Newsflash: Front Wheel Drive is rubbish!

[geckoGT]

Originally Posted by BA Falcon

Someone please close this thread - The OP is a borderline troll and this thread is merely a FWD bashing session.

Best post so far!

[388cube_edxr8]

Originally Posted by geckoGT

The fact that you say "The speedo shot from 100 to 140 instantly", means that you were not backing off the throttle when you hit the water. If you had backed of the throttle, the car would be slowing. You still had power on, there is no other logical explanation. When a car has its rolling wheels go from low resistance of a reasonably dry road to the high resistance of a large volume of water, the car velocity slows and the rotation speed of the wheels slow, not accelerate.

I am also tipping that if you were having control problems in an area of high ground water, you probably should not be messing around reading speedos and shifting to neutral. Perhaps 100 may have been a bit too quick for large amounts of water on the road, what do you think?

By the way, a list of car ownership that long, you must be 120 years old.

Borrowed, test drives, company cars, etc.

And I didn't lift off the throttle as soon as I hit the water, I lifted after I heard the engine rev up and glanced at the wildly optimistic speedo. You don't need to give a physics lesson to a nutty professor mate.

Flappist - if you feel the need to launch personal attacks on me for whatever reason, may I kindly request that you PM them to me so that I can ignore them and they don't fill the thread with useless crap.

BA Falcon - if you don't like it don't read it ya clown. This was intended to be a civilized debate between enthusiasts. I will concede that the thread was poorly titled and has degraded a little since the start, but seriously, ace it up a bit mate.

[Al...]

How about we all put our differences aside and go have a beer

[Rev28K]

Back to the original idea in the original post.

I can't see it happening with a transverse iron block straight 6.

I'd like to see the block as some of the following:
a stressed member
a flat "boxer" engine
a smaller capacity high boost engine

it would have to be good handling straight off the bat. Porsche & Alpine spent years fiddling with tricky layouts to get them right. Get it wrong and the car would risk being labelled "a Corvair for the noughties" (yup, I know that the Corvairs were rear engined). Shudders at thought of big, heavy Boss 290 in mid/rear of normal car (& they are done in GT40 replicas & Ford GT's).

If it was a transverse mid engine there are meant to be some nasty torque multiplication factors when you get off and on the throttle and you've still got to have space to hang a transmission of the side.

If you are running a front mounted radiator you'd need to have somewhere for the hot air to go before it hits the (presumably) front mounted luggage space.

The back tyres might want to be wider (to ease the strain on the DSC) and that's going to take up a bit more of your space between the rear hubs.

The weight of the front mounted fuel tank and any luggage would vary a bit, but a smart stability control system might be able to fiddle things to help it. Some 911s have reputations for understeering under brakes in the wet.

Gicotollo's had Alfa Sprint shells with mid-mounted Alfa V6's then Holden V8's in them. But it was a lot of work, including new suspension arms.

[Ghiadude]

Originally Posted by Al...

How about we all put our differences aside and go have a beer

As long as we drive to the pub in an awd car!
(best of both worlds?)

[geckoGT]

Originally Posted by 388cube_edxr8

And I didn't lift off the throttle as soon as I hit the water, I lifted after I heard the engine rev up and glanced at the wildly optimistic speedo. You don't need to give a physics lesson to a nutty professor mate.

So you continued to drive at 100 km/h, power on at a large body of water, wonder where the problem is?

This incident, I am sorry to say is not the shortfall of the drivetrain layout, just the method of control delivery behind the wheel.

As for nutty professor, why do you have so much trouble understanding vehicle dynamics?

[Dave_au]

Originally Posted by Ghiadude

As long as we drive to the pub in an awd car!
(best of both worlds?)

Or just drive a front wheel drive in reverse.

[388cube_edxr8]

Originally Posted by Dave_au

Or just drive a front wheel drive in reverse.

I've done that on a paddock, and that was bloody awesome

[Raptor]

I've received enough reported posts warnings from this thread to call it a day.

Now closed. It's run it's course.