Ariel Motor, makers of the tube-frame space-age Atom sports-racer and the road-legal dune buggy Nomad, have just taken one of the best pages from '70s motorsports and pulled it all the way into the future. You see even low-volume, niche sports-car makers are running into ever tighter emissions regulations. But when your car already weighs just over half a tonne, and uses an efficient 2.0L four-cylinder, improving that efficiency can be difficult.
So Ariel has headed down the only road that's left: improve aerodynamics. When you have an exposed cockpit, that would seem to be an easy task, but for the Atom, adding bodywork would also add weight. So the engineers at Ariel found a different way. A better way. A way that also improves cornering. They have taken a page from the 1970 Chaparral 2J Can-Am car and the 1978 Brabham BT46B F1 racer, and have added a pair of large fans to the bottom of the car that suck the car to the pavement.
The fans work along with rubber skirts that create a seal between the wider than standard floorpan and the pavement. They only run when necessary, and only for a short time. When they aren't needed, like at cruise or at high-speed (when the conventional aerodynamic aids work best), the fans stay shut off. This also helps the Atom team reduce drag. The wings only need to work at high speed, so they can be made smaller. The system even allows the car to create downforce even when stationary, improving acceleration from a stop.
Nicknamed the Vacuum Cleaner, the AERO-P Atom is still just a research project, but Ariel is excited to move the system into production. Director of Ariel Simon Saunders said "We’re already making about three times the downforce as aerofoils, but this really is just the first step and a very early stage in what is a large and complex project to bring to a production reality"
