December 13th, 2015- New Prototype NA Miata Hood Vents

New product! This was something I was excited to do for a while. You can buy the fanciest radiator money can buy, do all the ducting to guide into your fancy rad, but that air has to go somewhere after being heated to over 9000 degrees by your radiator. (Not actually over 9000 degrees.) Hood Vents are a great way to allow the hot air from your radiator escape instead of building up under your hood. A lot of high end sport cars and super cars  come with such hood vents to allow hot air from the radiator to escape. For example, the C7 Corvette comes with hood vents from the factory. This beautiful illustration below shows how the cooler ambient air flows in through the mouth of the car, and out the top of the hood as hot air.

2014-chevy-corvette-stingray-c7-hood-vent-model-13.jpg

I wanted to do something similar for my own Miata, but I didn't want a Mustang GT500 vent like everyone else. Also I didn't like how other vent options require you to cut away parts of the hood's frame. So I designed these hood vents so that you can cut around the existing NA hood frame. Not only is structural integrity maintained, but the hood's frame serves as a nice template when you are cutting the hood.

The vents are CNC laser cut out of aluminum and will be sold with the option of having black powder coat or raw metal so you can paint or powder coat it whatever colour you desire. I might eventually be able to powdercoat it whatever colour you wish in the near future.

Pricing to come soon.

3D computer rendering vs first real prototype parts.

Vents painted black and mocked up on a turbocharged '97.

November 11th, 2015- 90/91 diffusers now available, 92-05 diffusers still on sale.

I would like to start off by saying happy remembrance day or happy veterans day, which ever one you celebrate based on your country. I hope you all took time out of your day to show recognition to the brave men and women who gave sacrifice so we can live peacefully and Miata on.

I haven't updated my website blog in a while. I apologize. You can find the most recent updates on my facebook page, but I will try to update here as often as possible.

1990-1991 Miata owners rejoice! I now have the brackets available to make the R Theory Motorsports V1 Rear Diffuser fit your car! I also kept the 92-05 diffusers on sale until 90/91 owners get some time to take advantage of the sale price. Price of the kit depends on the year. The 90/91 kit is $29 more because of the brackets used to install the diffuser onto your rear subframe. You can expect the sale to end November 27th, 2015.

You can check out the diffuser on my online store here.

I'm also planning on putting all my BLACK NA Rad Support Covers on sale just to get rid of my old stock. Stay tuned for more details on that.

September 19th, 2015 - Miata Rear Diffuser CFD Analysis

As promised, I did more CFD test on an NA Miata to show how my rear diffuser kit would effect the air flow underneath the rear end of the car.

In case you weren't familiar with the function of a diffuser, here's a diffuser in a nut shell. It creates extra room for the air under the car to expand and creates a low pressure under the car. The low pressure area under the car creates down force and sucks the car down towards the road.

You want to create a diffuser with as much angle as possible. But if you create an angle that is too severe, the air will not follow the profile of the diffuser and will not create any downforce. It will just flow parallel with the ground and no downforce=no breaking necks at the track.

In the first image you can see a stock NA Miata with no diffuser. The air under the car flows parallel with the ground and eventually rises up after it passes the rear wake (the bubble of recirculating air) behind the car. No expansion under the car=no low pressure=no downforce is created.

In the second image you can see how the diffuser guides the air upwards; creating the low pressure area that results in downforce. Also the overall size of the rear wake has decreased. And notice how the airflow from the bottom of the car hits the top of the test area much earlier than the car without the diffuser. This shows that the airflow will remain attached to the diffuser's profile at 11 degrees. And that 11 degrees is not too steep of an angle. I have previously tested 11 degrees without the rear sub-frame belly pan, and it did not give good results. The diffuser worked better at around 5-7 degrees. But with a flatter under body including a flat rear sub-frame, the air remained attached to the diffuser at a steeper angle. So the next thing I would like to test is at what angle would the air not remain attached with a rear belly pan in place. The angle of my diffuser kit is adjustable, so this would be valuable information to know.

 Since the rear belly pan proves to make a significant increase in the function of the diffuser, it will without a doubt become an option that I will be offering to my customers in the near future.

**Please take this with a grain of salt. My version of Solidworks or any CFD software does not give a 100% accurate visualization of what happens in real life. But at the same time it still gives you a good idea of what would happen. There are still many real life variables to take into consideration like any underbody bracing, any gaps that would create turbulance, etc. Also you can see the boundaries of my test area does not fully envelope the car. With a larger test area, the lines were not dense enough to show you what the diffuser was doing. So i decided to sacrifice the airflow around the top of the car so that you can better see what's happening around the diffuser. 

You can see that the shallow ceiling pushes down the rear wake, which also reduces the amount of air expansion after the rear diffuser. It is my hypothesis that a CFD test with a larger test area will show an even larger low pressure region under the car. That is something that we will find out after more testing when we start using more sophisticated software! Lots of cool stuff to look forward to in the future!

July 24th, 2015- Prototype Miata Diffuser Final Installation!

I made a trip to my powder coater to pick up the parts I dropped off a few days ago. Like always, he did a great job and I was very happy with the outcome! One of the parts was my NA Miata Rad Support cover, I was able to get it powder coated a blue to perfectly match the OEM Mazda Mariner Blue! If you're interested in ordering a Black or Blue NA Miata Rad Support cover, you can find the product link here.

 Of course the most important part of the batch was the prototype rear diffuser. I cut the bumper properly on my test car, a turbocharged 1997 Miata. The diffuser looks much better with the properly trimmed bumper. Since height and angle is adjustable, the part will fit if you have an uncut stock bumper. But it will be much more functional and better looking with the bumper cut.  Going to get my photographer friend to take some cool pictures of it mounted, then I'll be posting it on my E-Store within the next week or two!

If you have any questions or concerns about the diffuser or any of my parts, feel free to contact me at rtheorymotorsports@gmail.com.