The other day a reader wrote in, saying how he was disappointed with AutoSpeed. Amongst other things, he said that there were plenty more powerful modified cars around than those we are featuring – all we had to do was attend some dyno days and go to the drags.

That we are no longer particularly interested in featuring typical straight-line drag cars, and typical horsepower dyno hero cars, hadn’t occurred to him.

I told him in my reply that AutoSpeed was (and is) changing in editorial direction; if he liked the Australian magazine Street Machine (he’d said in a previous email he did) I thought it very unlikely that he would like AutoSpeed, both now and in the future. Therefore, it would seem best that he stop reading AutoSpeed, rather than just go on being frustrated with us.

[Incidentally, this idea that if you don’t like us, don’t read us, seems to offend people. But to me it makes perfect sense: what’s the alternative – I encourage those readers to persevere, even though I know they won’t like what is coming up? To me that seems completely hypocritical.]

Anyway, I was reflecting on the reader’s comments, especially in the implication that more power is good – and even more power is therefore better. As I’ve stated previously, I think that many modified cars in Australia are heading in completely the wrong direction – they’re huge, hugely heavy, and hugely powerful. But rather than put this so negatively, let’s look at the issue more proactively. What makes for a good modified car? (And so, one that we’d be delighted to feature?)

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Over the years that I’ve been driving, my respect for various road rules has, I have to say, varied.

I’ve always respected drink driving laws – in fact, after driving a car once after having had just a few drinks (and so being well under the limit), I noted how my prowess had faltered and resolved to never drive again with any alcohol concentration at all.

But I’ve never had the same belief in speed limits – they’re simply too arbitrary, especially in their ignoring of car competence, the road quality and driving conditions.

And as for laws regarding car modification, I must say that I often have little respect for these.

But there’s one road law that I’ve always had the utmost belief in – the sanctity of the white line in the middle of the road.

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Arguably the biggest driver of car engine technology over the last 40 years has been exhaust emissions legislation.

The original Californian Clean Air legislation introduced in 1967 hastened the advent of electronic fuel injection (the pictured Bosch D-type system has just celebrated its 40th anniversary – and only 5 years after introduction, it was being used by 18 car manufacturers) and the march of clean emissions progress has barely slowed since.

These days, of course, the shift in focus has been from oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide to CO2 outputs.

But what actually are the standards causing so many engineers to pull out their hair? The laws rumoured to have lead to the foreshadowed demise of Ford’s Australian engine factory (more on Australian car manufacturing in an upcoming blog post) and which are making it so difficult to sell diesels in the US over the next few years? You’d think that getting a handle on all the laws would be damn’ near impossible – but that’s not so.

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As I write I’m getting over a cold. I am well enough to be mobile but not well enough to work. Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway.  

As many of you will know, I am becoming more and more interested in lightweight vehicles. One of my cars is a Honda Insight – amongst the lightest of all production cars on the road – and I find the downsides of its design usually quite minor. (If I need to carry more than two people, I take Frank the Falcon.)  

Now the Honda might be light, but it still has four wheels when surely three would be enough. Using a tadpole configuration (two front wheels and one rear) would also allow the car to be nicely streamlined, something that would be helped by a front mount engine and front wheel drive. That way, the classic teardrop shape for low aero drag would be much easier to implement.  

The starting point for such a car would be a FWD half-cut, say a Mira or Suzuki 660cc 3 cylinder turbo. Use the complete driveline, subframe, steering and front suspension and brakes, add on a tube frame chassis and then run the single rear wheel and suspension from a motorbike.  

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I’d no sooner finished writing A Disappearing Suspension Technology than I came across something that goes a long way to explaining the reason that swing-arm suspension was used by such hugely respected engineers like Porsche and by companies like Mercedes.

The magazine article is on a very interesting car produced by one of the all-time greats in suspension theory. The designer of the car was Bill Milliken and the premise was that by using narrow tyres running a huge amount of negative camber, very good cornering grip would be able to be obtained.

Now there’s a lot more to his car than just that (by clicking on the magnifying glass you can enlarge the article scans enough to print/read them) but the narrow tyres/huge neg camber is a very short summary.

The tyres being used by Auto Union and Mercedes pre-WWII race cars were similar in width to current big motorcycle tyres and so would have been far less susceptible to loss of grip through lifting of the flat tread of the tyre that would otherwise occur through negative camber. In fact, the lateral thrust from the camber achieved by the swing-arms would, as the Milliken car shows, have made a major contribution to cornering grip.

