Beyond 6000

Zetec se 1.4 150hp project.

2025-04-07T01:00:00.002+01:00

I own a focus mk1 rave built, a puma .k1 under transformation and a fiesta 1.25i that i'm saving for my eldest, but using it meanwile.

I have no lack of Zetecs, and this is not counting my past cars and Zetec experience.

Although people say that the Zetec SE (Yamaha based Ford sigma) is not a serviceable engine, as an engineer, the reply is clear! they are built and not welded they must be serviceable...you just have to know the secrets. Guess what: I do!

The puma mk1 raced on s1400 and s1600 rally series. The s1400 was factory built based engine, the s1600 was fully purpose built.

That means that you can polish the 1.4 Zetec SE to Honda territory over 100bhp/ltr.

There are people running 1.4 with almost 200 bhp, so 150bhp should be rather easy to obtain.

I've donated my 1.4 105bhp engine+ecu to my friend marco (as my own puma is getting the st170'a one... as the st170 will be getting the t5 2.3 one) so his poorly treated, almost dead engine, was just laying around in the workshop... and i just got it into the stand for a full blue printing and then tunning.

Several torque wrenches have been brought, cilinder honing tools, cilinder mounting tools and the crucial angle counter and micrometer...oh of course, how could I forget the dremel and the 2 digital scales... we're ready to rock!

Part1

And so it begins:

Clearly, some idiot have already fooled arround this engine and thought it would be a good idea to paint it gold with non heat resistant paint ... didn't work... fortunately.

But i've got all the help I need:

7yo Mike and his 5yo syster Liv helped me dismantle the intake manifold, water pump, alternator, AC compressor and even the PCV! wow

It's curious that this engine will probably find it's way into the Fiesta, as i don't believe the 1.25 will survive too long under my right foot.

The only one that will actually leverage this engine on her little fiesta - Maddie - couldn't care less... unless it's a tiktok enabled hatefful crapple iphone, she doesn't acknoledge its existence!

Fortunately, the other 2 love mechanical working and "beyond dirty" fingernails.

Disasembly continues and new tools are needed to pull the pulley, so we have to wait.

So far:

1- engine was out of time! I'm afraid of yhr valves that i'll encounter further on.

2- engine came from (or got a head from) a spanish second hand supplyer (probably junkyard) and looking at the wear on the camms, probably from a much older car... the cam journals do not look like 80k km.

3- the engine had recently been serviced for the timing chain... but the main damper puley is the original one.

4- the warer pump and all the rust signal tap water and being original factory one, not good considering its plastic

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

More to follow.

So far it is disasembly, but i'll lay the tricks down as I progress this post. Stay tuned.

Part 2

Humans, earths pinnacle of rational brain evolution, love to tame evolution.

2025-03-09T18:41:00.000+00:00

Porsche takes the grand prize.

Porsche is known for some of the best sports cars out there. People tend to compare Porsche with Ferrari and they will be ultimately wrong. You can buy a 911, drive it like you've stolen it, every day and night, and in the end, just take it to the 15.000km maintenance period for an oil change and small checks. Try thrashing a Ferrari on a street race and you'll end up with it on a tow-car with an expensive bill and 1000 broken or wear'd-out parts. OK maybe I was a bit too harsh... make it... 999 broken or wear'd-out parts. Yeah I know I'm caustic, but think about the following: used car reliability guide (this is where you really see what is the car is built to last) starts with Ferrari 1st, has Lamborghini and Maserati in it and ends in tesla 10th. If you think that a tesla is built to last the 4 year battery span and then get scrapped... and still is 9 positions above Ferrari, it says a lot about it. Check it your self in HERE

Porsche not only managed to build a reliable supercar, but they've managed something that is completely CRAZY and respectful all at once: a good 911.

911 Porsche was a rear wheel drive, rear engine thing. This layout counters physics of motion on 90% on scenarios. Today it is 4wd but still rear engin'd!

