Frontal Square Footage of the 370Z
 

I'm trying to figure out how the frontal sqare footage of a car (in this case the 370Z) is calculated. Does the "cd" figure into the formula? Is there a forumla for this?

Road and Track estimates it to be 23.7 sq. ft..

you get this figure from a projection of the car's forward facing surfaces onto a 2 dimensional plane, then integrating the area. Hard to do without a CAD drawing (and a computer), as any photograph would introduce "perspective" into the geometry that would skew any scaled measurement from a "2D" photo.

The drag coefficient often uses frontal area as a scale factor:

Cd = total drag force/ reference area/ q

So, if you know the total drag force in pounds at a given velocity (q), you could then calculate the reference area. Cd ~ .29