Posted on February 7, 2017
Local Man Discovers the Nissan Juke is Faster With the Hood Up
Bosco Dardanelli owns a 2016 Nissan Juke. He’s also an aerodynamics buff who built his own homemade wind tunnel in his side yard. “It’s basically a 350 Chevy engine hooked up to a DC-6 propeller,” he explains.
Using the wind tunnel, Dardanelli discovered the compact Juke would be faster around a race course with the hood propped open.
“Raising the hood drops the Juke’s .35 drag coefficient to .31,” he claimed. “The reason is simple; it’s Bernoulli’s Principle of fluid dynamics in which a decrease in air pressure creates…” (He actually kept talking but at that point we tuned out.)
It goes without saying that driving a vehicle with the hood up creates sightline issues. “You could cut a hole in the hood to look through,” Dardanelli mused, “but then you’d see an increase in incompressible flows, which occurs when the flow of…”