I believe most of the papers back up their work with real life testing. The Japanese one I pointed to seemed to imply they do the same with weights and strain gauges.
Simulation techniques just allow you to get rid of chaff before honing in on the real good stuff which requires real life chassis/dyno/testing. We did a fair amount of simulation at Loughborough which was shown to be accurate during a week of testing at MIRA. Chassis, aero and powertrain.
But in essence I agree, you can't do cfd without windtunnel testing (not yet anyway), you can do windtunnel testing without cfd, but cfd will save you operating costs and time. All simulation is the same, you put crap in you get crap out.
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