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I’m not sure what this aerodynamic feature is on the side of the car with the vane there in the middle. Maybe it’s for some noise issue. The three NACA ducts in the central panel look to feed cooling air to the transmission.
Air that goes in must have a place to come out. So, the backend of the panel has these six exit vents that each use a little protruding ramp to help pull the air out. Hey, this panel looks sort of like my ram-air/cold-air and vented hood on Project S2000. See, my hood maybe wasn’t such a half-baked idea after all.
What is this you’re looking at? It’s the underside of the carbon fiber hood of the Lexus LFA. So my buddies and I popped the hood and lifted it up. No struts on this hood so as to reduce weight. Okay…. So where is the prop stick? I looked around the engine bay for a bit and found nothing. I looked at the underside of the hood and saw the carbon fiber prop stick. If you had two LFA owners in a parking lot, they could have an impromptu fencing match.
Once we determined the method for keeping the hood up and the location of the prop stick itself, we had to figure out where the prop stick went. Located on the passenger side of the engine bay is this little matched aluminum bracket. Check out the fancy machine work on the bracket and parts for the chassis brace going across the engine bay.
The top side of the prop stick goes here in the hood. Interesting thing about car hoods, some have the insulation and some do not on the underside. In some forum discussions about my Project S2000 hood, there was discussion about the insulation. The best I can determine is it has two primary purposes: acoustic tuning and prolonging the time it takes for a fire to get out of control should such a fire break out in the engine bay. Or maybe it’s just to protect the carbon fiber and paint from heat. As for the two rear vents, they have a functional purpose.
Do you see those two little round chimney stacks at the back of the engine bay on the sides of the intake tubes? Those little chimneys are attached to the exhaust manifold heat shields and they line up with the vents. As you can see, the engine bay is pretty crammed. I’m guessing the hood vents and exhaust manifold chimney stacks are to get the heat out from the exhaust manifold areas without baking everything nearby. The chassis brace spanning the engine bay is a carbon fiber stick in the middle probably with aluminum end bits.
Lotus had this all-electric Evora in their booth. However, they kept their booth roped off for some reason, so I took this picture from about 25 feet away.
