snip

Well now that's more like it.
I do think at least an "how are you" was called for :-)

Never heard of Maitland. At least I don't remember a Maitland.
Ideas in those days moved around from place to place. I know I discussed
many ideas with Don, you and Mike on the phone and Jim face to face.

Jim walked into my office one day and said something like this "Suppose
we got a low pressure all over under the car? Would we get a lot of
down force?." I pulled out my slip stick and said lets see. etc., etc.
and came up with a couple of thousand pounds.

The first I saw of the suspension mounted high wing was when we got one
in a box from Chevy R&D made from solid blue foam and thick fiberglass
skins with no spar that weighed about 40 pounds. The Chevy R&D supplied
linkage
on the suspension mounted wing failed at Bridge Hampton LI during the
first race on both 2C cars. We beefed the linkage up and the struts failed
on the trailer on the way to the next Can Am race.

I thought about it a bit and decided the 40 pound wing was being jerked
sideways when the wheel went over a bump due to the geometry of the
lateral links used to locate the struts sideways. This introduced high
bending stresses in the struts and high compressive and tension loads
in the lateral linkage.

I figured what we needed was to eliminate the "bump steer" in the wing.
I designed a watts link to do this and showed it to Jim. Jim was skeptical
and did not think a watts link would work in that application so I built
one up and mounted it on the 2B mule car with huge super light weight
aluminum wing that I built out of .016 7075 T6 skins with conventional
ribs and spars. I got a picture around here somewhere of that wing mounted
on the 2B.

The watts link worked great and Jim adopted it for all subsequent suspension
mounted wings. Particularly on the 2F Group Six (as I recall) European
endurance racer. The huge aluminum wing showed up much later on the
low drag, low frontal area 2H "Whale" after it failed to be competitive.
Mike Pocabello(s?) and I had long arguments on the phone about the 2H prior
to its being built. I claimed the reason we were not accelerating as well
as Penske's Lola (which we instrumented and tested at Midland) was because of
the
losses in the torque converter in our pseudo "automatic" transmission.
Mike claimed it was excessive aerodynamic drag. I made some measurements
and calculations proving that aerodynamic drag was a minor impediment
when the car was still accelerating at over .5 G at 150 MPH.
I mentioned this in a technical paper I presented and published in
the Proceedings of the AIAA symposium on The Aerodynamics of Sports
& Competition Automobiles. April 20th 1968.

The Formula One guys tried to copy the suspension mounted
wing but did not fully understand the problems and several failed
causing severe accidents. Happened to me in Midland as the link that fixed
the 2B wing angle of attack failed and I went off a curve lickety
split if not sooner at over 100 MPH. You would not believe what happens
when you are cornering at two G and you suddenly lose all down force.
When Jim came back from a race and heard about it he was pissed :-)
No damage to me or the 2B thanks to the wide grassy areas on either
side of the track and thick brush beyond that.

As I recalled two wings failed on Lotii in Spain within laps of each other
and the FIA subsequently outlawed suspension mounted wings. Real shame
as that was a major advance in race cars that has not been reapplied
to this day.

I live in LA near UCLA and have a hangar and a couple of airplanes
at Santa Paula.

What is Don Cox up to these days? Do you have his email address?

Paul Lamar

Near UCLA?  Well, that does it, we are going to have to come see your KIS
project next time we're down.  We spend most of our time working across the
street from UCLA.  You going to be there in 3 or 4 weeks?  Heck, we'll even
take you to dinner (not The Palm).

Chris Cosman
microcosman.com

How about Del Monico's? (s?). I am only here half the time.
the rest of the time I am in the hangar at SZP. Let me know
in advance.+

Paul Lamar
 
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