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Fuel consumption of road cards has been a main issue for the global automotive industry. Engineering tools, such as wind tunnels and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), have been employed for vehicle design, intending to achieve more aerodynamic efficiency. However, wind tunnels are very expensive facilities. Conversely, CFD technique rises as the best cost-effective tool for solutions on aerodynamics. This paper presents the influences of numerics and brief analysis of the intrinsic turbulent flow over a 3D realistic car model. The objective is to provide a significant cost-benefit of numerical parameters to the automotive industry in the development of road cars. Besides the validation from an unsteady-state simulation over a full car domain, the simplification of the domain by half and the steady-state regime were found to provide an acceptable approach for automotive simulation.

A modern benchmark for passenger cars - DrivAer model - has provided significant contributions to aerodynamics-related topics in automotive engineering, where three categories of passenger cars have been successfully represented. However, a reference model for high-performance car configurations has not been considered appropriately yet. Technical knowledge in motorsport is also restricted due to competitiveness in performance, reputation and commercial gains. The consequence is a shortage of open-access material to be used as technical references for either motorsport community or academic research purposes. In this paper, a parametric assessment of race car aerodynamic devices are presented into four groups of studies. These are: (i) forebody strakes (dive planes), (ii) front bumper splitter, (iii) rear-end spoiler, and (iv) underbody diffuser.

The aerodynamic development of road car have been progressing as engineering tools become more accurate and feasible. Wind tunnels more similar to the real environment, as well as computational techniques with improved modelling and hardware, lead the development of aerodynamic applications to focus on details. In this scenario, exhaust gases may jump from ordinary residuals to useful flow for aerodynamic control. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of exhaust tailpipe position on drag coefficient over a 3D realistic road car model. Therefore, the main contributions of this paper are (i) to present the influence of tailpipe position over the car, as well as (ii) to provide results that may support technical decision concerning performance and design targets on a road car project.