“Bloody hell, they’ve done the Macarena” - Spectator During Acceleration Event at IMechE Formula Student. There’s a story behind the development of our upside-downey wing. At 2025’s Formula SAE-Australasia, due to a late change in our rear wing upper element, our low drag angle became illegal as it poked the trailing edge pass the rear of the bounding box. This meant we had to run in full drag trim for the event. However, a thought crossed my mind, could we flip the element forward and upside down instead. We didn’t do it at that comp in fear of breaching park ferme, but the seed was sown.
Development of our “Clamshell” Upside-downey Wing
Using the Gurney to our Advantage
Skip forward 2 months, and as I’m trying it out in CFD we’re also seeing Scuderia Ferrari HP debut their version of the #Macarena wing. Funny to see fundamentally similar concepts emerge for completely different reasons, though functionally ours is a bit different.
We use a gurney on our uppermost element, and so by inverting our upper two elements around the foremost pivot and sitting the gurney flush to the upper surface of the main plane we could generate a soft rolling vortex, effectively acting as a virtual leading edge. This “clamshell” arrangement then helps to downwash air at the trailing edge of the rear wing main plane, decreasing the wing’s drag by a further 10%, and overall vehicle drag by 5%. Still one of my favourite innovations we put on the car from Edith Cowan University Racing for Formula Student UK!
