What the heck is with the stock wing..

[u00mem91]

Thankfully they don't let pilots design their own aircraft!!

WOW. get a clue.

 

[Gansan]

Short answer: I don’t know.

Long answer: A slide rule is not going to be much use. What we need is a wind tunnel or someone who has the data from the wind tunnel testing.
NSX racer posted some data up above on this thread.
It’s kind of complex because the “wing” may do many things including reducing overall drag of the car, increasing high speed stability and adding down force to counteract the lift that is generally present in a road car.
How much down force the wing is producing is dependant on the airfoil section, and the size and shape of the wing and the angle of attack the air speed etc.
What we do know is that if the wing is producing 1 unit of lift at 10 mph and it will be. Then it will be producing 4 units of lift at 20 mph and 16 units at 40 mph and 64 at 80 mph and 256 units at 160 mph.
Because it goes up at the square of the airspeed.
So it’s not like the wing switches on at some point. It just gets progressively more effective. And how much down force do you need before you can say the wing has “come into play” or before you can tell the difference? 2 lb, 20 lb, 50 lb. I don’t know but I guess we would all rather have even 5 lb of down force rather than 5 lb of lift. Would we not?

Regards,

Patrick

Patrick is right, you can't say the wing comes into effect at a certain speed, because it is always in effect at all speeds. It's just a matter of degree. Of course, you can say it undetectable at some low speed, but where do you draw the line? What may be undetectable to an unskilled driver may be an obvious thing to a more experienced driver. But it's well known that aero forces increase with the square of speed.

Another interesting thing that strikes me is that it's possible the intake at the base of the rear window probably sucks in some of the boundary layer that is near the surface of the car and increases the speed of the air flowing over the rear wing, increasing it's effectiveness.