So insurance rates on Honda Civics are unusually high. Why? Because kids are choosing to modify them for the purposes of turning them into race cars. The car is just over 100 Horsepower, yet it sounds louder than big trucks. That must mean that the car is fast right? Not really when you remember how loud a lawnmower is and how fast you could ride one down the freeway. Loud does not mean fast. Especially when you are making a “BMMMMMMMMMMMMM” sound going half a mile an hour sideways over a speed bump. Loud is just annoying. It also frustrates me to see all of the aftermarket body modifications that these people do to their cars. People forget that engineers at car manufacturers put a lot of thought into under car body clearances. Then you see all these rice rockets with broken bumpers and torn off side panels because aftermarket companies just have to give the people what they want. Of course, the people buying these products don’t think that roads are not flat racetracks and want parts that hug the ground like a racecare would have. As a result, imperfect roads tear apart these cars. Its something you just have to laugh at. I wonder how many paychecks are dangling from the front of these people’s car.

I am technical by nature, so now I have to tear apart the mechanical errors with these horrible feats of consumerism. Have you ever seen the wing on the back of a car? That wing is designed to work on the opposite premise of a commercial airline wing. The airplane wing is curved in such a way that the velocity of the air on top of the wing is higher than the velocity of the air at the bottom of the wing. This higher velocity air at the top of the wing creates a low pressure area above the wing (based on Bernoulli’s equations).

Since higher pressure fluids always moves to lower pressure fluids, the higher pressure region pushes the wing up, creating lift. So by putting an upside down wing on the back of the car, the theory is that more force will be applied to the back of the car giving it traction. Of course, a Honda Civic is a front wheel drive car and therefore the front wheels are the wheels that need the traction. So if this wing worked, it would actually take traction away from the driving tires. A significant amount of aerodynamic features would have to compensate for this, shoving the front down and balancing the forces. However, you rarely see significant aerodynamic features on the front of a car. And air dams, won’t cut it by themselves. Lets get even more technical. The equation governing lift is proportional to velocity squared. This means that lift increases in an exponential relationship. That means that velocity plays the dominant role in the equation. I will spare you the math and just say that at 65 mph, the forces will be similar to carrying a backback in your car. That isn’t worth the hundreds of dollars it costs to buy a wing. However, going 500 mph can lift a plane. So wings work at high velocities and do not at freeway speeds.

These rice rockets are based on race cars with state of the art technology. However, when applied to street cars, all practicallity is lost and all you have is a loud commuter car with thousands of dollars in dangling, scratched plastic hanging from it.