Handling

Preface

As most of you might heard, great-handling cars often possess the following features:

mid-engined
4-wheel-drive, or at least RWD
front to rear weight distribution close to 50/50
low center of gravity
lightweight
a rigid chassis
sufficient downforce, or at least minimum aerodynamic lift.
preferably double-wishbones suspensions.

But I bet few of you know the actual theories behind them. For many years, I've heard many magazine writers said misleading rubbish like "Mid-engined helps achieving 50/50 weight distribution, hence the car is more stable." This is of course incorrect. Therefore I will explain the correct theories in this Chapter.

Introduction

Handling is perhaps the most complicated yet most interesting aspect of cars. To optimize handling, engineers have to involve many areas - chassis, suspensions, weight distribution, transmission system, steering, tyres and aerodynamics. On the other hand, they have to compromise with other requirements about packaging, cost and practicality. Even though the design seems perfect, the car has to be tested extensively on different kinds of roads and weather, under different driving style, then progressively tune to deliver desirable result.

What is handling ? Well, let me ask you in this way, how do we comment a car's handling as good ?

In my opinion, good handling means the combination of two things :

1) High cornering speed - that means the car generates a lot of grip in corner, and use the grip optimally such that it can corner at very high g-force. However, this does not equals to Car and Driver's skidpad test result. We need high cornering speed under dynamic conditions, no matter under braking or acceleration, the car is changing direction or not, in various kind of corners and surfaces, not only the tidy 300-foot test ground.

2) Adequate steering - It is not necessarily "neutral", because sometimes we need oversteer and understeer. The steering should be responsive, well weighted and have sufficient feedback.

Then we are going to explore in these 2 directions.

Continue ...