Hacker News Reader

Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to think the motivation was drag reduction, while I had heard the issue was one of countering undesirable lift, which is bad for tire traction. If these things did reduce drag, could someone explain how they achieved this?

View on HN

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_(car) a spoiler can reduce drag by changing the airflow around the car and reducing turbulence. A wing, like what the Daytona and the Superbird have is mostly for downforce to get more traction. But it can also help straightening the airflow after the car.

The turbulence after cars is one of the main reasons specially hatchbacks gets so dirty in the rear end and this turbulence create a drag on the car.

The article is of course wrong when not calling Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird for good looking, they are art and some of the best looking cars coming from America.

They are also 2 of the most expensive and sought after Mopar vehicles in existence. There is no doubt they where not popular at the time, many Americans thought they looked too European and did not reflect the muscle car image of the era. Also Mopar only built enough production ones to qualify as a stock car. IIRC in the range of 2000 each I think the Daytona may have been a little higher IIRC.

So NASCAR runs on enough of a variety of tracks that there are (very, very generally) three modes of running:

1) Reduce drag to the bare minimum. The cars can still grip, even when trimmed out all the way (Daytona, Talladega)

2) Downforce is king! I don't care if I'm 10MPH slower on the end of the straight if my mid-corner speed is 15 MPH higher (pretty much all "intermediate" (1-2 mile) tracks (this is the vast majority of tracks)

3) Aerodynamics are irrelevant (Short tracks like Bristol and Martinsville)

So there's not just one goal a NASCAR builder is optimizing for. You generally have to make compromises to win a championship.

One other thing to remember is the aero cars come out right after NASCAR ended much of their short track program. In that era more short tracks were run than superspeedways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com