Heya lads,

It may come as no surprise that I'm working on some cars for rFactor; this time its basically the cars from GTL getting the handling they deserve, or at least I hope so!

Of the *utmost* importance is that I'm not going to guess values. I want to calculate everything that is important such as inertias, tyre properties, springs and dampers.. I have decent ideas about those.

Aero is another thing. I can get any lift / downforce on the front or rear axle that I want.. But I'd like to decide on the aero properties based on the shape of the car, not by guessing or 'tuning' too much.

So what I'd like to do is load a 2D side view or perhaps a simplified 3D model into software, spit airflow at it and measure the vertical force on front and rear axle. The results may not be VERY accurate, but at least they're the result of method and thought, not guessing and notepad.

I do have access to FloWorks, but 3D CFD might be a bit over the top. If any of you have any suggestions on software or ideas on how to do this kind of thing, Please shout!

/Nielz

Offtopic (ish)

Is it worth Installing the demo of rFactor that came with my G25?

Not worth it imo. The default cars are poor. The full version allows you to get ''mods'' from the web, out of which 99% is pretty poor still, but the 1% is decent.

I'm no expert (in fact I usually have pretty much no clue whatsoever) but a quick Google found me this:

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/airfoils/q0035.shtml

There's a list of software about halfway down the page and one of them has a 5-day free trial. Whether they're any good or not (or even do what you want) I couldn't say.

a quick look around at wiki got me this:
http://www.cfd-online.com/Links/soft.html
whole bunch of free software that might be able to do the trick
of course theres always the option to get a "student" version of one of the major packages