Negative lift is the opposite of the lift used by planes to fly, it forces an object down rather than up (Yager). Negative lift is created by front and rear wings on race cars and by ground effects and spoilers on the average sports car. Most negative lift is used to fight inertia as a car rounds a turn. Inertia is the tendency of an object to remain in the same state of motion (Murphy 77). When a car rounds a turn at high speeds it often needs more force than it's weight to resist the car's tendency to keep traveling straight. The increased downforce puts more weight on the tires helping the tires grip the …show more content…
Using the top speed of 150mph which is maintained by keeping the gas pedal to the floor using all the horsepower we can determine how much horsepower is used to fight air resistance and how much is used to fight rolling friction and the slight internal friction (Beckman). A late model Corvette has a Cd of about 0.30 and frontal area of about 20 square feet (Beckman). Going through all the necessary conversions and math which is complicated because of converting to and from metric and force into horsepower you determine 145hp is used to balance drag and 95hp is used to balance the rolling resistance and internal friction (Beckman). This explains why fast cars have so much horsepower. As speed increases so does the drag and more horsepower is needed to compensate for