Lotus 72 CFD

For those interested in a bit of retrospective CFD, I've written an aerodynamic analysis of the 1970 Lotus 72, as a contribution to Mark Hughes's latest work, F1 Retro 1970.

We were extremely fortunate here in being able to utilise the CFD resources of Sharc, and in particular the patient and responsive cooperation of Richard Bardwell. Many thanks to all concerned!

You can read the full text in the published work, but there is an omission in that, to avoid deterring the non-technical reader, I decided not to list there the full details of the CFD configuration.

For the technically curious, however, I can now put that to rights: We used a k-epsilon turbulence model, and employed a mesh containing approximately 20 million cells, with a boundary layer mesh comprising 3 layers. A y⁺₁ of around 30 was chosen. The vehicle was simulated with rotating wheels on a rolling road at a freestream airspeed of 50m/s. The sidepod radiator and airbox inlets were treated as outlets (if you see what I mean).

Two ride-height combinations were used: 40mm front/60mm rear, and 60mm front/90mm rear. Runs were conducted for the Straight Ahead case, and with 4 degrees of steering angle. The frontal area used in the lift-coefficient calculations was 1.372msq. For each CFD case, the solver was run for 1000 iterations.