Body kits are great for your car’s looks. They enhance the visual appeal and set your car apart. You can choose kits that reflect your individual style and make a personal style statement. That all is well known and it’s just great. It makes buying and installing body kits great fun.
However they can do more than just enhance the visual appeal of your car. They serve to protect your car from minor dents and scratches and more important they also improve the aerodynamics of your car.
There are two aspects of improving the aerodynamics. The first is reducing the drag force that your car experiences. This can be done by making the car’s profile more aerodynamically efficient. This is tough to describe in detail but a seamless shape that increases in size gradually and then tapers off gradually is more aerodynamically efficient. You will have noticed an ultra high performance car look like aero-plane fuselage. In aerodynamic body kits the front and rear bumpers will be designed to improve the aerodynamics.
The second aspect of improving the aerodynamics is to increase the down force. A higher down force makes the car hug the road better, makes the ride more stable and gives the car better traction. Spoilers and wings are components that help increase the down force.
It should be mentioned here that the benefits of the improved aerodynamics from body kits are relatively minor and show up only on high speeds. Also for the improvement in aerodynamics to come through the fitting of the body kits has to be done very well. A slight error in fitting could take away from an improved car performance and in fact it can make it worse.
Body kits do increase the car weight and that adversely affects the cars performance. An increase in weight means the engine has a larger mass to propel forward and key performance indicators such as power to weight ratio will go down. However it may be possible to remove some stock components to compensate to an extent. Also you can opt for light weight carbon fiber body kits to minimize the increase in weight.
