Enlarge / OVC's Shelby Mustang recreations are accurate enough to be granted official papers to compete in historic racing. (credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle)

To Shelby Mustang fans, the Original Venice Crew (OVC) is the stuff of legends. This was the actual team that designed and built the original GT350s, Cobras, Daytona Coupes, and GT40s that introduced Carroll Shelby's name to the masses. Today, OVC builds modern Mustang recreations so accurate that one was approved for last year's Le Mans Classic, which celebrated 100 years of the world's most famous endurance race.

But OVC also offers updated versions of those classics, bringing to life ideas that bounced around the shop back in the day but that Shelby never built in series production. Want a 1965 GT350 with independent rear suspension? OVC can do that, after dialing in a design that Ford originally believed would be too expensive as a replacement for the first-gen Mustang's solid rear axle.

These projects don't quite fit under the "restomod" umbrella, instead falling more along the lines of the ideas that OVC founder and boss Jim Marietta remembers from his days back at 1042 Princeton Drive . Think fender flares cut by hand rather than being machined or updated fiberglass front fascias to provide additional airflow.

Enlarge / Experiments with paper airplanes revealed new aerodynamic effects that enhance our current understanding of flight stability. (credit: RUNSTUDIO/Getty Images)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2022, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: new insights into the aerodynamics of paper airplanes reveal the key to smooth gliding.

Drop a flat piece of paper and it will flutter and tumble through the air as it falls, but a well-fashioned paper airplane will glide smoothly. Yet these seemingly simple structures involve surprisingly complex aerodynamics. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences conducted a series of experiments involving paper airplanes to explore this transition and develop a mathematical model to predict flight stability, according to a March paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

“The study started with simple curiosity about what makes a good paper airplane and specifically what is needed for smooth gliding," said co-author Leif Ristroph . "Answering such basic questions ended up being far from child’s play. We discovered that the aerodynamics of how paper airplanes keep level flight is really very different from the stability of conventional airplanes.”

Enlarge / A Mazda RT-24P emerges from the Catesby Tunnel. (credit: Multimatic)

A tip of the hat to the editor over at Dailysportscar this morning for reminding me of one of the cooler bits of industrial repurposing in the automotive world. It's a Victorian railway tunnel in England that saw its last train in 1966 but is now entering its second life as an advanced aerodynamics test facility and an interesting alternative to a wind tunnel.

The Catesby Tunnel can be found in Northamptonshire, but more importantly it's in the heart of what's sometimes called the UK's motorsport valley because of the concentration of Formula 1 teams—Mercedes, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, and Red Bull—and their suppliers. Originally built in 1897, it was part of the Great Central Line and connected London with the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield.

But the UK's train network was devastated in 1963 by the Beeching cuts , where 3,000 miles of railway were torn up, market towns and villages were cut off from the rail network, and the nation—like so many others—started becoming much more car-centric. Ironic, then, that the tunnel is, too, more than 50 years later, thanks to a company called Aero Research Partners.

Enlarge / Charles Leclerc of Monaco driving the (16) Ferrari F1-75 on track during the F1 Grand Prix of Azerbaijan at Baku City Circuit on June 12, 2022, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

The sport of Formula 1 racing went through a massive change at the beginning of this season as it introduced new cars that harness aerodynamic ground effects to push them down onto the track. The aerodynamic approach was last used in F1 in the late 1970s and early 1980s before being banned on safety grounds.

One issue, then, that perhaps should have been anticipated this time was a condition called porpoising, where the cars oscillate vertically at a rather high frequency while traveling at high speed, violently shaking the driver in the process. As this season has progressed, the Grand Prix Drivers' Association has become more and more vocal about the potential health risk this poses for these athletes. And on Thursday, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (or FIA, the sport's governing body) announced it has a plan to do something about it.

What’s porpoising?

As the air travels underneath the body of an F1 car, it expands as it reaches the venturis at the rear of the car. The faster the car goes, the more downforce it generates via this expansion, until at a certain point the airflow detaches from the floor and stalls. This wipes out all the downforce immediately, and without that effect sucking the car to the ground, it raises up on its suspension.