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Hello; I've been looking at various "High Performance" cars...& quite a few have the front wheel wells (top of fender) ventilated with either a scoop or slates. I really like this look, Since the Pantera front end is famous for "front end float", I wonder if allowing the air pressure that is built up in the wheel well to exit via (scoops or slates) is something worth considering. I would like to know exactly how much "Lift" is caused by wheel well air pressure?.....If anyone has pictures of this modification to a Pantera ...PLEASE POST .....Thanks, Mark
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Depends how effective your nose spoiler is...if the spoiler allows a lot of air under the nose you may see benefit from the louvers. If you have one of the large air dams spoilers I'm pretty sure they are pretty effective at keeping air from going under the nose. Dennis Antenucci told me his air dam was pretty effective. Note the picture with no louvers. If it had made a big difference I'm sure he would have done it to improve his ORR times and speed.

Interesting story behind nose louvers...Bruce McLaren was the first to do the louvers on the fenders and it was discovered purely by accident. Bruce was testing one of his Can Am cars and accidentally left the pit with a nose access panel to the brake master cylinders partially un-fastened...he was on the straight away picking up speed and noticed the panel started to lift because of the air pressure under the nose. The thought in those days was the wind coming across the nose was pushing down on the nose...so they thought. He drove back into the pits and had the panel totally removed and made the hole bigger and found that the nose didn't lift as much. McLaren continued to modify the design and ended up with the louvers on the fenders. This cured some handling problems at speed for the McLarens.

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Last edited by tomsealbeach
Mark, to answer your question, no one knows exactly what affects anything aerodynamically on Panteras. As Tom said, it depends on your air dam and front end rake. But more importantly, none of this stuff is effective below about 125 mph, so experiment carefully! And don't forget that a car is essentially a box on 4 springs, so if you increase downforce in front, the rear is going to lift, pivoting around the center of balance which is about 6" in front of the engine. Fast guys who have added air dams or big front spoilers have found that the TAIL then gets light- above 160- leading to a small spoiler on the trailing edge of the body. A wing is effective but adds more drag- enough to slow a car maybe 20 mph on the top end. 'Course, if you're only interested in the look, anything that pleases you is fine- its your car!
Mark; While I agree that the Charger/Superbird scoops are not elegant on a Pantera and ribbed vents are a bit dated, I saw an alternative years back at the Pocono Event that caught my fancy. They were on Koji Kuboto's (sp) yellow Pantera and were NACA ducts that he used to route fresh air to the cabin. I haven't seen his car in a decade and perhaps it would look dated to me now; however, it looked good back then.

I do not have a picture of his car, yet I am confident someone else on the Forum may. As I recall the Pantera won best of show every year it was there, and finally, Koji removed it from the judging so that others would have a chance to take the award. Can someone post a pic of his front end treatment?
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