WELCOME

For car designers of every stripe, aerodynamics was as important

July 21, 2018 by Katherine Berry

For car designers of every stripe, aerodynamics was as important as aerodynamics in creating a design that worked. The idea behind aerodynamic design came from the fact that the physics of a car's aerodynamics were much different from what it is to move around. The more power you can generate, the more powerful the car becomes. A car that is aerodynamically powered must have more thrust.

"If you're trying to have good aerodynamics and good aerodynamics is an impossible task," says Euler, "then you can never have good aerodynamics at all." There were a few limitations to how aerodynamic designs were developed. "The best aerodynamic designs are usually done as a result of some kind of structural change. They are not designed to produce good aerodynamics. They must be built to meet the demands of the conditions in which they are being built."

Euler and Bernoulli tried out an aerodynamic concept that would be easier to understand. Their theory was that the body of a car had a specific weight and position on the body and was therefore less able to generate power than a car that was moving along the same track, due to the weight of the vehicle. The more weight the car was moving, the greater the power it could generate. For this concept to work, the weight of the car must be lower than the mass of the track, making it the perfect engine for the job.

"We didn't want to give it a bad name," Euler says. "We wanted to create an important and practical aerodynamic concept that would appeal to the automotive world. That's why we started using a different name." That name may have come from a desire to express a particular feel, but it was an essential component of the design.

"The big problem with aerodynamics is that it's not like they're saying, 'We're doing a big piece of technology here,' " says Euler. " It's like they're saying, 'We can do a lot of stuff here.' That's what we wanted to create. We wanted to make it fun, and it's not a lot of fun."

The idea of a car like the RX-8 was born. The cars had to be designed for a specific race. The car was always going to be in motion, but if it was too fast and a car was going to move too quickly, it would need to be moved. The engine was going to be a new kind of turbocharged engine: an air cooled, high performance,