JonBoy

The SRT-6 weighs roughly 3250 lbs in coupe form - that's from Chrysler's own documents.

Warren J. Dew

I'm not forgetting that at all. Understeer makes no difference to lap times for anyone who knows the car. So you have to turn the steering wheel a bit more - big whoop. You still get the same lateral grip.

The primary manifestation of brake fade is not decreased stopping power, but increased pedal effort. Again, less comfortable for the driver, but with a minimal effect on performance.

As for braking and lateral grip making up for power, it depends on how much power. If you race a Ferrari against my wife's Jetta, but we take out your engine and make you pedal with your legs, my money is on her.

[QUOTE]A Camaro SS beats up on an S2000 in a straight line.

ttb

i could careless about who won....

but i find the brake fade thing not correct...my understand is that with brake fade it's not just more effort...u can press the pedal as hard as you want, stopping power decreases. your pads/disc/fluid/hydrauls are too hot, can't do anything except let them cool.

re: understeer....i don't think it's as simple as just turning the wheel more. the balance of the car is not ideal for corner, you don't have enough grip...you'll have to slow down, not just turn more

but yea, more power = better times on almost all tracks. it's a lot easier t gain time on the straights than in the corners.

JonBoy

Do you race?

Understeer = less grip at the front than the rear, which means the car pushes. Turning more really doesn't do anything once you break traction - you have to either get the car to rotate magically or else let off the throttle so the tires can grip again... Heavy understeer will slow the car down.

The same lateral grip with the nose pointed the wrong way isn't conducive to fast lap times.

Brake fade does not mean increased pedal effort, unless you mean that you have to push the pedal down further. However, faded brakes mean that the brakes just don't stop nearly as well - the fluid gets too hot and the pads are too hot, so you can't apply enough hydraulic pressure (since the fluid is boiling) or else the pads are too hot to actually grip your rotor. You could put your foot hard to the floor on your brake and get next to no serious stopping power with heavily faded brakes.

I'll ignore the Ferrari/Jetta comment - it's irrelevant. The difference between foot power and a motor is so huge that it makes the argument silly.

Moderate power with excellent handling will generally match or beat excellent power with moderate handling ON A TIGHT COURSE LIKE SOW.

Nope, I haven't driven a Camaro at the track. I've driven similar cars and seen them driven, though. An S2000 will absolutely murder a STOCK Camaro in handling and cornering and braking - it's not even close, especially on a tight track.

I do believe a Camaro SS is significantly quicker than an S2000 - low 13s in the 1/4 are possible with a stock SS. The S2000 is lucky to get very high 13s with most drivers, so we're looking at a good 0.5s in the quarter, probably. The Boxster was only .7s behind the Crossfire...

Your statement was "On the other hand, this the old Boxster S - the same one that underperformed cars half its price." An Evo or STi are not comparable to the Boxster. They're completely different cars - my point was to make a fair comparison. A Mustang isn't even close to a Boxster S as an overall sports car - not even close.

The S2000 was comparable - I said as much - but that's about it. Generally, the S2000 was a bit behind the Boxster S, though. You said the Boxster S UNDERPERFORMED, which is not really true unless you're talking about a Corvette vert, which even then wasn't all that much better objectively and certainly not necessarily better subjectively.

Zoran

Anyone who thinks that you can combat understeer with more steering wheel input and brake fade with more pedal effort without losing time has never been on a race track.

pantyraider

Understeer doesn't slow you down?!?!? WTF are you talking about, understeer is the loss of traction in the front, when you try to turn the car it still plows ahead, that slows you down without a doubt.

I hate people who preach stuff when they have no idea what they're talking about

JonBoy

Easy, guys, easy. He didn't say he had a Ph. D. in racing. I don't even think he said he raced. He was just talking. Let's not be too harsh on him.

no_really

understeer is part of the handling characteristics of a car. Driving fast around a course asks you to use the handling characteristics to negotiate a corner. While it may not be as simple as turning the wheel farther, understeer is certainly not impossible to overcome. Changing your approach to a corner may be all that is needed, or braking harder to put more weight on the front before turn-in. Hell, it can be as minor as increasing front tire pressure (keeps the tire from rolling over onto the traction-less sidewall).

Basically, handling characteristics are what you manipulate when driving fast around a course. The mere presence of a specific factor is not a kiss of death, but merely a factor to be considered in the driving technique. Cars all drive different - the fastest cars don't all drive the same, nor do all "slow" cars. How a driver takes advantage of the tendencies of a given car makes the car fast or slow.

Comments in magazine articles like this need to be taken with a grain of salt. They are very often relative to the other cars in the comparison, and based on one person's perspective, rather than an absolute.

JonBoy

I agree - you have to adapt your driving to suit the car's handling characteristics (or else adapt the car's changeable parameters to match your driving style). However, I think most would agree that understeer is typically slower than oversteer.

With understeer, you can't use throttle (ie, speeding up) to change the attitude of the car (typically) - you have to brake/reduce speed to load up the front wheels enough to where the car will grip. With oversteer you can maintain speed and use the throttle to keep the car pointed where you want. That isn't the fastest way to drive but it's faster than having to hit your brakes to regain grip.

Warren J. Dew

Here's the thing: there are two places where friction affects braking. One is the friction between the pads and the rotor, which is where fade occurs. The other is the friction between the tires and the road, which isn't affected by fade.

In most modern cars, the tires are limiting at normal speeds. Basically, if you can get the ABS to activate, that means the pad/rotor friction is enough to overcome the tire/road friction and lock the wheels, and most current cars can do that up to a very high speed.

As fade kicks in, more and more effort is required to lock up the wheels. As long as you can lock the wheels, though, you're still reaching the limits of the tires, so you aren't really losing braking ability. Eventually, fade can affect the braking effort so much that you can't lock the wheels any more - it's only at that point that fade really affects braking performance, because you can no longer brake to the limit of the tires.

The question is, did this Crossfire get to the point during lapping that it couldn't use the full ability of its tires in braking? My guess is that it didn't, for several reasons. First, they were looking for the fastest single lap, so they could have allowed the brakes to cool after each lap. Second, Detroit cars are usually overboosted in every respect, making it easy to lock the brakes or activate ABS. It would take a lot of fade to overcome all that brake boost so that the tires were no longer limiting. Third, if the track had a lot of tight turns, speeds would have generally been low. The lower the speed, the less effort it takes to lock the brakes, and the less likely it is that fade will overcome the power brakes to the point that the tires become limiting. In this sense, tight turns would actually favor the Crossfire - the Boxster would have been better off with lots of high speed curves.