Let me be clear:

- Front wheel drive car with the engine in the front, is stable moving forward and has difficulty with direction changes. The weight at the front generates forward momentum and the front wheels get over-loaded with weight/torque and directional change.

- Rear wheel drive car with the engine in the front, is stable moving forward, stable while cornering, unstable under heavy acceleration particularly under cornering.

- Mid engine (front or back) with a rear wheel drive, is the most stable design for all circumstances, including stability under acceleration, as the weight on the engine promotes squeezing the tires to the ground increasing traction... if it loses, however, the experience is less progressive and not easy to master.

- Rear wheel drive car with the engine in the back, is only stable if you are moving backwards, in a straight movement. Else, the inertia will constantly try to make the rear end of the car, overtake the front. Rear wheel drive, rear engine lovers (911 owners) also claim increases adherence under acceleration, but the fact that once you brake traction you have an even more extreme and even more difficult to master overseer, rendered a lot of them in the hospital... or morgue. This is not helped with the fact that, lack of space on the rear, makes the front be the one holding the petrol tank... and this means that, as you start emptying it, the front has less and less weight to help you corner. It becomes a puzzle of balance that constantly changes variables.

So, having a true sports car that is stable, easy to drive and with a composed figure is difficult, with rear engine is really very difficult to master. Adding all the reliability, make them one of a kind and although the starting point is ALL WRONG in pure physics terms, the over engineering around it to tame it down, managed true miracles over the years, and you have to respect that. Still I would never buy a 911. not that I have the money to pay for one... that I don't, but the design is wrong and my engineering brain can't overlook that fact.

So Why is Porsche tame evolution? Well their way of managing their brand to protect the 911! They've thrown BILLIONS into developing the wrong platform almost to perfection, But then throw away the opportunity to do the same with much better platforms.

Enter the Cayman:

The Cayman is a Boxer with rigid top! Same Rear wheel drive mid engines beauty of balance and poised car, but with less weight (less reinforcement for the cut top) and better torsional rigidity. But for some reason, Porsche never really beefed it up with their best engines, they reserved that to the 911 RS series... but why? Well because if you were to test drive a Cayman GTS4.0 the de-tuned version of the RS engine, you would say: this feels better, pity it lacks the grunt to leverage the chassis.

It was only in 2021 (the platform exists since 2016) that Porsche properly fitted the engine from the 911 GT3RS (no de-tuned bs) to the chassis with the Cayman GT4 RS. Talk about 911 protection.

But this has happened before... Enter the 944:

It's 1989, Porsche has its 911 line and then launched the 944 turbo.

Bare in mind that the 92x and 94x chassis where all front engine, rear wheel drive cars, so the on the limit behavior was just beautifully balanced, unlike the 911. But the 280bhp 911 sold for being the one with the best engine and as such faster 0-100 times.

HOWEVER the engine on the 944 turbo was a 290 bhp able one. This would make it faster, quicker on 0-100 and crucially better handling. 911 would have been extinct right there and then. So Porsche de-tuned the 944 turbo, until it managed to produce 250bhp, and even still, it would only be 0.3s 0-100 and 3km/h top speed slower then the 911. Can you imagine the original 290Bhp numbers?

So, instead of letting the old 911 die... and invest all that engineering time in making a bad platform good, they should have just embraced the 944turbo.. develop it further, reach the boxter/cayman faster and give us better cars sooner.

Porsche is not alone... Honda follows close!

Honda has always managed to be respected because it followed it's own trends instead of copying others. Light Sports cars with High Revving engines with better revving range that torque figures, much like a motorcycle.

The VTEC and their B16, B18, F20C, K20 and K24 engines are so good that so over engineered (known to be able to support twice their power numbers on stock internals), that they've managed to go against much more expensive and bigger engine'd cars. They are a true pinnacle of engineering and used to be known for producing masterpieces of engineering brilliance.

During their best times, Honda created the Civic Type-R, Integra Type-R, the all aluminium NSX (Vtec, even thought the Vtec ha been designed for inlines) and the glorious s2000.

