Designing Faster Race Cars

When it comes to designing something to go fast—like a race car—often times it’s the things that you can’t see that slows it down. So when Switzerland-based MATECH Competition was developing its Ford GT1 for the 2010 FIA GT1 World Championship series, it deployed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to discover the little things that might have been overlooked in physical wind tunnel testing.
 MATECH simulated wind tunnel testing using Exa PowerFLOW (exa.com) CFD software. It allowed engineers to analyze areas of the vehicle where its aerodynamics could be improved, specifically the under body, air intakes and wheels and wheel houses, which are difficult to see in physical wind tunnel tests. “We could never have gathered the level of detailed data from our physical tunnel tests that we did from our Exa PowerFLOW simulations,” says José Santos, MATECH chief race engineer. “To compare numerical data and be able to visualize tiny flow structure changes from run to run made the difference in our modification decisions.”
 Clearly it helped. The  MATECH Ford GT1 won the first race in the series.