Photos: Ford
For the first time since the “Car of the Tomorrow” was introduced by NASCAR back in 2007, Ford’s all-new Sprint Cup car for the 2013 season closely mirrors the look of the actual Fusion production vehicle we’ll soon see hitting roads nationwide.
Featuring a completely redesigned sleek new silhouette, the car was designed to be the face of a new era of stock car racing. ”We wanted Fusion to be the car that helped return ‘stock car’ to NASCAR.” stated Jamie Allison, director, Ford Racing. (A welcome change after a half decade of “sameness” racing around the track.)
And since better aerodynamics on the track means winning races, it helps that Ford, using massively parallel supercomputers, spent 2 million computer hours improving the aerodynamics of the new Fusion. (That’s the equivalent of one person using one PC working on this for 300 years straight.) And according to Steve Parks, Lead Aerodynamics Engineer for the Fusion, it also spent a whole lot of time in the wind tunnel.
“All told, over the course of the development process, we spent 450 hours in the wind tunnel on this vehicle program, he said. “This includes benchmarking, clay vehicle development, and program verification of prototypes. That’s equivalent to 56 days in the tunnel.”
That allowed Ford to achieve a projected 10% reduction in its coefficient of drag in comparison to the outgoing 2012 Fusion model. A huge savings in the aero world, according to Ford. And not very easy to do.
“We’ve been squeezing drag out of the vehicles since the 70′s,” says Parks. “What’s left is only the ‘high hanging fruit,’ and requires the effort of intense optimization.”
How intense? Parks used to work for NASA on the shuttle program, and when they did Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations on the space shuttle, he was “amazed” that the solutions were 1GB in size. The files for the Fusion were 15 GB in size, 15 times as large as those original space shuttle calculations. “That gives you an indicator of what we have to do to get this value, and still retain that leadership in styling,” Parks says.
And styling is important. The car can’t just be slippery, it also has to appeal to car buyers. So everything Ford tested had to not only reduce drag, but increase the look and style of the car. Resulting in features like active grille shutters that open and close depending on speeds, stalk-mounted side view mirrors, a small, subtle lip spoiler on the rear deckled, minimized wheel well openings, a small “splitter” below the fog lamps, and streamlined rear quarter panels.
All of this new “slipperiness” gives the Fusion a class-leading estimated 37 mpg highway with the 1.6-liter EcoBoost engine, and the Hybrid version bumping up to 47 mpg in the city. And that translates into less pit stops.
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Tags: Car Trends and Innovations, Cars, Ford
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