Gary and Pam Beineke’s series of 1971 Chrysler wing cars are all based on early 1970s Chrysler documents that showed the company had tested scale models of aero ’71 cars in the wind tunnel. These reports were kept secret for decades, and once unearthed, served as inspiration for Gary and Pam to build several of the “never built” cars. Their latest is a 1971 Dodge Daytona built in the likeness of the Bobby Issac driven, K&K Insurance sponsored 1969 Daytona. Instead of just doing a show car tribute, the pair built a real land speed racer and have attacked Maxton, with plans for Bonneville this year as well as Loring, Maine. They went the extra mile and put the car in the A2 wind tunnel to get an idea of how the car would perform at speed.
Here’s what Gary said about his experience in the wind tunnel:
After licensing runs in
April, of 181.6 mph, we could feel the car was producing lift up
front. Prior to the May event, where
they we ran just over 190 mph we built a larger, more old school Nascar front
spoiler that was approximately 4 times the area of the ‘factory’ style front spoiler
that we ran in April. To confirm our suspicions about the lift, we stopped off at Aerodyn Windtunnel in
Mooresville, NC to put it to the test. We tested the car in the April configuration to get a baseline, and
compared it with the “May” configuration.
The results were huge; we reduced lift from 683lbs at 206 mph to only
236 lbs. Further testing, and a suggestion
by Gary Romberg, the original aerodynamicist that worked on the 3/8th
scale models for Chrysler back in early 1970, proved to solve the problem. The
car now in it’s “June” configuration solidly producing downforce up front. In addition, Aerodyn calculated that we were
able to free up nearly 100HP from the April set up compared to the current one. With the car aerodynamically balanced, we’ll
head back down to Maxton in June for some additional runs shooting for 200 mph.
Gary and Pam had their video camera in the wind tunnel and tipped us off to the video below. This car totally rules and the “smoke test” shows some the neat air flow characteristics of this large Mopar!
After watching the video below, click to see the BangShift.com feature stories and videos on some of Gary and Pam’s mother Mopars:
1971 One-Of-None Superbird The Jet-X One-of-None ’72 GTX The Serpent SRT-71 Charger
Click
here to see the 2010 video of the ’71 K&K Daytona running 190 mph at
Maxton
