Gurney Flap - History

History

The original application, by automobile racing icon Dan Gurney, was a right-angle piece of sheet metal, rigidly fixed to the top trailing edge of the rear wing on his open wheel racing cars of the early 1970s. The device was installed pointing upwards to increase downforce generated by the wing, improving traction. He field tested it and found it allowed a car to negotiate turns at higher speed, while also achieving higher speed in the straight sections of the track.

The first application of the flap was in 1971, after Gurney retired from driving and began managing his own racing team full-time. His driver, Bobby Unser, had been testing a new Gurney designed car at Phoenix International Raceway, and was unhappy with the car's performance on the track. Gurney needed to do something to restore his driver's confidence before the race, and recalled experiments conducted in the 1950s by certain racing teams with spoilers affixed to the rear of the bodywork to cancel lift. (At that level of development, the spoilers were not thought of as potential performance enhancers—merely devices to cancel out destabilizing and potentially deadly aerodynamic lift.) Gurney decided to try adding a "spoiler" to the trailing edge of the rear wing. The device was fabricated and fitted in under an hour, but Unser's test laps with the modified wing turned in equally poor times. When Unser was able to speak to Gurney in confidence, he disclosed that the lap times with the new wing were slowed because it was now producing so much downforce that the car was understeering. All that was needed was to balance this by adding additional downforce in front.

Unser realized the value of this breakthrough immediately and wanted to conceal it from the competition, including his brother Al. Not wanting to call attention to the devices, Gurney left them out in the open. To conceal his true intent, Gurney deceived inquisitive competitors by telling them the blunted trailing edge was intended to prevent injury and damage when pushing the car by hand. Some copied the design, and some of them even “improved” it by pointing the flap downwards, which actually hurt performance.

Gurney was able to use the device in racing for several years before its true purpose became known. Later, he discussed his ideas with aerodynamicist and wing designer Bob Liebeck of Douglas Aircraft Company. Liebeck tested the device, which he later named the “Gurney flap,” and confirmed Gurney’s field test results using a 1.25% chord flap on a Newman symmetric airfoil. His 1976 AIAA paper (76-406) “On the design of subsonic airfoils for high lift” introduced the concept to the aerodynamics community. The Gurney flap is the first aerodynamic development made in automobile racing that has been transferred to aircraft engineering.

Gurney assigned his patent rights to Douglas Aircraft, but the device was not patentable, since it was substantially similar to a movable microflap patented by E.F. Zaparka in 1931, ten days before Gurney was born. Similar devices were also tested by Gruschwitz and Schrenk and presented in Berlin in 1932.