Having just spent the better part of a week on the Bonneville salt flats looking at race cars, listening to engineers and race car builders, and considering the role of aerodynamics on everything that happens there, this video is timely. You are going to watch a 1980s film that shows off the incredible NASA Ames Research Wind Tunnel which happens to be the largest in the world. See that lead image above? That little red spec at the bottom is not a bug on the lens but rather a van driving by one of the football field size air intakes that feed the tunnel which has a large bay of 80×120 feet. Whole, full-sized planes can be tested in there as well as smaller stuff at super high simulated speeds. This thing is beastly.
While using this tunnel is out of the reach of most every hot rodder at Bonneville (we said MOST) smaller wind tunnels better suited to race cars like the A2 facility are becoming more and more popular. Land speed racing has largely developed by trial and error, interesting “eyeball” ideas, and accidental successes but more and more it is advancing because of hard science. Horsepower cures many ills but at some point, the big motors and the big power adders cannot overcome the forces that Mother Nature places opposite the car. The only way to “beat” the air is with clever and well engineered aerodynamic designs.
The power of aero? This year a tiny streamliner with a single turbo LS engine that measured 253ci went 389mph on gasoline. Danny Thompson’s gargantuan Challenger 2 used a pair of injected nitro burning hemi engines to run 450mph. The air is both friend and enemy. The NASA Ames Research Wind Tunnel has been proving out lessons like this for decades now.
