Originally Posted by
Lundefaret
Verticality has nothing to do with frontal area, that is, as you say your selves, in an effort to direct air flow.
Moder LMP1 cars have as small a frontal area as the rules will allow.
If you ask Adrian Newey this is his first objective when designing a F1 car.
For a rally car, a lot of the parameters are given, because you start with a production car body, and you have an 1875mm width limit.
So, the smaller frontal area the road car body has, the less drag you can achieve (also a bit dependant on general body shape), and the more liberties you can take to design the aerodynamic "helpers."
So if you look at the Toyota it is quite a narrow car, you can see this on the width of the fender "boxes." You also see this on the Polo.
Fiesta seems a little bit wider, so also the i20, and the C3 the widest.
In regards to the C3 I think they have worked a lot on drag, on top of downforce, because they started with a bigger frontal area. And i suspect this is why they went in the direction of "normal" fender flares, vs the boxes.
They have also used a lot of time perfecting the air flow around and in the fender flares. They have "blown" the fender openings, very visual in the front with air coming in from behind the head lights.
In regards to the Toyota, they have gone max out towards downforce.
Ford and Hyundai is in the direction of the Toyota.
Will be very interesting if it will be a real performance difference. If it is any, this will be most evident in medium to long corners, in medium to high speed (100-200 kph), with an increasing factor depending on how straight you can drive the car.