Originally posted by Starfire
How fast are you going, anyway? Area ruling is only helpful for aircraft in the highly compressible regime, i.e. transonic. The whole idea of area-ruling is to reduce the transonic drag rise, and delay the drag-divergence mach number. By their very nature, propeller aircraft can't usually get up to this level.
Starfire,
I fell into a trap and you caught me. Most guys call the popular fuse shape "Area Rule". What I should have said was "laminar" where the portion of the fuse aft of the wing's TE is pinched slightly (concave).
To answer your question, the current record for Q40 is 0:59: and change for a 2.5 mile course. If you do the math, this works out to over 150 mph. But you must remember that because the course is ten laps around three pylons, the actual distance traveled will be considerably longer than that because of the radius of each turn around a pylon.
Generally speaking, Quickie 500 racers are around 160 mph, Q40s are around 180 mph and F3D (FAI) racers can top 200 mph.