(BroBible.com)
Monday, October 19, 2015
A Good Read If You Got A Few Minutes
The Lost Art of Making a Driver's Car
Anyway, this brings me to my final, sort of related, point. Some carmakers have gotten so lazy when designing sports cars that most of their performance-inducing bits are actually dialed in by software engineers instead of good-old chassis engineers. Let me explain, but you can probably try this in almost any (not all) modern sports car that allows you to completely switch off the ESP and have a game of “catch the oversteer before you crash.”
Instead of developing a car with near-perfect weight distribution and a perfect suspension setup, some carmakers leave those trivial details to be sorted out via stuff like electronically controlled suspension, multiple-steps stability control systems or clever differentials. That becomes hugely apparent when testing a car's limits with all the systems on and then with them off, since the latter will make you feel like you're driving an overpowered children kart instead of the same car, but less friendly at the limit.
This is why you never see stuff like ESP or magnetorheological dampers in circuit racing, since race cars are usually left in the driver's hands only after some very good chassis engineers and/or aerodynamicists have dialed in the right amount of understeer/oversteer and weight distribution. How about trying something similar to all of the world's sports cars, instead of fixing bad chassis design with electronics? It's not like it hasn't been done before. Leave all the assist systems on board, but allow me to completely switch them off. Most of all, make sure the car's handling doesn't depend on them to provide driving thrills, that's all I ask.
(AutoEvolution.com)
Anyway, this brings me to my final, sort of related, point. Some carmakers have gotten so lazy when designing sports cars that most of their performance-inducing bits are actually dialed in by software engineers instead of good-old chassis engineers. Let me explain, but you can probably try this in almost any (not all) modern sports car that allows you to completely switch off the ESP and have a game of “catch the oversteer before you crash.”
Instead of developing a car with near-perfect weight distribution and a perfect suspension setup, some carmakers leave those trivial details to be sorted out via stuff like electronically controlled suspension, multiple-steps stability control systems or clever differentials. That becomes hugely apparent when testing a car's limits with all the systems on and then with them off, since the latter will make you feel like you're driving an overpowered children kart instead of the same car, but less friendly at the limit.
This is why you never see stuff like ESP or magnetorheological dampers in circuit racing, since race cars are usually left in the driver's hands only after some very good chassis engineers and/or aerodynamicists have dialed in the right amount of understeer/oversteer and weight distribution. How about trying something similar to all of the world's sports cars, instead of fixing bad chassis design with electronics? It's not like it hasn't been done before. Leave all the assist systems on board, but allow me to completely switch them off. Most of all, make sure the car's handling doesn't depend on them to provide driving thrills, that's all I ask.
(AutoEvolution.com)
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