Is FWD really that bad?

FWD?

  • Total voters
    126
Z

zmepro

Member
:
Protege5
No flaming, no bulls***, I want real well thought out answers. How bad is FWD really? (For road corse/auto X/windy mountain road at high speed)

I know it understeers a bit, what can be done to counter that? Is there an flaw in FWD that cannot be overcome by suspention / lsd's? Do LSD's help reduce the understeer? Can a Protege be a competitive car without major drivetrain modifications (ie. xelderx) ? Or is modifiying it with hope of it being fast(ish) (like wrx competion, not in the straight, in the turns) really pointless or can it be done (without AWD converson or any of that stuff?)

Thanks (nana)
 
any car can be modified to have understeer or oversteer....even fwd's. lsd's definately do help with understeer that's for sure. so does sway bars, springs, shocks, height of the car, weight distribution, tires, tire pressure....everything plays it's own little part in the whole equation
 
Just look at the MP3 and MSPs. They are both FWD, are arguably the best FWD handling cars in NA, get extremely close to be a neutral handling car and have much less understeer then a WRX.

If you want more oversteer to counter our understeer, raise the psi of your rear tires, put a thicker anti-sway bar in the rear, get stiffer rear springs...

But yeah, FWDs end up having some other drawbacks, like torque steer. LSDs are good.
 
Black Majik MSP said:
Don't forget wheel hop. :mad:
Click to expand...
Just a stiffer front motor mount helped me a lot. It's still there sometimes, but I say it's been 70% eliminated, especially on wet roads. Yeah, stupid wheel hop.
 
the trick to understeer is not to make your car have less understeer, because that is hard to do with a car engineered that way. the easiest way to counter understeer is to make the car more likly to oversteer. that way you balance it out.

cbcbd is right. stiffer rear springs and swaybar will help out a lot.

there is a good article on suspension tunning in sport compact car from december I think.

it is in regards to project silvia, but informative none the less.

ok then, back on topic.
 
FWD okay

FWD isn't bad, it's different. I think it's just a matter of learning a different driving style for the "opposite" weight transfer, and other dynamics. And some people will take to one or the other more naturally. Say you're in autocross and the back end is sliding out on you. In FWD you accelerate to pull the car through the corner and keep the back end in line, assuming you aren't already at the front tire adhesion limits. However I find the Protege nicely balanced compared to many FWD cars. I grew up with rear drive, then a dozen years with FWD, then rear drive, now FWD again the last few years. I really don't like RWD now. FWD lets me get around much quicker. I can't even do rear drive well on a Playstation anymore.

A Pro still won't get around like a WRX with AWD and the years of rally engineering designed into it. By the time you outfit a Protege to do that you could pay for a WRX. It'd be fun though! But my opinion is the Protege could race a WRX through a mirror image course as well as a WRX, maybe just not as quickly. I bet there are talented people in here that could beat a WRX on a road course driven by someone not dialed into what their car can do. Couple years ago I asked a more experienced racer what I could do to make my old Civic faster and he said practice more. I let him co-drive a run and he beat my time by almost 3 seconds. I'm faster now but still can't wring all the performance out of the Pro. It's a sweet car for it's class. Of course by next year I'll have added mods that move me into another class so it will still be the drivers handicap. It's never ending I suppose. Couple weeks to the first event and I can't wait.
 
conekiller said:
RWD cars have wheelhop too.

~brian
Click to expand...
yeah wheel hop can affect almost anything, my friends F250 diesel would wheelhop really bad on the stock tires but 35"s and 4" of lift and now the tires just roll :D

as far as the windy mountain roads and the road courses I would rather have AWD or FWD but with auto-x (where AWD is king of all) I would have to say that for beginner to moderate level drivers FWD is better (than RWD) but as you progress the RWD would be better in most situations so you can drift through the turns and keep your speed up. (rofl2)
the main problem, as I see it, with FWD cars is that the acceleration of the cars automatically transfers the weigh of the car (and the most traction on the tires with it) to the rear. this can be counter-acted with stiffer springs on the rears but that is the major downfall that truly handicaps the FWD world.
just my opinions... :D
 
Replica said:
Drive a RWD car and get back to us...
Click to expand...
i currently have one RWD car and the first car i had was RWD,

its definitly different tho, and they are not as good a measure (neither perform as well as my protege5) so its hard to compair
 
zmepro said:
i currently have one RWD car and the first car i had was RWD,

its definitly different tho, and they are not as good a measure (neither perform as well as my protege5) so its hard to compair
Click to expand...
No wheel hop, better weight transfer, better traction and can launch MUCH harder. Easy to change the rear end gear for different applications, no understeer. It's easier to rotate an object in motion if pushed from the back, not the front. It's easier to push than pull....blah blah...insert more RWD propaganda.
 
Replica said:
No wheel hop, better weight transfer, better traction and can launch MUCH harder. Easy to change the rear end gear for different applications, no understeer. It's easier to rotate an object in motion if pushed from the back, not the front. It's easier to push than pull....blah blah...insert more RWD propaganda.
Click to expand...

But that's NOT the case for all RWD cars. Almost every car is designed to understeer. Wheel hop...all depends on the suspension components/setup/adjustment. Final gear ratio, definately easier in RWD.
I think my mildly setup fox body stang handled worse than my pro did stock. The stang was a 87 coupe 2.3L turbo with GT swaybars, 3/4" lowering springs, CC's, maximum motorsports RLCA's, poly bushings all around, Gt struts, and 245/45/17's all the way around. Also it had a 3/4" wider track per side due to the 93 cobra suspension and wheels. I though it handled great, until I drove the P5 hard. Then I was just pissed :D
 
If you take the time to do the reading (Speed Secrets is a good start) and so forth you'll understand the different dynamics and so forth that go into why FWD and RWD and AWD handle the way they do and how to drive a car as a race car. They all have their pro's and con's.

One of the con's to FWD is that you are using the same tires for acceleration as you are for steering. Because of the slip angles and the traction limits of the tire this can lead to more understeer in the car as the traction available for steering or accelerating is less than if one or the other is taken away from being assigned to those tires. That is why things like trail braking become important to alter the handling characteristic of the car on turn in and so forth. This can also be done to some extent with chassis stiffening and suspension modification etc.

RWD has some advantages in it's abilities to give you more control of inducing oversteer by adding "too much" power to the rear tires inducing slip/oversteer.

RWD allows for greater acceleration due to the transfer of weight back. But corner weighting and weight distribution play into this. A 200 ft-lb FWD car is likely to have less traction issues than a 200 ft-lb pickup truck that has no weight in the back. FWD is also more forgiving and allows you to "pull" through mistakes and oversteer and so forth.

So in other words a horse a piece.

AWD has it's pros and cons as well. It can actually be harder to launch AWD due to the fact that if the tires do NOT slip you will pull your rpms down out of power band rather rapidly and will actually hurt your available torque for getting going off the line etc. Also you end up with a small amount of the issue of having acceleration and steering linked to the same tires, so again traction limits will dictate. Overall AWD has better traction, but that does not necessarily mean better handling.

Keep in mind handling and traction are two different things as well :)

I think that covers most of it... but anyway... back to work for me.

Later.

Steve
 
My MSP, and I'm sure all others have oversteer, I have never experienced understeer, the backend swings out way before that will happen.
 
Just go to http://www.jgtc.net/index_en.htm

and look up driver number 71 he moved from a MR-s to a Celica and went from like 1 top 5 finishes in the first 5 races to 3 top 5 finishes in the last 4 race. Ur point proven.

FYI i can't wait for JGTC to come to the US. He is my example only because i met him in Japan.
 
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