Aero mods for a Super Beetle?!? (Page 1 of 2)

Just take some notes from the time attack guys. They are all about being glued for fast laps.

Awesome bug! Though I think we'll be going decidedly more ghetto with our mods...

its a bug, at the speeds it does wind shouldnt be factor

everyone seems to laugh at that, but i'm not sure why.

This is critical - especially if you think the car will be fast enough to get up to 80 mph or so. In the last race we did, the Ghia was running well enough that we could get there, and while we had a front dam, it had lost it's structural integrity. Most of the drivers on the team agree that we were experience classic VW lift at the end of the straight.

We're fixing ours now to try and keep the air from underneath - we figure if the turbo doesn't blow the engine up, we might go fast enough to get the front end too light for comfort.

But if this is your first race - it wouldn't be the #1 priority for me. I'd start collecting spares. You'll need them. You can PM or email me if you want some more advice on running an air-cooled VW. We've done 3 races in ours.

Also - take a look here:

http://www.shoptalkforums.com/viewtopic … p;t=115568

Read everything this guy wrote in that forum. All of it. You'll learn things you didn't know.

What you need is downforce:

"I have thought about a super many times, and cant seem to convince my teammates that a 70ish hp car is the way to go..."

Funny story actually... when we bought it in January, we were told it had a "custom stroker engine". Which ultimately turned into it had "all the parts to BUILD a custom stroker engine" and they had been sitting in various boxes for the past 5 or 6 years in this dudes garage (Which explains why it was so damn cheap!). Needless to say, none of us had ever actually built an engine before and it has been mostly put together only to be taken back appart about 4 times since we started.

In theory it may actually make like 100 hp, in which case it should be plenty fast enough to get unstable. Either that or our knucklehead built engine will just implode by lap 8!

Ya, I wasn't joking. I first saw this in a MotoIQ.com writup about time-attack. It is a perfectly sound idea. I'm surprised that team doesn't have a Lemons car with that type of ingenuity.

The only better idea is the Chaparrel car. I'm waiting for someone to do that in Lemons, too.

Yeah, it's a Clark Y when it clearly needs to be a NACA five-series airfoil...who designed that wing anyway? That Bug will never exceed 400 MPH...

Here's what we ended up doing for aero: The rear spoiler is a copy of the old Herrod Helper and the frot spoiler is pure hand-crafted hooptiness...

You really need to get that thing lower to the ground and add some Rake into it as suggested then the hood will act as the down force for the front, also I would consider bringing your lower air dam farther froward at the bottom cause by the looks of it, it may actually lift the front end up.

The air dam actually seemed to work pretty well at CMP last month, though it never got above 70 mph. The photos seem to distort the angle of the dam, it really is verticle with a forward curved lip on the bottom edge.

We will be lowering it for our next race, but will lower both the front and rear and probably no more than 1-1/2" to 2". Rake is no problem for a Super if you're only going in a straight line (ie, drag racing), but for road handling it really throws the geometry of the steering out of wack and the ball joints can't pivot fully. So for now we are more focused on upgrading the brakes and firming up the suspension just a little.