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This article highlights the advances in the aerodynamic development and test processes of both road and motorsports cars over the last two decades, including explaining the main driving forces behind this evolution. The relentless and continuous drive to improve efficiency and correlation between computational fluid dynamics, real-time simulation, wind tunnel testing, and the track is explained. Key enabling technologies are described, such as: continuous motion systems; high-speed data acquisition systems; steel moving belt ground planes with under floor load cells; on-demand robotic particle image velocimetry; pneumatic model tyres with integral sidewall and contact patch deflection systems; driver simulators and rapid prototyped rake systems for track cars. Finally, as aerodynamicists attempt to simulate and test within ever more complex and realistic environments potential future directions and emerging trends are outlined, including gusts, aeroelasticity, adaptive cooling, and cornering.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">5 belt wind tunnels are the most common facility to conduct the experimental aerodynamics development for production cars. Among aerodynamic properties, usually drag is the most important development target, but lift force and its front/rear balance is also important for vehicle dynamics. Related to the lift measurement, it is known that the “pad correction”, the correction in the lift measurement values for the undesirable aerodynamic force acting on wheel belt surface around the tire contact patch, must be accounted.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Due to the pad correction measurement difficulties, it is common to simply subtract a fixed amount of lift values from measured lift force. However, this method is obviously not perfect as the pad corrections are different for differing vehicle body shapes, aerodynamic configurations, tire sizes and shapes. As an alternative, CFD is a possible solution to estimate pad correction, but it is still not practical to calculate all cases of the development due to the calculation cost and time.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">One existing wind tunnel test measurement procedure is to utilize special arrangements in the car restraint apparatus. But this method requires a preparation test apart from the actual aerodynamic test run, which is not ideal in terms of wind tunnel test productivity.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">In this paper, a new method to estimate the pad correction for 5 belt wind tunnel is proposed, introducing a newly developed mathematical model of pressure distribution on the belt surface. With this model, it is possible to estimate pad correction values without any other preparation test.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">In order to develop this method, CFD analysis with tire rotation condition was made for 10 cases/6 vehicles. For the validation of CFD itself, these CFD results were compared with the pressure distribution data measured in a single belt wind tunnel.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">The pressure distribution model was created ensuring its mathematically generated distribution can reproduce 10 cases of CFD results with a unified expression, by changing its 68 parameters. Also, these parameters were reduced to 7, in order to enable parameters estimation by multiple linear regression (MLR) from 42 pressure tap point data around the 5 belt wind tunnel wheel belt.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">For the verification of the method, CFD results were used. The pad correction values were estimated from 42 pressure tap point data taken from the CFD results, and compared with directly calculated pad correction values from the same CFD results.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">The verification of the estimation accuracy showed within error variation widths of 0.007 ~ 0.008 (widths between maximum and minimum errors) of pad correction for <i>CL_front</i> or <i>CL_rear</i> correction values. Also, the error variation widths for the same car were 0.001 ~ 0.003 for <i>CL_front</i> pad correction, which is enough to predict its configuration difference trend.</div></div>

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