Attach an accelerometer to measure peak lateral g-force with and without aero.

remember, aerodynamic forces are generated almost primarily on the low-pressure side of the surface -- flow detachment on the bottom of your wings isn't just creating drag, it's also severely limiting the amount of downforce you're generating. less angle of attack on those wings might actually generate more downforce since they wouldn't be stalling. if you wanted to keep the aggressive angle of attack, you should upgrade to a multi-element setup to keep flow attachment.

Suggestion: use a multi flaps wings like the current f1 cars instead of the shovel, you can get a lower profile front wing with an increased surface area

The good old trick of sticking some bits of yarn all over the car would probably reveal a lot of the possible aerodynamic issues. Also, for a more consistent test, drive in a circle as fast as the car can go, and measure how fast the car can go around a circle with a certain radius. The benefit of this is that you can use quite simple physics to figure out if the aerodynamics is providing a meaningful downforce to assist the car - namely, if the centripetal acceleration in a corner is continuously higher than 1.0g, then you have conclusively demonstrated the presence of downforce.

I can tell you right now, Im gonna rip off the fan in front of the smoke machine idea

Lift does not increase with the area squared, but rather the speed squared. Area is just A^1

You definitely should test with the kit body. Aero makes a big difference, at least in 10th scale racing. We notice the handling difference by just changing the body and leaving the wings the same!

I know this isn't the aerodynamics that is being used in F1 today, but it does leave you impressed about how it began and the what the basics of downforce and aerodynamics are.

Great project, maybe on a smoother track, like inside a sport arena, you could experiment more with the ground-effect.

Some suggestions: Testing each change individually, and periodically re-testing the base no aero setup, and documenting how each change affected the car positively/negatively. I know it's a lot of work, but would be fun to watch I think, as we could follow the progress in detail with you. I think this could be an interesting ongoing project to follow over time, with further experimentation as time goes on, maybe one day have active aero for a more varied track. Comparing the stock aero from the factory could also be something interesting to see. As for suggestions, I would go with softening the rear shock absorbers a bit, maybe with a lighter oil, as it looks like the car is getting thrown around from those big bumps without absorbing them. 3D printing aero parts might also be a way to have lighter parts that are also precise. Anyway, definitely please continue this project. =)

You also needed the car with the stock bodywork and underside stuff to see how it compares. It could be that with the speeds and weights involved, the body they have designed already does an OK job. Probably easier to add to that than start from scratch.

That F1 edit at the end was phenomenal!

A selfmade wind tunnel would be An interesting project in itself and a nice tool in the development of future builds.

Very interesting stuff. Having had a tiny role in some F1 aero (I once mechanically designed a blade antenna that went on the 2002 Williams) I know how much effort the teams put into the TINIEST details to gain miniscule improvements. I was impressed with William's input and care and totally shocked by Jaguars lack of it (also did their antenna).

Given what you know about airplanes, why are you not using the "wings" in a more traditional sense? As in, as you explained in the beginning of this video, using the wing, just upside down. Consider building an airplane that wants to climb more and more the faster you get...you'd never build an airplane with that angle of attack. I personally would love to see a video where you try to use the aerodynamics of a wing, even if protrudes beyond the base chassis, to prove that wings can push the chassis down...maybe have a scale on the front axis to try to measure?

This video really helped me on my Speedrun project! My car kept flipping up at the front at high speed, saw this video and made a front spoiler and it worked!! Thank you 🙏🏾

Yeah, this is really cool, but definitively needed to be more scientific. Even without the wings, the car could go full speed through the corner. At that point, the only thing the wings can do is slow the car down with drag. You need to find a corner that the bare-body version can't get around without slowing down, and then see if the wings improve it. Pointing the camera at the suspensions and seeing it pushed down would also be a really good indicator

Great video James! I'm not a car guy but this was really interesting. That smoke machine + EDF worked really well to visualize the airflow!

I think you misunderstand "drag" and "downforce". Of course I'm not an expert, but I'm somewhat confident that just like at an airplane, where most force gets generated at the *top* side of the wing, the majority of the downforce of your car gets generated at the *bottom* of the car's wing. That means, if you have layer separation (=stall) at the bottom side of your wing, then this does not just increase drag, it also drastically decreases the downforce.

Would love to see some active flow control applied to an RC car -- think: control surfaces and active feedback to vary grip based on commanded turn rate

Hope you enjoyed this month's video! Let me know what you want to see me build next! Correction to the lift calculations -the full lift formula is L = Cl * A * .5 * r * V^2 More info here www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/lifteq.html

Great video as always. I’m a little surprised you didn’t test the car with the stock bodywork installed to see if the massive wings were an improvement over the scale ones.

Those bumps were killing that thing! I will be attempting something similar to this thank you for the info and tips! Also, that editing with the old engine sound at 9:22 was awesome!

