Anything without a laminar wing is probably not going to be as fast as a race Mustang.
the wing on the spitfires was most definately a wind designed for altitude and not lots of low level work, but hmmmm a high power alison or merlin in a cleaned up Yak.... that would be cool... just reshape the airfoil because the standard airfoil isnt so hot at high speeds.. ( im sure sherm could help out here with info like that if he is snooping around here)
race fan, photographer with more cameras than a camera store
Anything without a laminar wing is probably not going to be as fast as a race Mustang.
I didn't miss anything. Saying the Spit would never be as fast of a racer as a Mustang is correct, and it's largely due to the fact that the Mustang has much less drag, which is also due to it's laminar flow wing. Bearcats and Seafurys are able to overcome their aerodynamic disadvantages to the Mustang by virtue of having larger, more powerful engines. That can't be done with a Spit.
How much fuel the Mustang could carry has nothing to do with drag. The Spit's eliptical wing has much more area, and the fact that it's a non-laminal flow design means that it creates far more drag than the Mustang's wing. I stand by my statement that the Spit would never be as fast of a racer as the Mustang.
I made some drawings awhile back of a modified Yak with a mouse motor in it. (Well, as much as you can draw that) But the whole idea was to design a Yak totally for air racing. It turned out pretty cool. If you could have a strong merlin, which should just about bolt right in. And all the usual mods, you might not even have to clip the wings. It should go faster than Czech Mate, and possibly be a relatively cheap race winner!
I'll see if I can find those drawings and post them.
Race 29
Full throttle till you see God, then turn left!
The Bear example is a poor one. It's wing has little to nothing to do with it's speed. Bear is fast because of brute power, nothing less, nothing more. A spit would be limited by the amount of power that can be squeezed from an inline, and I still think it's wing would hinder speed as compared to that of the Mustang's.
Didn't Rare Bear do what; 490 last year on a hybrid stock motor? I know it was WAY faster than Pardue's Bearcat. Rare Bear has a lot going for it other than just raw power (and its got lots of that.)
A Spitfire F.XIV running a Griffon 65 was rated at "over 450 mph" in the Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War Two. The same publication has the P51 listed at 445. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a Spitfire is quite a bit lighter than a P51 as well. With some clean up and mods (like a boil off system) I think a Spitfire could very well be a contender. With the radiators removed from under the wings, a Spitfire becomes a very clean aircraft. Just looking at the model of the Sea Fury and the several Spitfires hanging above me as I type, I can't help but notice that the shape of the wings are pretty similar between the two. The profile might not be the same, but the basic shape of the wing looks similar. I'm no expert here, but if a Spitfire were really cleaned up (to the same degree as Strega, Voodoo, ect) I think it would be a contender with the same HP (or more since the later versions of both the Spitfires and the Seafires came with the Griffons anyway.) Heck, didn't Stiletto prove that it was able to go very fast with less power? A Spitfire is not a draggy airplane like a Hawker Hurricane.
Will