- Quick, when you think of a car
that has the best aerodynamics,
what car do you think of?
A wedge car, a teardrop, ack maybe?
Well, the answer is probably not what you're thinking.
Aerodynamics play an extremely important role
when it comes to speed, performance, and handling,
and they can also make a car look really freaking cool.
(driving music)
But looks can be deceiving,
and car shapes that appear to cut through the air
might actually have horrible aerodynamic properties.
In this video, we're gonna see how aerodynamics work,
how they've evolved over time, and what happens
when you take aerodynamics just a little too far.
Stick around to see some of the most truly insane concepts
that were banned from racing.
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To understand aerodynamics,
we need to think of them as two separate forces.
The first is friction,
which matters less than you might think.
Otherwise, we'd be obsessed
with getting our cars all nice and oily
to help them slip through the air easier.
And since Land O'Lakes Racing Butter
isn't our sponsor today, it's safe to say
that friction is not the only major factor in aero.
(gun cocks)
The second, much more important, force is turbulence,
all that air jostling around a car's nooks and crannies,
slowing it down.
The smoother a car's airflow is, the less turbulence,
and that's why truly aerodynamic cars have features
like fully enclosed underbodies, flush headlights,
and body panels that don't disrupt air as much.
(gun cocks)
The main way we quantify all this
is through a score called the drag coefficient.
The lower the drag coefficient,
the more aerodynamic a car is.
Currently, the Mercedes A-Class sedan
has a drag coefficient of .22, the lowest drag coefficient
of any production car currently on the market.
On the other side of the spectrum, the brick-on-wheels side,
we have the Hummer H2 at .57.
.57 is bad.
Now that we know the basics of aerodynamics,
where did all this hunger to go with the flow all start?
(gun cocks in slow-motion)
(speaks in slow-motion)
(high-intensity music)
(beeps)
In 1898, a full 10 years before the Model T,
and 103 years before Post Malone was born,
our aerodynamic journey begins with
a little steam-powered number called La Jamais Contente.
I know I butchered that, you don't have to tell me,
I'm just gonna butcher all your languages
if that's okay with you guys.
La Jamais Contente is French for "never satisfied".
That's right, they named a car after my ex.
This vehicle is straight out of Mario Kart.
It weighed 3,200 pounds and had 62 horsepower,
which was like 2,000 horsepower back then.
The Jamais Contente is most famous for being
the first car to go over 100 kilometers per hour.
And while its design
is impressively streamlined for the time,
a lot of its aerodynamic design was ruined
by the driver basically sitting on top of it.
This was before innovations like wind tunnel testing;
they mostly went with what looked fast.
And I gotta admit, I kinda want one.
- [Voiceover] Reloading!
- As car manufacturing became a major industry,
carmakers started to get interested in streamlined designs.
The first attempt at a streamlined mass-produced car
was the Rumpler Tropfenwagen, produced from 1921-25,
and it had a drag coefficient of .28.
Also, it's maybe the most fun car name to say of all time.
Try it out: Rumpler Tropfenwagen.
It's German for drop car, so named for its teardrop shape.
The Tropfenwagen narrowed so sharply at its nose
that there was only room for one person in the front row.
Despite how literally cutting-edge this car was,
it was a flop, with only about 100 of them being produced.
By the time we got to the 30s,
aero was becoming a much bigger part of car design,
and we started to see the influence of art deco design
as cars started taking many of their design cues
from the sleek, sculpted steel of the world of aeronautics.
We started to see stuff like fins and sloping wheel wells.
A lot of it was still more about looks
than true aerodynamic design,
but the intent was still there.
In the 30s, Hans Ledwinka and Paul Jeray,
the latter of whom also drew up freaking zeppelins,
designed the Tatra 77.
The Tatra went beyond mere streamlining,
with a drag coefficient of .2455.
It was the first mass-produced car to be
truly, scientifically, aerodynamically tested.
Jeray used wind tunnels that were initially built
to aerodynamically test, what else, but zeppelins,
to develop the design of the Tatra.
