Ariel's 'fan car' explained

Simon Saunders talks PH round Ariel's curious suction-generated downforce system

"If you put more and more power through, you just end up spinning the wheels." Simon Saunders, inspirational boss of Ariel, is talking us through a major developmental hurdle at the firm. Namely, anytime they try and boost engine output, the car spins it away on launch.

The fact that the Atom is a flyweight at 520kg doesn't help, but what if you could artificially push the car into the ground at any speed?

This is the genius solution - revive the ground-effect 'fan-car' technology that got Gordon Murray's 1978 Brabham banned from the F1 grid. "This is kind of like the holy grail - downforce when you're stationary," Saunders says.

We ran across Saunders and the so-called Aero-P at the Low Carbon Vehicle Show at Millbrook, Bedfordshire, of all places, and were instantly drawn to it. To look at it you'd think Ariel had attempted a road-going Atom hovercraft, which actually doesn't sound quite so barmy now the Nomad has taken the brand off-road. In this instance a lightweight underfloor, complete with flexible rubbery skirts, protrudes from the car and contains two fans, one at the front, one at the rear. Aircraft-style 'No Step' signs remind you this ain't structural.

We ask Saunders how big these fans are, expecting something in the order of a couple of adapted ceiling fans under there. 100mm, he says. We must've looked sceptical, because he offers to activate the launch sequence. "Stand back," he says. We wonder why for the fraction of second it takes for the fans to spin up, before howling like an industrial Dyson Airblade and blasting air sucked from below through a Y-shaped duct just behind the seats. The force is such the Atom physically hunkers to the floor. It's phenomenal to see.

This is very much in the developmental stage but Saunders is excited about the other benefits it could offer. Like taking over the job of the rear wing, which has been removed on this concept car.

"We do an aerofoil package that increases drag by 15 per cent, so in performance terms it slows you down. And they don't work until you're doing 60-70mph. By removing them you've got a faster, more efficient car," he says. Even with these generic, electric-powered 100mm fans, Saunders estimates he gets three times the downforce his current aero package offers. That not only helps in corners, but also under braking. "You hit the brakes and it deploys the skirts and the fans, and suddenly your stopping distance has markedly improved," he says.

Deploy is a key word here because you don't want the skirts scraping the ground all the time. The head-scratcher for Saunders is how to fold away the ground-effect technology in normal use and then activate it quickly, for example under hard braking, or when the G-sensors say so. Or when you're about to utilize whatever crazy power Saunders has managed to extract above the 310hp of the supercharged version of the Honda-powered Atom.

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