Video: K&K 1971 Dodge Daytona in A2 Wind Tunnel

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Those who recall Street Legal TV's coverage a little less than a month ago on this very same Daytona will remember that Chrysler never built this '71 Charger wing car, rather, Gary and Pam Beineke did. We showed you how this '71 Daytona clicked off an impressive 190mph on the Maxton track. The Beineke's creation was based on early '70s Chrysler documents that showed the company had tested scale models of aero '71 cars in wind tunnels. Once these reports were made public after decades of secrecy, Gary and Pam sought out to build several of these "never built" cars.


Image: BangShift

The latest, a '71 Dodge Daytona built to resemble the Bobby Issac K&K Insurance '69 Daytona, has been on the quest to set a land speed record, charging Maxton and aiming at Bonneville.

Here's what Gary said:

After licensing runs in April, of 181.6 mph, we could feel the car was producing lift up front. Prior to the May event, where they we ran just over 190 mph we built a larger, more old school Nascar front spoiler that was approximately four times the area of the ‘factory’ style front spoiler that we ran in April. To confirm our suspicions about the lift, we stopped off at Aerodyn Windtunnel in Mooresville, NC to put it to the test. We tested the car in the April configuration to get a baseline, and compared it with the “May” configuration. The results were huge; we reduced lift from 683lbs at 206 mph to only 236 lbs.

Further testing, and a suggestion by Gary Romberg, the original aerodynamicist that worked on the 3/8th scale models for Chrysler back in early 1970, proved to solve the problem. The car now in it’s “June” configuration solidly producing downforce up front. In addition, Aerodyn calculated that we were able to free up nearly 100hp from the April set up compared to the current one. With the car aerodynamically balanced, we’ll head back down to Maxton in June for some additional runs shooting for 200 mph.






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