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If you have lots of power and you need to turn corners it makes sense to go extreme in accepting drag to create downforce. There are not many cars that beat the SINOCO Porsche 917-30 Mark Donoghue used to race in the 70's (and maybe early 80's?). With the famous Porsche flat-12 turbocharged engines producing ridiculous power (> 1,200hp) they needed traction above all. Consequently their aero was all about downforce so really high Cd resulted, like around 0.6 or more. See piccy ...If you've ever seen any Porsche 917 in the flesh, they are actually a very small vehicle, so the frontal area is minimal. (I guess around 1.6 sq. m. which would give Cd x A around 0.96)At the other extreme a trick to reduce Cd is to make car longer, which is why the long tails in some of the Le Mans variants of 917's (see 2nd piccy). These cars had much lower Cd than the Sinoco shape, hence really high top speed on the Mulsanne straight ... (around 400 kph / 250 mph) but nowhere near the downforce (or power BTW) i.e. the best balance between downforce and drag depends a lot on the track you'll be racing and the power you have.
If you have lots of power and you need to turn corners it makes sense to go extreme in accepting drag to create downforce. There are not many cars that beat the SINOCO Porsche 917-30 Mark Donoghue used to race in the 70's (and maybe early 80's?). With the famous Porsche flat-12 turbocharged engines producing ridiculous power (> 1,200hp) they needed traction above all. Consequently their aero was all about downforce so really high Cd resulted, like around 0.6 or more. See piccy ...
If you've ever seen any Porsche 917 in the flesh, they are actually a very small vehicle, so the frontal area is minimal. (I guess around 1.6 sq. m. which would give Cd x A around 0.96)
At the other extreme a trick to reduce Cd is to make car longer, which is why the long tails in some of the Le Mans variants of 917's (see 2nd piccy). These cars had much lower Cd than the Sinoco shape, hence really high top speed on the Mulsanne straight ... (around 400 kph / 250 mph) but nowhere near the downforce (or power BTW) i.e. the best balance between downforce and drag depends a lot on the track you'll be racing and the power you have.
