Wing Logic makes a satisfactory wing at a great price. It doesn’t come set up for any particular car, and so you will need to do some DIY fabrication. You’ll have to figure out things like how to mount the wing securely in the correct location, and then you’ll need to drill the bottom mounts for a range of useful angles, and then weld the bottom mounts to the wing.
It takes some patience and know-how to figure it all out, and if I’m being honest, 90% of people will cock it up and do a sub-optimal job, losing some of the wing’s performance in the process. If you buy a ready-made kit from 9 Lives Racing, AJ Hartman Aero, and other reputable companies, you’ll get an easier install and better performance straight out of the box.
But if you know what you’re doing, a DIY wing like Wing Logic or 9 Lives Racing’s new Express kits, can save you some money. Or if you have a car that doesn’t have a ready-made kit available, then a DIY solution is the only game in town.
I tested a Wing Logic wing in the wind tunnel vs the industry standard 9 Lives Racing Big Wang (Wing Logic versus 9 Lives Racing), and found the performance was similar. Wing Logic’s wing has less camber, and so it makes less downforce for a given area, but it’s a physically larger wing (9.2” vs 10”), and so the performance ends up being quite close. 9 Lives has the edge in weight and performance, and so if you’re racing in a series that limits the total wing area (GLTC, SCCA TT Nats, etc), or if you care about two pounds (high up, at the polar end of the car), then 9 Lives is a better choice. For the track rat or hard-park poseur, it’s a wash. I have plans to radically lighten the wing by milling it out into a skeleton, and then wrapping with carbon fiber, but that experiment will have to wait until the end of the track season, because I no longer have it.
Steve Leo is making a foam composite dual element, and while that process takes place (for fucking forever) I loaned him my 65” Wing Logic for his Subaru WRX STi. He didn’t have any wing mounts for it, but he had a spare trunk, and I said bring it over and I’ll figure something out.
Because I had already tested this wing on a Miata, the wing has brackets welded 41” apart. Ergo, I’d need to put the same spacing on the Subaru trunk. As luck would have it, that put the wing mounts right on top of the hinges, which is a sturdy area with some extra thickness and support in the metal frame. Also as luck would have it, the hardware would now be in the way, and I’d have to work out how to allow the trunk to close.
But first things first, to place the wings on the surface of the trunk, such that the wing is braced against side to side movement. I went to the Lowe’s racing department and bought a couple feet of 1” angle aluminum. I cut this into four pieces to make brackets, and sandwiched the Miata wing stands between them.
But I couldn’t put bolts through the top of the trunk and nuts on the bottom, as the nuts would be in the trunk gutter – this would cause interference and keep the trunk from closing. So I installed the hardware upside down, with countersunk 6mm bolts going through the underside and nylock nuts on top. It’s maybe a little less attractive, but this was the only way I got it to work.
It took a bit of head scratching, but I figured out how to install all 12 bolts from underneath. It took bolts of different lengths, which I’ve noted in the previous images in case you want to give it a go. It all came out surprisingly sturdy, and probably more rigid than you’d see on most cars. You can grab the wing and shake the car side to side, and the wing mounts don’t move.
The only thing I wasn’t terribly happy with is that the wing is too far forward. The rule of thumb is to overlap the trunk by 1/4 of the chord. So on this 10” wing, 2.5” should overlap the trunk, and 7.5” should be over the bumper.
How important is that? Well, I tested a Civic coupe in the wind tunnel, and moving the wing from on top of the trunk to the ideal rearward position resulted in less drag and more downforce. Usually you get one at the expense of the other, but this was a win-win. I would have liked to do that for Steve, but I didn’t have any more aluminum stock to make another set of wing stands, and he needed this done ASAP.
We got super lucky with the setback distance, any closer and the wing would hit the roof when the trunk was fully opened. I’ll take that as a win and optimize the wing stands at some later date.
Data?
Steve reports that the wing is working really well, but through some bad luck, we have had the devil of a time getting comparative A/B data. He’s used the wing at Watkins Glen, Lime Rock, NYST, and Pineview Run, and while we have data from those events, it’s not the kind of back-to-back data that tells a compelling story.
By the seat of the pants, the Wing Logic setup works better than the VSC rally wing he had on there previously. But the Wing Logic single wing doesn’t work quite as well as the Wing Logic dual element he tried this week. Wait, what?! Dual-fucking-element Wing Logic? You can read about that in the next post.
Occam's Racer 