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It’s always amazed me how profoundly a slight tweak here or there can change the composure of a car as it goes down the road or the confidence a driver feels behind the wheel.

Many times it comes down to a change of bushing, a tighter damper, or a change in final drive ratio, not a lower ride height or bigger wheels.

The details can make your head spin and its not just in high performance cars. ‘07 Mazda 3s get relocated tie rods and rear trailing arm mounts for even quicker turn in response, the difference in body control and response in an X5 sport package comes from different front shocks and springs…

This passage from 4Car is what got me thinking along these lines…

This is a much better suspension set-up than the GT HDi 110’s, because it’s less jittery over broken surfaces yet handles with more enthusiasm. It’s surprising what a difference stiffer rear bushes for the front suspension’s wishbones, a rear torsion beam stiffened by 12.5% and recalibrated dampers can make.

People tend to overcomplicate cars – in the end most of what’s true is true because you can’t break the laws of physics.

Case in point: BMW and Subaru SUVs handle better because the engineers insist on a low engine placement (the Porsche Cayenne has a high mounted engine so has to resort to a complicated suspension to regain lost ground). And the Jaguar XK rides handles and accelerates better than competitors because it is 400 lbs lighter than the Mercedes SL 550 and 500 lbs lighter than BMW 6-Series.

Maybe marketers and designers should be required to take high school physics.

Remember when BMW’s handled AND rode well?

That was before the stylists insisted the wheels had to be enormous to look proportional to the car.

The result:

The Z4 coupe, as with the roadster, can be a chore to commute in, however, owing to heavy steering and a twitchy tendency to be pulled around by pavement troughs and seams. The suspension is downright nervous on imperfect surfaces (and where are they perfect besides Germany?), requiring constant correction and allowing little relaxation. – Car and Driver

Isn’t the media fascinating? BMW’s had a fleet of hydrogen powered 7 series cars whooshing around since well before this generation of 7 was released, and all of a sudden the press – no doubt clued in by a release sent from BMW’s PR department – is rushing to cover the technology, the same way they all parrot Hybrid as some sort of cure all.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from folks asking what I think of all of this. I’ll spare you the long version, quoting instead from a piece in Car and Driver:

Powering the Hydrogen 7 is a 256-hp 6.0-liter V-12 (the same engine in the 760Li makes 438 hp). The 7-series isn’t light to begin with and saddled with an undisclosed amount of additional weight, the V-12 is said to deliver its driver to 62 mph in a leisurely 9.5 seconds, regardless of which fuel is being used. That’s some four seconds off the pace of a 360-hp 750Li… getting a pound of hydrogen into its liquid form takes roughly six kilowatt hours of electricity. If that electricity comes from a coal-fired plant, it creates as much carbon dioxide as burning half a gallon of gasoline (which contains the same amount of energy as that pound of liquid hydrogen).

muscular once on boost but soft-edged when accelerating from low speeds… despite its twin-scroll turbocharger, designed to reduce turbo lag by separating the exhaust pulses of cylinders one and four from those of two and three, so they don’t interfere with each other and reduce the energy available to drive the turbocharger. – 4Car

Can be found here in a MySpace forum of all places.

Why does this car excite me? It’s not the show-car styling but rather that it gives the RS4 engine a proper home and shows what the Gallardo would be with lighter weight and better visibility. Oh yeah, and it punctuates that Audi is really truly serious about building drivers cars after years of empty promises.

Let’s cut to the chase – what distinguishes ‘real’ driver’s cars from grocery getters boils down to where the engine is placed and where the torque is sent (the closer to the center and the more to the rear respectively, the more agile the final product).

The Mercedes A class was ingenious in its placing the engine below the floor but the more you loaded it up the more likely it was to go belly up. Later cars were stiffenened to the point that they rode like sports cars but didn’t handle all that much better.

The Smart conversely showed the world the minimal power – when combined with minimal weight – could be maximal fun. In fact Gordon Murray, designed of the vaunted McLaren F1, loves the ForTwo, especially in Brabus form, where the front tires are widened and the torque curve is fattened.

All that said, I’d like to see efficient cars of the future to follow a mid or rear engine, rear drive or rear biased all wheel drive layout similar to the Mitsubishi i. With the advent of ESP and traction control there’s really no point in front engined, front drive cars (that is unless you’re a carmarker – they love the design because it reduces assembly time and maximizes profits).

...can be seen here (but don’t close the window until you read about the revised ABS system).

Every time I’m behind a Trailblazer or Envoy I have a mild heart attack as my V1 goes into full bleat, as though an officer with a laser gun has trained his crosshairs on me.

According to this sidebar in this month’s Car and Driver things are about to get much worse for anyone owning a radar detector…

Keep your right foot buried, though, and things start to go awry as the big Chrysler bounces from hump to bump, its tall 225/60/18 Pirelli P7s contributing to the impression that ride control is care of a space-hopper at each corner. Numb steering doesn’t improve the experience. – evo