Watch the 2017 Ford GT’s Active Aero Dance During Wind Tunnel Testing
Developing a supercar, apparently, can involve some really, really late nights.
Developing a new supercar, as it turns out, isn't all Nurburgring testing and auto show debuts. Sometimes it involves sacrificing a night's sleep to test out the new 2017 Ford GT on the wind tunnel at 2 a.m.
But while doing so might mean missing out on a good night's sleep or catching up on Cinemax's latest erotic masterpieces, staying up all night to test the Ford GT in the wind tunnel does make for some seriously neat footage. So Ford, in its wisdom, cooked up a fun little video showing the road-going version of its new Le Mans-winning supercar hard at work testing out all its super-cool active aerodynamic bits and pieces, in advance of the production car's expected debut at the end of this year.
As Ford is all too happy to point out, all those scoops, vents, and intakes weren't added to the GT in a Homer Simpson-like attempt to add speed holes; every curve, bulge, and hollow of the car's exterior serve a specific aerodynamic purpose. To see how they all come together to keep the Ford GT stuck to the ground at super-legal speeds, Ford subjected the car to wind speeds of nearly 125 miles per hour in the wind tunnel, giving engineers a chance to watch firsthand the ways the fast-moving air flows and dances over the car's transforming spoiler and whale shark-like front vents.
It's not quite as cool as watching a scale model of the 2017 Ford GT explode in a hot ball of fury, but it's still pretty damn awesome.
