perhaps cars should come with instructions on how they’re meant to be driven…
March 2nd, 2006Every time we hear someone complain that their car understeers, we think to ourselves “they’re probably not driving it the way it was designed to be driven.”
As we said before in this piece, while some cars like a tidy, textbook technique, those with trick differentials only come alive when tossed into a corner and slid most of the way back out.
It’s a bit of a trend that’s sweeping the industry because it makes for great magazine cover shots but I question if it makes the car less enjoyable 99.9% of the time, for 99.9% of owners who don’t know as much as carcounsel |HID| readers.
Autocar’s Andrew Frankel agrees:
Try as I might, I just couldn’t get into the groove with it. I tried guiding it across the Spanish landscape as I would a Boxster S, but found myself missing apexes, turning in to corners too late, constantly having to correct my position on the road. Had a handy racetrack not presented itself, I might still believe the fault lay with the car rather than me. But on the circuit I discovered that trying to flow with the car and steering it smoothly was about as pointless as wearing sunglasses in bed. It would simply magnify all the problems found on the road, understeering stubbornly and leaving you wondering where on earth BMW went wrong. In fact, all it really needed was a different approach: a brutal approach. Instead of throttling back to stop the nose peeling away from a corner, you do the reverse and use judicious amounts of throttle to drive through the understeer, kicking the tail wide and into one of those drifting powerslides that look several times more heroic than they actually are. Treated like this, and once I’d convinced myself that the differential would allow insane slip angles without actually letting the car spin, it drove in much the same way you feel that TVRs should but all too rarely do. Informed and enthused by my discovery, I removed the Z4M from the track and applied what I had learned in diluted form to the medium of the public road. And do you know what? The Z4M transformed in my head from a borderline disaster to what it always promised to be:a seriously good-fun roadster. Even though it and the Boxster S take diametrically opposed routes to the provision of driving pleasure, this does not mean one is necessarily right and the other inevitably wrong. Indeed, if you get your thrills from the delight of feeling the back of the car move and your reassurance from the knowledge that the car has enough basic agility and suspension sophistication to allow you to round it up with ease, then the Z4M driven with the right measure of controlled savagery provides a kind of pleasure the Boxster S driver will never know. But I might get weary of its relentless animalistic nature. Fun though the Z4M can be on the right road or track, this is no substitute for the sensitivity, precision and feel imparted so freely by the Boxster S. However and wherever you drive it, you will never be as at one with the Z4M as you will in a Boxster S.
(Click here) for a previous post on the Z4 M).