Project SC300 Road Racer: Part 27 – Joining a Wang Gang
screw baggie, some stickers, and wing endplates wrapped in plastic wrap, laying on table
The wing includes a little accessory kit with the mounting hardware, endplates (for you to attach later), and some stickers.

 

wooden endplate with nine lives racing logo cut into it, resting underneath a cart
When Nine Lives Racing ships your wang to you, it comes with these wood endplates preinstalled.

This actually helps with the shipping process in that it tends to prevent the shipper from being able to easily mangle the box. Since I was picking mine up in person, I didn’t get the cool wooden trophy. The use of the wooden endplates also prevents the real endplates from being damaged in shipping, too.

 

drilling into the edge of the wing body
Speaking of the endplates, Johnny drills and taps the mounting holes on the airfoil so that you can actually attach endplates.

Since the wing is made from an extrusion, and is made an appropriate width for the vehicle, the holes need to be tapped. In my case the wing is 71″ which is technically the maximum width that Nine Lives Racing offers. A 1992 SC300 is 70.5″ wide. But with 50mm over fenders, mine is around 74.5″ wide. Most series prohibit the wing being wider than the vehicle, so this works out perfectly.

With that, I had everything ready to go. Time to install.

 

milwaukee drill, bit box, two pylons, blue painters tape, permanent marker, and tape measure sitting on carbon fiber trunk lid
You don’t need a ton of tools to install your wang, but a few specific things will definitely help.

Since this is a race car, its only job is to have holes drilled into it, so, of course, you need a drill. You’ll also want a tape measure and some masking tape to mark the trunk lid for where exactly to drill the holes. The wing needs to end up centered on the trunk surface and centered on the car.

It’s unlikely that your trunk lid is so crooked that it’s not close enough to centered on the vehicle, but measuring from the edge of the quarter panel to the edge of the quarter panel will help with figuring it out.

 

wing perched atop pylons standing up on concrete
First, loosely assemble the pylons to the wing.

There is definitely a left and a right. You will figure that out very quickly, because the tabs will not sit flush at all if you do it backwards. I also chose to put the pylons inboard of the mounting tabs on the wing because I figured Johnny was smart enough to design the mounting plates to not hide his awesome logo.

Laces out!

Don’t make things too tight because you’ll have to take it apart to adjust it soon.

5 comments

  1. Dang, I was hoping that the paint would be use for flow visualization. Flow viz paint, and wool tufts are both cheap and effective methods to develop chassis aerodynamics.

    You can’t really know what the flow is like at the back end of a vehicle without real-world testing. For example, the optimum solution for the SC300 may not be a wing, at all…but rather, a trunk lid spoiler. You can gain both downforce anb reduce drag if you design a proper spoiler. The curved surface of the SC300 rear trunk lid probably increases lift, rather than making downforce. So, there’s a huge missed opportunity by installing a rear wing only.

    Personally, I would like to see more testing, and real-world verifcation before I were to commision the fabrication of a solution like a custom rear wing.

    Please note, that some of the most expensive super cars currenly being produced no longer include rear wings. This is because a wing is not the optimal method to produce downforce. A diffuser/spoiler is currently en vogue because it produces downforce with very small drag penalties. A proper race car optimizes the negative lift/drag coefficient.

    One should always explore as many solutions as possible before committing to one particluar solution.

    I don’t want to be a complete Debbie Downer, but I would highly recommend that you use some flow viz, and install a lip spoiler on the trunk lid. (The flow viz can be used before/after to verify the solution.) A rear lid spoiler will make the rear wing and rear diffuser more efficient. Whenever you can get a two for one, that’s when you know that you are heading down the right path.

  2. Aye, a wing is definitely the most efficient item by itself. But you can get quite significant interaction by changing the pressure distribution on a large area of the car, which is how you get crazy high lift/drag ratios like were seen in Group C racing, even with the primitive state of CFD at the time (pretty much 100% wind tunnel testing to develop those cars).

    An SC300 would probably see quite a benefit by putting a small lip spoiler on the end of the trunk lid. This will encourage clean separation of flow at the rear end of the car (look at modern cars now, they all have sharp features at the very back for this reason), and at a moderate ~15-30 deg angle and ~1.5-2″ of height, it will tend to reduce total drag and add a small bit of rear downforce. We’re not talking huge downforce here, but it reduces drag at the same time, so it comes at no aero penalty.

    1. @cmj re-read page two:

      “But there’s an end to this means, I assure you. And it’s not another innuendo. I don’t think. If you look back to the photo of Rob, he’s taking a photo. In fact, he’s taking dozens of photos. You see, when you take dozens of photos from different angles of the speckled car, you can then use some really fancy computering to stitch all of the photos together to build a really accurate 3D model of the vehicle.”

      https://motoiq.com/project-sc300-road-racer-part-27-joining-a-wang-gang/2/

      Rob is using a regular digital camera and then stitching 2D photos together using software to build the 3D model.

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