Wind tunnel development

摘要

It may be unkind, but the 'house brick' tag seems to crop up whenever you search for information on the aerodynamics of the Mini, but with a drag coefficient in the region of 0.5 (compared with 0.36 reported for the New Mini and 0.3 to 0.4 for most modern cars) it's hardly surprising. But vehicle aerodynamics is about more than just drag coefficients, and the Mini's shape is what it is. So when our sister publication Racecar Engineering recently took a Mini into the full-scale wind tunnel at MIRA in Warwickshire to see what improvements could be found, we were invited along too.