Yeah, the title is a little click-baity…
But this is actually pretty cool.
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Welp, building a home-made wind tunnel is how the bike mechanics Orville and Wilbur Wright figured out how to design an airplane. At one point in the past I started thinking about building full scale bicycle wind tunnel in my garage. I came away thinking it would relatively straightforward to accomplish, but didn’t have the interest/motivation to actually do it.
The Cd of a modern Prius or a Tesla Model S is around 0.2, and they have a CdA in the ballpark of 0.5-0.6 m^2. (For reference, that’s about the CdA of someone on a MTB).
The Cd of a F1 car is close to 1.0, and has the CdA of a pickup truck.
F1 cars are designed more for downforce than CdA.
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