,
The rear wing mount is a sturdy piece fabricated from 5/16″ plate aluminum. It attaches to the reinforced quarter panels and the frame rails. The mount must be able to support over a thousand pounds of force and is quite stiff, you can literally hang off it it with your whole weight and it does not deflect. The wing would break first. The mount has plenty of adjustment for angle of attack.
The quarter panels are reinforced by these aluminum braces that connect directly to the frame rails. The wing mounts bolt through the quarter panels into these. These braces were here previously but were beefed up and lateral braces added to eliminate side to side flex.
The APR/Andrew Brilliant carbon rear wing features triple elements. Multi element wings are more efficient because each element works off the altered airflow of the previous element so the flow stays more attached to the overall group of wings even at high angles of attack. Of course you can’t just stack three elements together. The position of each element relative to the others becomes much more critical so Andrew spent some time on the wing’s design (maybe Andrew will explain in greater detail in a future story that Eric will write). The wing is massive. It is going to be a new challenge getting the suspension tuning right on such an aero dependent car. Time Attack is pushing aerodynamics to the limit as there is very little previous data on how to get the most downforce out of total production body forms. Cars like JGTC and DTM use very little of the original body and are more like prototypes. Time Attack cars by the rules have most of their body intact. Setting up the car is going to be a new experience for the team.
A deck spoiler is used to both help activate the rear diffuser and increase rear wing effectiveness. Sometimes the use of CFD reveals things that are significant and not so intuitive. The use of CFD is one of the things that separates the work of pros like Andrew vs the copying and common sense approach we took to aerodynamics in the car’s previous iteration.
Gary uses Cleco Pins to hold things together as he fabricates the lower deck spoiler out of carbon honey comb. The deck spoiler is yet another thing I ended up grooving my head on.
A big part of the car’s aero is dependent on using all of the air around the car to produce downforce. A lot of it is to also let cooling air have the least effect on the aerodynamic surfaces. We thus attempt to mange air flow around and even through the car as much as possible. If you have been following the car’s build, you know about the part of the car we call the oven. The oven is where the car’s exhaust downpipes and rear mounted turbo live. The rear mounted Borg Warner EFR turbo is an innovation to shorten the charge pipes, build a more efficient freer flowing exhaust and to improve weight distribution by moving 50 lbs from the front of the car to the passenger foot well. The oven has been recently turned into a double decker oven by relocating the intercooler to the upper dash area on top of the oven to improve aerodynamics. The oven is fed air from ducts in the high pressure wheelwells through the intercooler and ventilating the oven out through ducts through the interior of the car. You can see some of the sheetmetal fabrication for the oven and the intercooler support structure here.
