Measure the drag coefficient of your car

Step 1 Equipment

You will need the following equipment:

• a vehicle (and someone with a driver's license)
• a clock or stopwatch
• a pen and paper (and someone other than the driver to record data)
• a flashlight (driving at night avoids traffic)
• a long stretch of flat road with little traffic or wind
• Excel or another spreadsheet application. I prefer OpenOffice Calc because I like to support open source software, but its Solver function does not handle non-linear systems (yet) so you'll have adjust input variables manually by an iterative process to fit your model to the data (it's not too hard).
• The spreadsheet I created to analyze the results. Download here: Drag_Coefficient.xls