Fury Body v's Vortx chassis

As we were planning on using the bodywork we had already developed on my fury, we needed to overlay the bodywork onto a chassis to check it would fit. Once Marc had a customer chassis in the jig built up to a reasonable level we shot up to the workshop with the body in tow.#

It all dropped on surprisingly well, apart from the 9" gap caused by the longer wheel base, but this could easily be rectified by extending the bonnet mould. The sills were going to be completely new so we didn't need to consider this. Also we were developing a new rear body tub that would be more pleasing to look at and hopefully create better aero, but in essence its the same size so using the old rear tub let us prove things out.

The new rear tub was something were were keen to develop and test on the existing car. We had proven when we added the new nose last season that the increase in front down force unsettled the car hugely and the batwings were added to level this out. We would like to get the rear tub close aero as close as possible in its design without the need to add winglets or flaps, so with the Birkett looming we thought it would be idela to get the new tub out for the test day and do some back to back testing.

We based the new rear tub on an old rear tub we had, knowing that if we built around it, it would fit. The biggest thing we have discovered about aero on these cars is that you dont want any of the rear deck dropping down causing the air flow to detach from the surface, in essence the car wants to be a wedge shape. Now lots of fancy race cars like the radicals have big swooping rear ends which look great, and are very slippery, but what they have which we don't in RGB is massive great rear wings. A lot of the class R cars have been styled like this, and most of them suffer with no rear down force, something that people are now realising and changing their cars (we did tell you ;-) ).  As usual Dad was looking for an existing item to cut up and use, after much searching he noticed the bonnet of my moms Freelander................ I was sceptical....

While she was out for the morning we nabbed the bonnet and cast a part of in GRP

We then started to mess with how and where to mount it, i was still sceptical......

We new the new car would be wider so wasn't concerned about the over hangs at the side as these would disappear, but i was still sceptical.....

Lots and lots of expanding foam and filler:-

Lots and lots of rubbing down and spraying

 

 Then a mould was made of the rear corners

The rear corner moulds were then attached to the original deck (original cast off freelander bonnet), and GRP laid into the moulds, which also joined the deck to the corners. The moulds were pulled off, followed by some strengthening with ribs, rubbed down and sprayed again

 

 

 

Yes it looks too wide compared to the rest of the body work, but this would disappear when the bodywork was modified for the new chassis anyway. The aim of this was to  have bodywork we could run on the fury and test the aero balance. You can just see in the rear shot we drilled a few holes at different heights so we could easily adjust the height/angle of the deck to see what effect this had on handling.