Turbo or Fan racing Wheel caps? Pic's
 

In the 80's and into the early 90's you would see these on most of the race cars form GT to prototype. Why are they not used anymore? There had to be a benefit from them. Were they outlawed. Does anyone know where you could get some made? They look cool.

Those TransAm Audis are some of my favorite racecars.

Solid disc wheels are illegal in the sanctioning bodys I know of.

One problem with those was that rather than pumping air from the outside and into the rotors you could reverse the fan and use them to pump air out from under the car. Pumping air out from under the car creates downforce...

I also reckon that if you're pumping air into the brake rotors from the front of the wheels that air still has to come back out somewhere, most likely reversing direction and exiting around the tire. It's probably not as efficient aero wise as a traditional brake cooling duct. It could also add to the higher pressure area inside the wheel wells; exaceberating the lift problem there.

My best guesses anyway.

I didn't think that it was a solid disk wheel, more of an attachment to the existing wheel. If you look at some of the pic's of the 787b and allot of the 962's they all used them. Almost look's like the new Ferrari F1 car is useing them for the rear, or something similar.

as damon already pointed out...yes they have been banned by many sanc. bodys. and yes they would pump air out of the wheel. it was a attempt to clean up the aero around the wheels and also increase the GA of the car. today many race cars simply run block off pannels on the inside of the wheel.

If anyone noticed the F1 races last year there were a few cars running partial wheel blanks for some of the races(gotta love open rule books:)

I have a set of those wheels to fit a 2nd gen made by Volks wheels.
They are white in color and have racing beat written on them.

Yes there are fan vanes in there but the face of the wheel is still a solid disk.

This style came in two different ways. Some companies had wheels with built in fan vanes, and other wheel companies had removable outer fans. CCW was going to make carbon wheel fans for their wheels before they were banned. Guess it wouldn't be pretty as a spectator to get hit by one of those from a car at speed.

-Aaron

Got any pictures or links to show this? Curious about this one...

-Aaron

Here you go.