The first downforce car?

TotalSim were approached by Charles Armstrong-Wilson, freelance journalist and former editor of Racecar Engineering, to help investigate the performance of what might be the worlds first downforce car.

Little is known about the car designed in the 1920’s by Rene Prevost, which he briefly described with a diagram and photo in his letter published in a1928 edition of The Automobile Engineer. He did however, mention the possible benefits of increased stability and power by sucking the car to the track. Based on this info, 3D cad was generated by Stuart Brown of 3D Engineers (www.3d-engineers.co.uk) and a CFD model created by TotalSim.

It did generate downforce, although the stagnation under the nose produced a lot of front lift which would have made the handling pretty interesting…

The full story was featured in the March 2011 edition of Octane Magazine (www.octane-magazine.com), we hope to show you the copy soon…