UofIT ACE Wind Tunnel

In the late ’60s, Dodge was desperately looking to get more speed out of its Charger race cars so it could turn around its fortunes on NASCAR’s super-speedways, and knew more horsepower wasn’t the answer. So engineers there began experimenting with the car’s aerodynamics instead, to make it more slippery-through-the-air. After months of testing, they settled on adding an 18-inch pointed nose cone and two-foot-tall spoiler. It looked outrageous, but it worked. The race car, which Chrysler called the Charger Daytona, won its first-ever NASCAR event and helped Dodge dominate the circuit the next two seasons. In March 1970, it became the first stock-bodied car to crack 200 miles-an-hour (320 km/h) on a closed course, at Talladega. The effect of those mods in terms of actual down force and drag figures was never properly measured—until now. When offered access to UOIT’s ACE Speed Lab wind tunnel in Oshawa, Ontario, we knew what we wanted to do with it—use it to find out exactly what the Daytona’s wing and nosecone really did. And so we set up a comparison between a 1969 Dodge Charger Hemi; an authentic Charger Daytona; and, just for the heck of it, a 2015 Dodge Charger Hellcat. Here’s what we found out...