PUTTING A NUMBER ON HISTORIC AERO FIGURES
Feedback is always welcome but when one of our loyal readers, Ben Halford, asked me to write about the historical development of aerodynamic efficiency, I hadn’t appreciated what a rabbit hole I was about to disappear into.
Firstly we need to establish what we mean by aerodynamic efficiency and how we express it. In this context efficiency would be expressed as the total downforce divided by the total drag. Here comes the first problem. While it’s been possible (albeit difficult) to pull together some numbers for downforce, it’s been much harder to get drag figures – so