The onboard camera footage was ace, can really see how any small bump in the road really messes those things up

Compession of suspension components to a calibrated set point would give down force value and a split front/back , but would need a smooth running surface. Awesome vid btw 👍👍👍

I used to race RC cars nearly 20 years ago - indoor 1/12th on a reasonably large carpet track with a decent straight. I remember playing around with different body shells and rear wing combinations and there were deffinately differences to be felt - less so with shells, but a decent rear wing with end fences definately made them more stable down the long straight. That could then be balanced with better front end grip allowing good tracking down the straights, with pointy stearing response for the tight corners. Not talking huge differences here, but when you are used to running the same car on the same circuit (we did change track layouts once a month) with controlled indoor conditions, then you do start to notice the small setup changes which you can make and the small differences adding a big wing with fences can make. Fun fact, the track used to rubber in over the course of the month - when the carpet was hoovered at track change time, the grip the first week of the new setup was awful. We didn't use tyre addatives, just the natural rubbering in of the foam tyres on the carpet. 'Marbles' (dust and general crap) off line was a thing too!

The crash was like an how an actual F1 car would crash but instead it would break into pieces COOL!!! Love your work man.

You’re an excellent scientist / engineer. You tried hard to develop a quantifiable test and continued to evaluate your hypothesis. You also acknowledged that correlation did not guarantee causation.

If you want to learn anything from these experiments, you should be more methodical and try to isolate one factor each time, running the same test (or as similar as possible). For example, you should have tested the smaller wing at that same corner, without changing the rake angle and adding the splitter-diffuser floor.

If it's a square relationship doesn't double wing equal quadruple lift/downforce?

love the old Williams livery. RIP Sir Frank Williams

Always enjoy seeing what you've come up with.

maybe raise the spoiler and remove the skirts in f1 they stopped the skirts because of increases in crashes also, the big size with the large angles of the aero could make handling harder

Your understeer was a combination of more downforce from that wing and also the drag high up at the rear. The rear wing drag is like a lever acting on the rear wheels as a pivot. Those wings are only generating downforce by increasing pressure on the top surface. You should print a proper profile to get lower pressure on the bottom rather than just separating as you discovered

Good job kid, (I'm old, probably 3x or 4x your age). I hope my 10 year old kid with get interested with engineering and physics stuff like this. Subscribed!

Just some tips: Gurney flaps are very useful (basically flexing the very end of the wing more drastically, producing more downforce with less drag). Placing skirts on the side of the floor (obviously not made of a thick material) would also inprove ground effect. You can also wider the front wing, because turned tires can disturb air flow. This solution might also work: placing the rear wing on a shark fin by its upper side as the rear wing's lower side produces the more downforce, and as the shark fin ends in the rear wing, it doesn't create such a big vortex.

I have a Lotus Elise Body on my 1:10 and when I remove the rear wing it becomes practically undriveable. Top speed is about a third higher than with the wing on. Also aerodynamic flow over the entire thing is super important too, not just the downforce of the wing.

It's very interesting to see how you are in front of the same problem than full scale. The ground effect could only work on flat surface, loosing the ground effect is so dangerous that it can't really be a good option except on perfect track. But using your smoking development aero system, you probably could test the actual F1 looking aerokit on your model. I'm impatient seeing it 😃

9:22 love the V10 F1 sound

That's a really cool experiment, I'd love to try this out myself someday! You could also try implementing a tail-fan like the Gordon Murray T50. Also, lift increases with the square of velocity and not planform area [L = Cl * A * .5 * r * V^2].

The wing angle of attack should be in the 7° to 13° range to avoid flow separation on the back. To increase down force you can split one big wing into several smaller ones with progressively higher angle of attack, so that each is ~7° steeper than the one before it, and shallower than the one after it. Aerofoil cross section matters.

I got this same car going 154mph. Great choice of rc

Definitely interested to see more !! Thank you it was great

I'd be interested in seeing how the aerodynamics of the wings would affect the top speed.

James, a very interesting video. This type of aero is like a law of diminishing returns but seeing as how your baseline was the bare chassis with no aero then the initial gains are going to be massive, I can tell you that an 1/8 scale IC car with no body work is very unsettled, put even an average body like a Lancia LC2 an there is a huge initial difference, then the gains are smaller and much harder to find. At one point later in the video where you had understeer, you had the car pivoting about the back axle and actually lifting the front end. I done some wind tunnel testing with Ford on their first WRC Focus in the Cologne wind tunnel and this rotating around the axles is very noticeable. Ease off on the rear down force and some to the front and away you go. Don't listen to the doubters. Most of them have never done anything useful.

That car looks smooth and cool

I'm making some aerodynamic improvements on my rc f1 project car and this video really helped me!

Also you have to consider the drag force caused by big spoilers increasing the frontal surface area... There is a relationship between drag and downforce...