It makes me think that a lightweight car running low pivot point swing-arm (or semi-trailing or leading) suspension and motorcycle tyres could develop a lot of grip while maintaining an ultra lightweight suspension, in turn giving a very low unsprung weight and low total vehicle mass. And the narrow wheels and tyres would also give far lower rotating inertia, improving acceleration and braking still further…

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The other month I found myself commuting 160 kilometres each day, most of that on two, three and four lane freeways. When everyone’s travelling at basically the same speed, it’s an ideal opportunity to look at the suspension behaviour of other cars. For several kilometres of bumps, you can literally eyeball from close quarters the front or rear wheels of a car travelling at 100 km/h.

One of the interesting things is watching the front dynamic camber variations. Theory says that you want a neg camber increase in bump, primarily to keep the outside, loaded tyre closer to vertical as the car rolls. But theory also says that this dynamic camber increase is pretty well impossible to achieve with MacPherson strut suspension, unless the steering axis inclination is radical (which in turn brings other problems).

And can’t you just see it in action when you watch adjoining cars!

On my local roads, the (pre VE) Commodores and nearly all Japanese and European small cars have front wheels that just move up and down. But watch a Falcon, or any of the European cars with double wishbones, and you can see clear dynamic camber variations.

And the same thing applies at the back, except this time the wheels just moving up and down are those connecting to torsion beam rear axles (FWD cars) or solid rear axles (RWD cars). On cars with multi-link or wishbone suspensions, the camber change is quite obvious to the eye. Of course I’m not talking about much variation – perhaps a few degrees. But you can still see it.

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Now forgive me if this seems pretty esoteric: it probably is. In fact, I’d never really even thought about it until a year or so ago; I’d never actually experienced it until today.

Most of you would be familiar with the idea of ‘toe’. Toe-in is where the wheels point inwards – when viewed from above, they’re constantly steering towards the centreline of the car. Toe-out, as you’d soon guess, is where the wheels are constantly steering outwards from the centreline. Zero toe means the wheels are parallel to the centre line.

Most cars these days run zero toe or just a very small amount of toe-in. Toe, usually measured in millimetres (although degrees would make far more sense), is at most only 1 or 2mm: the amount the wheels steer inwards or outwards is very small indeed.

OK – so that’s static toe. But what about when the suspension moves up and down?

If, during suspension travel, the wheels stay steering exactly in the directions they were originally steering in, the suspension is said to have zero bump steer. If the wheels steer inwards on bump, they’re said to have toe-in on bump. Toe-out on bump is defined as you’d expect it to be. (Note that in all these quoted cases, the steering wheel is held still – it’s the suspension itself that’s doing [or not doing] the steering.)

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I think this (apparently uniquely Australian) idea that big family cars need to be rear wheel drive is simply rubbish. You hear it all the time – rear wheel drive is best for towing, rear wheel drive is best for handling, rear wheel drive is somehow hugely superior over front wheel drive. Well, apparently it is for the macho Australian male, anyway.

From the day I first bought a car I have never been a believer in the philosophy; in the time since I’ve owned rear wheel drive, four wheel drive and front wheel drive cars – and I have remained unconvinced. In fact, if anything, I think I am leaning heavily in the direction that rear wheel drive, without traction control (or better still, stability control) is potentially bloody dangerous.

Today is a perfect example. I’d bought a big workbench on eBay – and this morning I had to go pick it up. The thing is enormous – much too big to fit on my normal 6 x 4 trailer. So I organised the hire of a car carrying trailer. When the alarm went off at 5.45 am (pick-up was set for 8 am) I awoke, listened for a moment, and then my heart sank.

It was raining.

I needed to go down the narrow, tortuous road from the mountain on which I live, pick up the huge trailer, then drive straight back up the mountain, descending the other side on an even tighter, narrower road. All in Frank the EF Falcon, a car which even without a trailer hooked on the back, power oversteers around these wet and slippery corners even when you’re trying to drive gently. Perhaps it’s the tyres – and the rears are certainly down in tread although still quite legal – or perhaps it’s the sheer torque and throttle response of the 5-speed manual Falc. But either way, it’s a car that in the wet needs to be treated with an incredibly judicious right foot. Even when you’re not towing a huge trailer with a 300kg workbench strapped to it.

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There are a few ways of regarding the comments I am about to write. One perspective is that they’re the ramblings of an old, out of touch man who prefers comfort to handling. Another is that I am stuck in the past, ignoring the advances that are self-evident – well, to all but apparently me.

But I think that most car manufacturers are on the wrong track with their current ride/handling compromise.

Having a car that handles competently is important. No one wants to see people spear off the road when they make a minor error; no one wants to see new cars being sold that squeal and wail and wallow their way around corners. But the opposite extreme – cars that are built to handle road conditions and driving behaviour that nearly all will simply never see – is almost as silly. Why? Well, every time you’re in a car, you’re being subjected to its ride – whether that’s good, bad or awful. And while it may be possible to produce cars that both handle and ride well, in the vast majority of production cars, better handling means a worse ride.

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