Reply to "ARCHITETTURA DELLA CARROZZERIA #29"

Disclaimer: I am NOT a lawyer.
My understanding of such things is, if you are NOT selling copies of someone else's work, you are within your rights to make yourself a copy, and to share it with others. With the expectation that they too will not be making money selling it. The reason some of you have seen the data before is exactly because of this; only one (1.0) abbreviated tunnel test on a Pantera was ever done or at least publicised. Further, the magazine in question has been defunct for over 30 yrs, their copywrite is unregistered anywhere today, the owners may be deceased as well, and in any event, it was for Italy (Turin), not U.S.

My fascination with the article is that the lift/drag figures for the Pantera were sooo close to the GT-40, knowing that neither car was designed in a wind tunnel and both were designed for different end uses. The Pantera was a back-of-the-envelope effort hurriedly done by a single talented individual, while Ford's earlier racer was as carefully designed as a large group of pro engineers could make it. Note some of Ford's top brass believed that using spoilers or wings indicated to the general public that the car's basic design was flawed! It took refusals to drive the early GT-40 flat-out by development drivers until the car's dangerous nose-lift problem was resolved. Then they got around to the equally upsetting tail-lift.

Finally, those wind tunnel results are only truly accurate for low & mid-range air speeds, as the results were 'factored' for higher velocities. 150 mph wind tunnels did not exist at the time even for military airplanes and are still rare 45 years later. Factored aero results are common today in many fields. Long conversations with Pantera owner Dr Andy Wortmann who runs an aero lab (with gov't & commercial contracts) in So-Cal pointed this out to me decades ago.