That’s awesome! What kind of work were you doing in Siberia?

Everyone loves the Loaf!

I have an odd attraction to agricultural equipment and you’ve just confirmed that I need a Loaf in my life! How much did you drive it? Like, around the block or a lot? Inquiring minds need to know!

Make mine out of a Loaf!

I know it’s kind of cheating, but any Detroit 2-stroke diesel (including the V-8s) sounds pretty angry:

The Novi engine that ran the Indy 500 in the 1950s.

Theeeeere it is!

And the gearhead community let’s out a collective “D’awwwwe”

Thanks! I’ll try to find something interesting to say from time to time!

The tunnel you’re talking about is the Behr wind tunnel. I know almost nothing about it, other than that it is a climatic tunnel, which aren’t really used for aero work. They’re used to simulate the air flowing through and around a car while that car is running under load (on a chassis dyno). Climatic tunnels are…

Yeah, the early Chrysler testing was all in small scale until after The War. I know Ford started full-scale testing of cars in 1936,though I’m unsure of when scale testing started. I know Ford owned a scale wind tunnel in 1929 after acquisition of the Stout Metal Airplane Company, which led to the development of the…

I didn’t know Boeing had so many tunnels! That’s awesome!

I’m not much of a CFD jockey, so I’m not the best one to ask, but I have not seen the use of a reflection plane in industry. I suspect that the reason is that the underside of a car is different than the road surface. I would have thought the same for trains, but this is outside of my comfort zone!

Ha ha, thanks! Unfortunately, I’m starting to run out of stories I can share in public forum. My current employer won’t let me talk about the cool stuff until after the magazines steal my thunder! That being said, the best places to get awesome aero stories are from the craftsmen working in wind tunnels and on the…

Yeah, I spent several years working in aero tunnels and have only recently admitted to myself that the two facilities are really very different! Aero tunnels (especially transonic ones) are incredibly complex and tend to have ultra strict requirements regarding flow quality, temperature stability, pressure…

I have a few thoughts on this: First, CFD is limited mostly by it’s users, in my opinion. We’re only humans and we make mistakes or misinterpret results, even the best of us. In addition, the schedule pressure associated with racing might cause people to miss small but important parts of the results. The results of a…

Exotic cars usually have much worse Cd than normal cars. That’s mostly due to the need to generate downforce, whch always brings it’s buddy Drag to the party. In addition, they usually have excess power to achieve their target max speed, which is often limited by things like tires or cooling. They can therefore afford…

The problem is that automotive testing is dependent on good boundary layer development, which simply isn’t possible in a transonic or supersonic tunnel. Sure, we can get down to a few millimeters of boundary layer displacement under like 150 mph without a belt (looking at the state-of-the-art tunnels now in use), but…

Ugh, the A2 tunnel with a full scale car :( Dat blockage ratio makes my brain throw up every time I see it.

Their data collection methods leave something to be desired. Watching this video (and cringing) I expect that 10% is within the statistical scatter of their experiment.