|
I hope you don't mind if I quote myself from the "changes to LeMans" thread;
As far as the humps, a little shaving is ok, just leave enough so that the landmark is still there. The only answer here is to find a way to keep the cars on the ground (DOH!! ground effects) or have a bunch of completely flat tracks. The old Nurburgring had massive elevation changes, and Porsche had two (more streamlined) 908/2 spyders fly in 1969, not a great debut for the car. And remember the CanAm 917's flipping at Road Atlanta? Remember the Mercedes aeorbatic team?
The problem is flat bottomed cars going fast enough to generate that kind of lift. When a car comes over a hump, the front end wants to keep going up (helped if downforce is compromised by disturbed air), and it does, if only a little. Once enough air gets under ther nose, the car essentially becomes a flat bottomed airfoil, and like an airliner picking it's nose wheel up off the ground, the car rotates back and the lift exceeds the vehicle weight. Notice none of the ground effects cars ever did that. So i think a return to limited tunnels and slight shaving is the best answer. This isn't hot wheels with a jump ramp!!! "
in addition;
Porsche had seen plenty of this sort of thing before. They were destroying longtails left and right in the 60's. They would fly up in the air in testing at Hockenheim and Wolfsburg. They had two of them fly at Daytona.
Porsche was the first to experience these problems because their head of engineering, the great Ferdinand Piech, wanted the cars to be as streamilined as possible to overcome the smaller displacement engines they were running. When the cars started going at aircraft take off speeds, anything shaped like a wing wasn't going to stay put on the ground. And then they built the 917 which was a whole new twightlight zone as far as speed was conserned.
After 1971, the big 5 litre cars were banned and speeds droped to a level where the problem was not as severe. But when the big flat bottomed "GT" cars started reaching those speeds again, it was the same problem all over again. You will notice that when the Porsche 911GT1 flipped at Road Atlanta, Porsche pulled out of GT1 racing altogether. They had already seen that problem and weren't going to take part in it again.
So, that is my theory. Big flat bottoms are bad news at high speed, excaserbated by elevation changes and distrubed air.
|