Your joking right?
Not really.
Drag is not caused by pushing of the air around the object in a non-rotational way (flow lines not forming circles). Drag is caused by depositing some of the flow kinetic energy into rotational flow. If no circulations are created, the object will leave the airflow behind it undisturbed from how it was before it - that means no energy was lost or gained, or in other words, no drag no matter how large your frontal area is.
Large frontal area means one needs to push more air around the plane, but once you are in a steady state, no more energy is required. Accelerating will require more kinetic energy in the flow around the plane, so there is energy input here, but in air (as opposed to lets say, water) this accelerating resistance is small - of the order of the acceleration times the mass of air in the volume of the object. That would be very small in air since the air density is so much smaller than the average plane mass density. But even this is more of a volume thing than just frontal area.
The SHAPE as opposed to the area of the front has a lot to do with drag. This is what causes the flow to break into part laminar, part turbulence and part ordered rotational flow. What happens at the trailing edge often has a much larger impact on the drag than what happens at the front. In the front, there will always be built a pressure-front that will divert most of the air around the body and into large scale flow, where dissipation is minimal. On the trailing edge, there is no more the barrier of the solid object. Large scale disconnected flow from above and below (or sides) of the object suddenly meet and breaks into rotational flow in all scales - turbulent wake. This is the largest source of drag, assuming the object surface itself is not full of irregularities to produce small scale turbulence while the air is flowing across.
People tend to think that radial planes are less aerodynamically efficient than inlines, because they have a larger frontal cross-section. The real reason is that radials have an aerodynamic inefficient SHAPE to their front because they need to get the air into the engine to cool it, instead of diverting the flow around the body. Inline engines do not need to do that, but instead have to stick a radiator into the airflow that produce a lot of drag. It is easier to design an aerodynamic efficient radiator that will give some of the lost energy back by heating and accelerating the air out of the radiator than it is to control the flow of air around an engine and out through the fuselage to get the same effect. Good design of the engine cowling can dramatically improve the situation for radials. The XP-47J is such an example and is claimed to break the 500 mph. It was almost 40 mph faster than a regular jug at the same engine power (military). The biggest difference is a redesigned cowling. The total frontal area could not have changed much as it is limited by the size of the radial engine.