DOWNFORCE!

Amazing work, keep going !

Bị nghiện bài này từ thời Bảo Thy, ko ngờ lại có ngày được nghe idol mới trong lòng mình Đức Phúc cover lại. Cảm ơn em ĐP vì đã cover lại lắng đọng cảm xúc như vậy

I have always wondered about active Aero. Wings flatten out in a straight line, sensors pitch them up for more downforce in turns and turn them right up for braking. Also like to see the old fan car design that sucked the vehicle onto the road with engine power. They built one like this but it was so quick they banned it after one race. Always wish they Built a Demo car with all the tech like active aero, fans, turbos etc and see how much faster it could go round a track than the " legal" cars. I bet it would be a LOT faster.

Huge issue with ground effect is that the scale of the RC car compared to the scale of the smoothness of the road is a much bigger issue than with a full-sized car, and they work HARD to make F1 tracks grippy enough for turning but smooth enough to not vibrate the hell out of the vehicles. Active aero could have potential but you'd need a fast computer on board to control it accurately.

I wish I had seen this sooner or knew you were working on it. Because believe it or not slot cars are still a thing and are great for aero experiments. They also have winged cars that are insanely fast and use a very simple form of active aero.

Dude! Nice. Probably the most interesting RC car content I've ever seen. Ive come to realize that so much can be done at this scale - affordably . Very nice work on the video and the car!

Would be cool if you did some hard engineering as opposed to just tinkering. Interesting video regardless!

Companies spend millions in researching this. I'd suggest you mimic them and see why they've chosen what they have. Having a snow-plow in the front and back, won't do anything meaningful.

The quality of your videos is astronomical. You deserve at least a million subs!

Another great one as usual thank you so much for sharing

I'd love to see more like this

Wawwww, Just discovered this youtube channel. Keep up the good work!!!!!

Project Air: makes something that will definitely not fly

Sweet RC body modifications! and love the F1 sounds 😂

Would definitely love to see more videos on this!

Would be super interested in more videos on experiments with ground effect RC cars! And I suggest doing some constant steering test to objectively compare maximum cornering speed on equal cornering radius. Ideally clean road, and loop around a constant radius circle to remove other variables like gravel, weight shifting, etc. :)

Love this video! I used to be into RC and spent more time repairing them than I did driving them, good times. Subbed

Aerodynamics on rc cars is something I never thought about, very cool

Always a great video. Love the knowledge and experiments!

If you want to reduce drag while still keeping good downforce levels, you can use multiple wing elements that "feed" each other but with a smaller angle of attack in between them. That way you wouldn't have as much flow separation on the underside of the wings

fun time 9:21 , good work, nice acceleration timing. "from Brazil

This video made me subscribed, honestly I was pretty impressed with the quality of this video

More like this please 👏🏻👍🏻

Awesome video, aerodynamic is really an essencial key to achieve success! Cool Casio W-86!!

Great to see you are applying Haas’s wind tunnel testing

I did something very similar about 8 years ago and yes it works well so long as the spring rate are balanced properly with the aero and going around in a circle is a better way to find out what Gaines you have made.

I love this video. Well done 🎉

This video was awesome

PLEASE MAKE MORE THIS KIND OF VIDEOS I REALLY LOVE IT 😍

With the f1 sound it was epic!

Use a split front scoop to allow more air to pass over the front center of the car pushing down the rear. I did similar experiments with a Traxxas Jato 3.3. Full front scoop overheated the engine due to air deflection as I ran gas. With split scoop there was still a considerable difference in stearing ability against a stock Jato. Both had upgraded Road Rage tires and not the garbage stock Anacondas. Keep up the good work

Dude this is awesome. I actually looked at this for my science fair project.

this is really great

Wonderful and informative vid

Great video!

I would love to see the results with the original bodywork - given that the model had quite aerodynamic shape already. Would be interesting to see the difference.

I would like to see you nail this! 👍

Ah man well-done with that real sound! Awesome and unexpected 😂😂👍❤

Awesome

Lovely vw up btw👌

Understeer and slow front end response can be solved with a very fast and high torque steering servo. Especially at higher speeds even without the extra aerodynamics

the V10 sound it's awesome

Great video, very smart young lad!

Amazing video

Ground effect car sounds interesting!

Here's it completely new concept, mount an upside-down RC airplane wing like 4 inch above the RC car right at the center of gravity, so it pushes both front and rear down equally

Keep going! There are a million more air options that would be fun to watch you try. For instance a front wing that isn't solid (like in F1) and some big holes in the body to guide the air through the car.

This is so interesting!

2:50 Two squared is actually four, mate. That said, lift increases as a square of the velocity, not the area, so at double the speed, you generate four times the downforce. 💜🤓👍

That box on the top will be creating such a lot of drag, it’s like a pocket for the air to suck into

That bump on the turn is killing me