"Car-nards" Automobile Street Racing Canards
The Euro styling of compact cars is really catching on and I have
watched it with great interest. I never understood why these cars were called
Euro when all of them are Japanese. Maybe the youth of America slept through
geography class. I believe Euro styling is at the fore front of hot rodding
for street enthusiasts. The engine modifications used nowadays are putting out
immense horsepower for these new street cars. After all what you have in a twin
cam 24 valve V6 is virtually a detuned Grand prix engine so the sky, your wallet
and driving ability are the limit as far as available power goes. You always
have to remember that each horsepower improvement you add to the engine diminishes
its endurance, meaning motor and transmission life will decrease.
If
the Japanese manufacturers could give you 500 horse, 12,000 RPM, 250 M.P.H.
performance, decent gas mileage and 0 emissions they would. This would make
their products sell like hot cakes. Well, realistically they can't or won't,
but if they could you couldn't afford it anyway. So it is up to you to pull
out your tools and look for good products to increase performance. One bit of
advice I have learned in street rodding is if an aftermarket product is marked
"Universal- fits all models" that is code for "Pull out all your
tools as this is going to be a nightmare to install!"
Here is a quick reality check for all you guys with
that neat looking aerodynamic fiberglass stuff and rear wing bolted to your
car. All that junk actually makes your car run slower and handle worse than
stock! From what I have seen and I have seen it all. What the manufacturers
of all that stuff know about automobile aerodynamics, I could write on a matchbook.
Which means they don't know squat? As an example all the fiber glass body panels
you bolt to the lower part of your car adds frontal area, (adding drag) while
also making the air under your car turbulent, (adding drag) and directs cool
air away from your brakes overheating them, causing premature brake wear and
warping your rotors. These panels also force air around the car in an undesirable
way destabilizing the car at high speed. The air going around or over the rear
window separates ( or delaminates) from the window a few inches after the curve
so that only air swirling in vortices strike that rear wing. This wing would
only work in laminar, free moving air anyway so it does nothing on the rear
of your car but sit there and add drag. If by some miracle it got a good supply
of air it would generate negative lift or down force. Why you would want more
weight added at the rear of a front wheel drive car is beyond me, but I don't
understand oversized sagging clown pants either. If the wing did actually work
it would only push the front end up, lightening the front wheels. Now think
about the 120 to 
150
lbs. you addedin weight to your car by adding all this junk and it is like street
racing with a passenger on board. Not counting the 2 large you shelled out for
all this aero-garbage.
I am not putting you guys down, when I was a young street
racer I didn't know what I was doing either. I ran Mopar muscle and would slow
my cars down by jacking up the rear ends on a set of shackles or Gabriel Hi
Jacker air shocks and add big meats to the rear rims. The change in car angle
would throw all the floats and fluids off in the entire car and it would actually
be down in power. The rigidity of the shocks and shackles would bounce the car
over bumps and this was a real problem at over a 100 m.p.h. They sure did look
cool though and since what I really wanted was the attention of girls ( I was
a homely kid at the time) I guess it was all worth it.
Anyway I approached at least nine or ten Euro racerswith my new idea and offered
it at no cost for them to try. I don't know if it is the excess of marijuana
they smoke out here or the fact that their bald heads have let the sun fry their
brains but none of them got a hold of me. So the pictures posted are of a euro
style street racer model with my invention "Car-nards" mounted on
the front end. It is a play on the term Cannards (which are forward mounted
wings on aircraft) and the word "car". Where I grew up in the Chicago
suburbs the slang term "nards" was a term for essential male parts
which all street racers have excess of.
These devices are essentially small symmetrical long
skinny wings mounted on tubes either side of the front wheel of euro FRONT WHEEL
DRIVE CARS ONLY!. What they do is load ( put weight on ) the front wheels (forcing
them into the ground) at speed. There are two of them, one on either side of
the car straddling the front wheels just above street level. They would be kept
in the trunk and used only when racing. They have two tubes mounted at either
end of the wings that would slip into receiver tubes welded to the chassis on
either side of the front wheels. They have a large curved notch in them to allow
the front wheels to turn for steering control. They also have end plates to
keep the smooth air on them from slipping off the edges and causing turbulence
on the wing. I built them on the model about 50% larger than they would actually
need to be because I wanted you to get a good idea of what they would look like.
You could put a little bit of negative angle in them (only about 5 degrees as
this would allow your suspension to jump up and down and not exceed a stall
angle of about 15 degrees. These wings would give you about 200 lbs of negative
lift right at your drive, handling wheels, increasing their efficiency where
you would need it most. These wings could be made of Styrofoam covered with
resin over the mounting tubes welded to a thin steel plate buried inside the
wings for strength.
As always I offer you this idea free and for your own
experimentation so try not to build them so big you kill yourself. Go fast and
stay stable that is my motto. I watched a NASCAR race the other day and noticed
that all the cars were using an offshoot of my invention of a Ogive under body
air dam I designed for Ron Pruett's Bonneville Thunderbird in the early 1990s
to anchor them to the track. Gee I wonder when NASCAR will send me my royalty
check. Maybe I should go out and check my mail box right now.......Waldo