Sports Car Negative Lift
The average driver doesn't think about what keeps their car moving or what keeps them on the road, but that's because they don't have to. The average driver doesn't have to worry about having enough downforce to keep them on the road or if they will reach the adhesive limit of their car's tires around a turn. These are the things are the car designers, professional drivers, racing pit crews, serious sports car owners, and physicist think about. Physics are an important part of every sports and racing car design. The stylish curves and ground effects on sports cars are usually there not just for form but function as well allowing you to go speeds over 140 mph in most serious sports cars and remain on the road and in reasonable control.
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Negative lift is the opposite of the lift used by planes to fly, it forces an object down rather than up (Yager). Negative lift is created by front and rear wings on race cars and by ground effects and spoilers on the average sports car. Most negative lift is used to fight inertia as a car rounds a turn. Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain in the same state of motion (Murphy 77). When a car rounds a turn at high speeds it often needs more force than it's weight to resist the car's tendency to keep traveling straight. The increased downforce puts more weight on the tires helping the tires grip the …show more content…
Using the top speed of 150mph which is maintained by keeping the gas pedal to the floor using all the horsepower we can determine how much horsepower is used to fight air resistance and how much is used to fight rolling friction and the slight internal friction (Beckman). A late model Corvette has a Cd of about 0.30 and frontal area of about 20 square feet (Beckman). Going through all the necessary conversions and math which is complicated because of converting to and from metric and force into horsepower you determine 145hp is used to balance drag and 95hp is used to balance the rolling resistance and internal friction (Beckman). This explains why fast cars have so much horsepower. As speed increases so does the drag and more horsepower is needed to compensate for
Negative lift is the opposite of the lift used by planes to fly, it forces an object down rather than up (Yager). Negative lift is created by front and rear wings on race cars and by ground effects and spoilers on the average sports car. Most negative lift is used to fight inertia as a car rounds a turn. Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain in the same state of motion (Murphy 77). When a car rounds a turn at high speeds it often needs more force than it's weight to resist the car's tendency to keep traveling straight. The increased downforce puts more weight on the tires helping the tires grip the …show more content…
Using the top speed of 150mph which is maintained by keeping the gas pedal to the floor using all the horsepower we can determine how much horsepower is used to fight air resistance and how much is used to fight rolling friction and the slight internal friction (Beckman). A late model Corvette has a Cd of about 0.30 and frontal area of about 20 square feet (Beckman). Going through all the necessary conversions and math which is complicated because of converting to and from metric and force into horsepower you determine 145hp is used to balance drag and 95hp is used to balance the rolling resistance and internal friction (Beckman). This explains why fast cars have so much horsepower. As speed increases so does the drag and more horsepower is needed to compensate for