Ok you lost me there... Are you talking about building a custom car or manufacturing a line of cars lol

Apologies admittedly for a curve ball on that last post.

It's just a thoroughly ingrained habit with me to think about how to make the next 100,000 just much as making the next 1. It's my job in a very different field, actually. Please feel free to dismiss it as idle daydreaming!

Best,
MAP

Hi Folks,

I'm starting to suspect my post had the effect of halting further thread progress, and this absolutely wasn't my intention. I'll just add this point to my penultimate post and then invite everyone to carry on: as to steering neutrality, if an engine/tranny/suspension rear assembly can be made on a FWD line and per FWD methods, then with admittedly added cost, the steering function could be conserved. If so, then yaw dampening could be made constant irrespective of speed within reasonable limits, and it could be programmed to provide a direct dampening effect as well. The result would be highly predictable and stable handling with a tendency toward oversteer at low speeds, and understeer at high speeds. Maybe +/- 5 deg of rear-steer is all that's needed.

Again, please ignore and my apologies if this is unwanted input; I don't want to detract in the slightest from Mark's amazing work described in this thread.

Best,
MAP

Porsche is doing this already. Porsche credits the active rear steering in the 991 GT3 with ~ 15s improvement in 'Ring time. The development of the system though is quite pricey.... :G-Dub:

IMO GM is very good at finding simple, clever, low-cost solutions to complex problems. Best - MAP

At 130+ large, it ought to do more than that. You should be able to toss your W-2s in that sucker and come back the next morning and find a refund check, even if you didn't have one coming.

If you want 63% rear weight bias he could just buy my Lotus 2 11..... Just be real mindful that the weight wants to lead the car... i.e., don't do a big throttle lift IN a corner... LOL

Everything has a trade off.

Generally speaking, when the center of thrust is forward of the center of mass, we have dynamic stability under forward acceleration. Under braking, the reverse is true. The former correlates more closely to a rear-heavy design, and the latter front-heavy. If accelerating while cornering, it does get more complex as you say.

Thx,
MAP

PS: I do hope we hear from Mark again soon. Please feel free to ignore all my posts about a rear-engine design if I crossed into a corporate no-talk zone.

Hellfire in CARS Inc 2015 Calendar
 

Hellfire, as a work in progress, is featured in the 2015 CARS Inc. calendar for the month of February.

http://i1158.photobucket.com/albums/...V/DSC_3274.jpg

The conundrum we always face with these technical interchanges is that only discussions within a broad public-domain definition can be occur. As soon as we get into something that's truly technically intriguing, IP corporate concerns shut down any further discourse. (The dark side of engineering that they never told us about at MIT.)

If I'm right about this, then we won't be hearing back from Mark in this thread again. Of course, I hope I'm wrong about this.

Best,
MAP