I've been thinking about experimenting with pedestal heights on my GTC-300 wing and had some questions. I've seen many guys here run 275, 330 mm stands on their J's and Voltex wings trying to get the wing closer to the roof line. I understand the cleaner air theory and how it can produce relatively more downforce; however won't you hit lower stall speeds with the increased height?

The APR guy told me "Raising the wing higher is only necessary on sedans with steep angels from the back of the rood to the trunk for instance like the Evo 8/9 for example if you look at the roof line and the transition from the roof to trunk is very abrupt and sharp there for raising the wing on that vehicle is necessary."

So....should the wing be placed lower (say 10" height) due to the lower roof line of the s2k? I haven't seen how the air stream flows after coming off the rear roof. Where is our "clean air", up high or down low?

 

There is a point of diminishing returns, but the rule of thumb is to run it as high as the rules allow. Then stall speed would be controlled by the angle of the wing, not the height per se.

It is way easy to overthink these issues and bench analyze, but it is far better to just go out and do lapping days with a timer. If the driver is not consistent, and/or the vehicle prep is weak you will see that (and have to fix it first as you should) before you can get faster with aero consistently. And, just to make things fun, suspension grip vs. aero grip can go in opposite directions based on the turn types.

The "3-D wings" try to approximate the complex flow path to compensate, but the real flow is super complex. Look at the last Racecar Engineering at the newstands and you can see how a professional team addresses all those issues.