Le Mans and the Mulsanne Straight have always been a fascination for me. At nearly 3.5 miles long, the Mulsanne was such a high percentage of the overall lap time at Le Mans that anything you could do to make your car go as fast down the Mulsanne as it could would more than likely lower your lap time. The aerodynamic specificity that was needed to tackle the Mulsanne Straight was different than any other track during the racing season. The Mulsanne straight was the fastest piece of racing real estate on the planet! In 1970, Vic Elford in the Porsche 917 LH ran over 240 mph down Mulsanne at night, in the rain, through the "kink" flat out. It took Indy Cars nearly 25 years to reach straight line performance levels that the sports cars were achieving back in the early 70s!
My interest in racing is solely from a technical standpoint. It always has been. As a teenager I was fascinated by the fact that there was function behind the form. Nothing was arbitrary, unlike in the street car production world. But I was more interested in pursuing form as function than function as form, that is, working from the aesthetics side rather than the computational.
I
have my Bachelors of Industrial Design from Auburn
University. I
have worked for racing organizations such as Downing/Atlanta, Riley
& Scott,
Reynard, and Panoz/Elan Motorsports in such varied disciplines as
composite
lamination and wind tunnel model making. I've
cultivated a knowledge in aerodynamics through observation and
intuition
and hands on experience.
This website is to be used as a data base for sports car fans, race car designers, and anyone simply interested in the nuts-and-bolts of contemporary sports prototype racing cars.