The Tatra would also inspire Ferdinand Porsche
to develop the Volkswagen Beetle,
and by inspire, I mean completely rip off.
You can learn more about the controversy
in our Past Gas series on the Beetle.
While we're in pre-war Germany,
I present to you the Schlörwagen,
a 1939 prototype nicknamed the "aeropill",
because it looks like a pill-bug.
I guess.
It had a mind-blowing drag coefficient of .113.
It was an incredible car,
aside from the terrible visibility, cooling,
and vulnerability to tipping over from crosswinds.
Hmm.
By the 50s, aerodynamic design was mainstream.
Decades before the Nintendo DS,
the French gave us the incredible Citroën DS.
DS is short for goddess because DS sounds like déesse.
When it was unveiled at the 1955 Paris Motor Show of 1955,
it received 80,000 orders in 10 days,
a record for initial orders that stood for 61 years
until the launch of the Tesla Model 3 in 2016.
The DS would stay in production until 1975.
The body of the DS was as significant
for what it didn't have as for what it did,
with frameless doors and a complete lack of a grill.
Also it had the most aerodynamic steering wheel of all time.
This thing is awesome.
(metal music)
If there's anything YouTubers like me want to be in life,
it's a musician.
Unfortunately, I have no talent.
(guitar playing)
But I won't let that stop me from making my own band shirt.
(metal music)
I'm super stoked that WheelHouse finally has its own shirt,
and I'm double stoked on how it came out.
I really wanted our shirt
to emulate some of my favorite bands.
It's got a haunted house on it
'cause it's WheelHouse, and I'm a spooky boy.
(metal music)
Also, there's a lot of WheelHouse Easter eggs
included on the shirt.
Definitely a melk reference on there somewhere,
you gotta look for it though.
I love the shirt, I love how it came out, and you will too.
You can get it on our store, donutmedia.com,
and live out all of your headbanger fantasies.
(metal music)
(guitar playing)
There's one type of car that always gets brought up
when talking about aerodynamics,
and most of these car designs were done by one man.
I'm talking about Giorgetto Giugiaro,
a man with a beautiful name only transcended
by his beautiful wedge cars.
Giugiaro's aesthetic was nicknamed "folding paper",
so called because his cars looked like
they had been shaped out of origami.
Giugiaro introduced
a whole new interpretation of aerodynamics,
replacing the previous trend of rounded edges
with sharp, angular, geometric designs
that were intensely futuristic.
Giugiaro designed countless incredible cars
for pretty much every European carmaker.
Chances are, he designed one of your bucket list cars.
From the Maserati Ghibli,
to the BMW M1, to the Lotus Esprit,
to the incredibly "Back to the Future"-istic DMC DeLorean,
to the incredibly sexy,
breathtakingly sleek Volkswagen Golf.
Oh man, soak it all in.
Seriously though, this guy designed pretty much everything.
He was even hired by pasta producer Barilla
to design his own shape of pasta,
the Marille, drag coefficient unknown.
I'm still waiting for Barilla to pay me
for my pasta design, the Wooshy Boy.
It's pasta shaped like...
It's a Turbo.
That'd actually be pretty good.
Yum. Unlike his pasta,
Giugiaro's influence on car design lives on.
His wedge shapes are still hugely influential
on modern luxury cars that are looking for
that sharp, knife-through-the-air look.
If you want further evidence,
look no further than the Tesla Cybertruck.
His signature style remains shorthand
for futuristic, aerodynamic excellence.
(sighs)
Okay, I know that was all super freaking inspiring,
and you're welcome,
but there's one kind of giant caveat to all this.
These sleek cars weren't actually that aerodynamic.
It turns out nature knows what it's doing.
More organic shapes like the teardrop
are more naturally aerodynamic.
Sharp edges contribute to turbulent wind patterns,
which slow the car down.
The BMW M1, for example,
has a mediocre .40 drag coefficient.
To put that in perspective,
a Toyota Sienna minivan comes in at .30.
So now that we're reaching the modern age of cars,
what actually makes a car aerodynamic?
