I too am a big fan of yellow. In particular, my Competition Yellow MX-5. One of the most gorgeous and striking car colors I've ever seen.

F1 technology hit the human drivability singularity sometime around the 1980's. If ground effect were left unchecked, and the turbo motors and qualifying tires lasted more than a single lap, a human would not reliably be able to extract the maximum capabilities of the car. G-forces aren't the sole matter, as one thing…

The Katz book is decent, but personally, I'd recommend Simon McBeath's Competition Car Aerodynamics. I think it hits on a few more topics and goes into some more depth as well. Both are good to have around. Simon also writes the excellent Aerobytes articles in Racecar Engineering magazine.

Ground effect research when it comes to race cars is very light out there, you're not mistaken. Funny enough, I essentially wrote the entire Wikipedia article on automotive diffusers, as it was badly written with a lot of misinformation. A lot of the research that has been done on ground effect downforce has been done…

Effective, yeah. Hideous, well it's not elegant, that's for sure. I understand the idea, wanting to place the wing above any influence of the bodywork, and to give the driver a clear view, but if I was designing it, I would have moved the wing much lower and further in front of the car, so it operates in ground…

Funny enough, the whole "Actually I am a rocket scientist" never has the desired effects. Generally you're dismissed in the same vein as car enthusiasts, as a pursuit too nerdy/dull to follow, instead of the steely eyed missile men we all really are :)

Properly designed flow phenomena is a stunning thing of beauty. Take Concorde. As beautiful of a plane as that is, if you could actually visualize how the air flows over its delta wings as it rotates for takeoff, it's poetry in motion. It folds and shapes and bends the air around those gossamer thin wings, as…

Raphael, thanks for the recommendation! If there's anything I can help clarify regarding aerodynamics, vortices, downforce, etc., let me know. Aerodynamics isn't exactly a very intuitive science, and at times, it's practically black magic.

No worries! If there's anything I can help clear up, let me know. Aero isn't exactly the most intuitive of subjects (and we're talking low speed stuff here, when you get into trans/supersonic flows, things start getting really weird), so I do my best to try and explain it.

Hey Jalopnik, y'all should hire me to do aerodynamics articles, just saying... ;)

Aerospace engineer here. Some vortices are good, some are bad. Generally, vortices off of the wings (especially noticeable off the rear) aren't desirable. A strong tip vortex means a lot of energy is being lost there in drag. It's a good indicator of the pressure differential at the wingtip, but it also means it's…

How about the Circuit De La Sarthe, which is a track that some claim has you on the throttle flat-out for 85% of a lap? It combines a street course and purpose built race track with a mind-bending eight-mile straight that sadly has been split into three segments to connect it all.

This was one of the first posts I remember reading on Jalopnik, and watching this again is never a bad thing.

From what I can gather, since this happened before I started auto-xing, the thread pitch mismatch was 1/2" where 12mm thread should have been used (that's 12.7mm vs 12mm). This allowed the lug nuts to thread on, and torque, but there wasn't enough thread engagement to actually allow it to maintain torque.

Just to clarify, the RX-7 incident happened as a result of mismatched lug nuts, at an autocross event in south GA. A supplier sent him wrong ones They were imperial threaded nuts on metric lugs, which threaded on just far enough to make it seemed torqued, but when he put a high lateral load through the wheels, they…

Petter, have you ever driven any of the old Group B cars, and if so, how do you compare them to a modern day WRC car? Favorite rally car of all time, and/or that you've driven?

While this might be the fastest supersonic ejection, it isn't the first. That "honor" goes to Lt. Cdr. Ray Hawkins, a Blue Angels pilot, who ejected in 1953 from his aircraft that was in an uncontrollable supersonic dive. http://www.blueangels.org/NANews/Articles/Oct53/Oct53.htm

That's actually a Red Bull RB1, with some modifications for the 2010 aero rules. Notice the position of the exhaust, the gills on the sidepods, and the mirrors mounted on the turning vanes. Both the RB5 and 6 had very low mounted exhausts to aid the diffuser.