Hot Car Spotlight:

This is a spotlight of a track/race car that we love. We’ll examine some of the details that make these cars so cool, from examples of cutting edge aerodynamics and engineering to historically awesome cars that influenced today’s race car design.

The Car:

This car comes from some of the best years of racing: The Mazda RX-7 GTO

This car was built for IMSA racing – with a 4-rotor 600hp powerplant which came from Mazda’s LeMans efforts, it shared almost nothing with the production version of the RX-7.

What this car shows is how effective relatively basic race-car engineering can be. Steel space-frame chassis, aluminum and carbon fiber body panels, BIG wheels/rubber/brakes, smart but simple aerodynamics, and big horsepower. The result was absurdly fast. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this car run around the track in person and it is a religious experience.

This car was one of the primary inspirations for the fender design on my own time attack car:

There isn’t any crazy F1-level aero here, but it’s done right. The huge vented front fenders stand out immediately. Also, notice the rear wing’s endplates double as the mounts – an efficient design that avoids the flow disruption under the wing that traditional uprights cause. The sideskirts on the car flare out to keep air from ‘spilling’ to the underside (under-car airflow is very important).

The glimpse under the skin demonstrates the separation from street car to ground-up built race car well. Ducting plays a prominent role – when you think of aerodynamics, visions of wings and canards come to mind first, but that’s only part of the equation: airflow through the car is as important as the airflow around it.

The most important thing to remember is that while you may not be able to directly copy a layout like this within a normal car, these concepts can be applied with great effect to production car builds. Don’t handicap your build by thinking that only ground-up race cars can enjoy these benefits!