This whole time we've been thinking about aerodynamics
as simply car versus wind
as it travels horizontally through the air.
But what if a car's design could actually
use the wind to its advantage?
Well, that's where downforce comes in.
Downforce is the increased vertical downward force
on the tires of the car,
which gives it better traction, especially in turns.
At lower speeds, downforce isn't that important.
However, the faster you get,
the more crucial downforce becomes,
and that's when we get into
the magical realm of ground effects.
(big bang music)
In the mid-60s, designers introduced
the most basic of downforce elements: wings.
At first, they were mounted high above the chassis
to take advantage of wind that hadn't been
whipped around by the body of the car.
But that proved to be incredibly dangerous,
as you might imagine,
as the wings could get ripped off and cause collisions.
Check out the wing on Sarah's LeMons Miata.
It's inspired by the same design, and it's high as hell.
Check out this Bumper to Bumper episode about it.
In 1967, Lotus became the first team
to install a spoiler on a Formula 1 car.
The next significant milestone in aerodynamics
was made possible by Lotus as well.
After they struggled in the 1977 season,
Colin Chapman wrote a 27-page paper
filled with ideas on how to create downforce.
He realized he could take the design
of a fighter bomber's wing-mounted outlets,
and simply turn that design upside down
and use it to create downforce on a race car.
When the team started testing different designs,
they realized that, as the speed of the car increased,
the underbody got drawn closer to the road,
which, due to the Bernoulli effect,
increased the downforce to insane levels.
Don't know what the Bernoulli effect is?
Don't worry, I gotcha.
(cows mooing) (classical music)
Real quick explanation of the Bernoulli effect.
Very simply,
as the speed of a fluid increases, pressure decreases.
Air under a car acts as a fluid,
so the faster the air moves under it,
the lower the pressure under the car.
You got a high pressure zone on top of the car,
low pressure underneath, that creates suction,
which draws the body of the car to the ground
and puts pressure on those tires.
Soon, teams were racing off the track
to develop new ground effects,
with racing rule makers hot on their heels,
banning most adaptations as they were being developed.
Williams' F1 essentially designed the entire FW07 chassis
to be a giant ground effects generator.
One major advantage was little skirts
that intentionally touched the ground at all times,
keeping that suction underneath the car.
Another notable car was the
Brabham Alfa Romeo BT46B fan car,
which utilized a horizontal fan.
Brabham claimed that the fan cooled the engine,
but in reality it reduced air pressure underneath the car,
effectively sucking it to the track.
Other racers complained that the fan
was blowing debris onto their faces,
and when another car leaked oil on the track,
it seemingly gave the fan car an unbeatable advantage
as it could exert enough downforce
to essentially negate the slippery effect of the oil.
That's freaking sick.
The fan car lasted for just three races
before Formula 1 caught up
and banned so-called fan car designs altogether.
(gun cocks)
So, with all these admittedly necessary safety regulations
kind of throttling Formula 1 and other racing leagues,
where could a race fan turn to
if they wanted to see what cars would look like
if they took advantage of all these
newly-developed, aerodynamic advantages?
The answer was the Can-Am Challenge Cup,
which ran from 1966 to 1987.
In that time, Can-Am cars were often timed
with faster laps than their Formula 1 counterparts.
They were governed by what was called group 7 regulations.
These rules were basically that there were no rules.
No rules on engine size, no rules on vehicle weight,
no rules on turbochargers, superchargers,
everything was basically allowed,
you just have to add seatbelts and wear a helmet.
And as for ground effects,
you guessed it, there were no rules.
The McLaren team was especially dominant
in the early years of Can-Am.
Instead of resorting to gimmicks,
their cars were known for their refined designs
and extensive fine tuning.
Tragically, Bruce McLaren was killed
as he was testing the Can-Am McLaren M8D,
as the rear body work separated from the car,
causing it to lose downforce
and spinning him into a flag station.
Bruce was a pretty iconic figure in Formula 1,
if you'd like to learn more about his life,
check out our series on McLaren on Past Gas.
It's three parts long, and it's really good,
I think you should check it out.
