Emerging commercial and academic tools are regularly being applied to the
design of road and race cars, but there currently are no well-established
benchmark cases to study the aerodynamics of race car wings in ground effect.
In this paper we propose a new test case, with a relatively complex geometry,
supported by the availability of CAD model and experimental results. We refer
to the test case as the Imperial Front Wing, originally based on the front wing
and endplate design of the McLaren 17D race car. A comparison of different
resolutions of a high fidelity spectral/hp element simulation using
under-resolved DNS/implicit LES approach with fourth and fifth polynomial order
is presented. The results demonstrate good correlation to both the wall-bounded
streaklines obtained by oil flow visualization and experimental PIV results,
correctly predicting key characteristics of the time-averaged flow structures,
namely intensity, contours and locations. This study highlights the resolution
requirements in capturing salient flow features arising from this type of
challenging geometry, providing an interesting test case for both traditional
and emerging high-fidelity simulations.