In later years,
the Porsche 917 was an especially dominant car,
with over 1500 horsepower that sucked up so much gas
that even Can-Am had to change
their rules for fuel efficiency in response.
Just look at this thing.
That's a lot of downforce.
Perhaps the strongest contender
for aerodynamics innovation in the Can-Am era
was (stutters)...
Was (stutters)...
Chaparral Race Cars, founded by Hap Sharp and Jim Hall.
They aggressively pushed the envelope of aerodynamic design.
Their crowning achievement was the original 2J,
not to be confused with the 2JZ,
a race car that employed two engines.
A massive Chevy drove the car,
while a secondary engine that they took out of a snowmobile
powered two fans located at the 2J's rear.
These fans sucked the air out from underneath the car,
which was effectively vacuum-sealed
by these skirts on the side,
essentially suction-cupping the car to the road.
Pretty freaking sick.
The 2J was too crazy even for Can-Am,
and would be banned shortly after its introduction,
and then made its way into "Gran Turismo 4"
as a really fun car to drive.
All these advances in science
would continue to cause headaches
for racing associations trying to bring the safest, fairest,
and most exciting entertainment to race fans.
Which brings us to (coughs)...
dirty air.
If you follow Formula 1,
you've probably heard of dirty air by now.
Remember way back at the start of this video,
when I mentioned that turbulence
was the most important factor in aerodynamics?
(car revving)
If a car can avoid creating unnecessary turbulence,
it's naturally more aerodynamic.
But what if the air hitting the car is already turbulent?
Behind each race car is an area of turbulence, dirty air.
This reduces the ability of the chasing car
to generate downforce and grip its tires
to the ground as effectively.
The more cars you're behind,
the more you're going to suffer the effects of dirty air.
And when it's harder to catch up, that means worse racing.
The solution?
Well, theoretically,
making these cars less reliant on downforce
would make dirty air less of a problem.
But downforce is also what makes a car
so aerodynamic and fast.
It's a paradox, and one that Formula 1
is still grappling with today.
Over here in the states, IndyCar got
around the dirty air problem by designing their cars
to make more downforce from ground effects,
and we can expect Formula 1 to do the very same in 2022.
Huh, I managed to explain dirty air
without doing a fart joke.
Not to toot my own horn or anything.
- [Voiceover] Boom!
- So, we've raced all the way through the 20th century,
and now we're back to today.
What's the state of modern car aerodynamics?
Well, well...
Well... (chuckles)
Well, have you ever noticed that
all cars on the road today kinda look the same?
It turns out that dedicating your design
to lowering that all-important drag coefficient
is, well, kind of a drag,
and that's because, in their quest to improve mileage,
car manufacturers are being drawn towards
the same scientific principles of aerodynamic design.
Essentially, every car today is a Tropfenwagen,
aka a teardrop car, because they all follow
nature's ideal aerodynamic design.
As a raindrop falls vertically to Earth,
it forms the shape of least resistance,
and that, in turn, is the ideal shape for an aerodynamic car
as it drives horizontally across land.
On the plus side,
even the un-flashiest of consumer cars today
are incredibly aerodynamic compared to their predecessors.
The new challenge for auto designers
is to find innovative and new variations
on what we now know to be the best, ideal aerodynamic shape.
Also, in the future
we could have renewable energy so plentiful
that we could forget about drag coefficient altogether
and just build whatever looks cool.
We could be driving on Mars,
where the air is 100 times thinner,
no air resistance to worry about.
But me personally, I wanna live underwater like SpongeBob,
and have to deal with some aquadynamics.
I'm gonna get my boater's license and drive a hamburger car.
All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode on aerodynamics.
I think I learned a lot, I hope you did too.
If you haven't subscribed to Donut yet,
please consider it, it would really help us out.
And check out our podcast, Past Gas,
on its other channel, Donut Podcasts.
Follow Donut on social media @donutmedia,
follow me @nolanjsykes.
Be kind, I'll see you next time.
(beep)
Influence of art deco on cars.
(farts)
And we started to see the...