Honda even managed to create the second generation NSX in the middle of the Hybrid eco-mania era, and make it better than the rest by having torque biasing front electric engines, plus a hybrid rear drive with an electric engine to compensate the low end lack of torque, until the petrol engine gained revs and started to shine it's magnificent high rev character. It was perfect.

But they where not just brilliant with top end cars... consider the civic and look at the versions and it's competitors form other brands:

1997
Parameter	Honda	VW	SEAT	PEUGEOT	Renault
Model	Civic Type-R (EK9)	Golf Mk4	-	306 GTi	-
Engine	1.6 Vtec	1.8 Turbo	-	2.0	-
Power	185PS	180PS	-	167PS	-
Weight	1050Kg	1213Kg	-	1215Kg	-
Ratio	5.7 Kg/ps	6.7Kg/ps	-	7.3 Kg/ps	-

2001
Parameter	Honda	VW	SEAT	PEUGEOT	Renault
Model	Civic Type-R (EP3)	Golf Mk5	Leon Cupra R	307 GTi	Megane2 RS
Engine	2.0 Vtec	2.0 Turbo	1.8 Turbo	2.0	2.0 Turbo
Power	200PS	200PS	225PS	177PS	225ps
Weight	1190Kg	1347Kg	1320Kg	1320Kg	1232Kg
Ratio	5.95 Kg/ps	6.7Kg/ps	5.7Kg/ps	7.45 Kg/ps	5.47Kg/ps

Even with a 5.95kg/ps against the lower SEAT and Renault, the engine availability under VTEC would mean it would smoke them on a track without breaking a sweat. So even thought it was falling behind, the end result was still very competitive.

But then!

Honda killed the NSX, killed the S2000, killed the Integra Type-r, and ... started Turboing the K20 engine from the Civic Type-r in pursue of ps numbers, much like the europeans had done. Pocket rockets are now 1.6, 1.8 or 2.0 but always turbo. No perfect delivery of power, no millimetric throttling, no instant response...and a bunch of unneeded electronics to tame the beast down, while generating tones of heat soak issues and absurd cooling needs, out of an already tight and packed front end of the car!

And they didn't need to!

Prototype Racing was installing the K20A with a tune, new exhaust and intake and pulling 260ps; BTCC EP3 type'r where running over 300Ps without turboing the car. Why turbo it to go 306 ps?

Why then push it to 320 unreliably?

It's a complete joke that the latest Civic Type-R reduced the engine RPM limit, to get to 320 ps but it will not run a full lap without SERIOUS overheating issues... This is just dumb.

Some tuners have turboed the EP3 k20A and made over 360ps reliable and daily driven.

Honda, on its own, killed the ONE thing that made them better than any other brand out there, and replaced it with a copy'paste sort of mentality, and built... well... far worse products.

Seppuku is the only word that comes to mind.

Why? Well the one thing americans complain (yes, no other country complains about Honda's torque numbers, except the 7.2 V8 20 ps nation) is low end torque. Evidently! had they ever driver a proper race car, they would know that the engine tuning for high rpm, will sacrifice torque, but in the end, having more usable engine range is crucial on the track. Obviously it's hard to get this principle if you're running around in ovals the entire time!

Still, A high rpm engine will, by design, not be optimized for torque particularly at low rpm. The electric engine is tremendously capable or torque, but at high rpm it loses it's efficiency and starts having wear and heat problems.

Till we get a new breakthrough, the technology that is positioned to become the best future for cars, is the hydrogen engine. This will produce even pore power than gas (out of the same design), and the speed of the hydrogen combustion is higher and more violent than compressed atomized gasoline, so high rpms will be the tune for this type of engine.

So: in my opinion, unless tomorrow we find out that nitrogen is a better option, a hydrogen powered car, can have hydrogen fuel cell power a small electric engine to produce torque and then handover to the hydrogen combustion engine to the high rpm efficiency. In this possibility, engine designs that run high rpm's with the technology and engineering to match the design are the future... and Honda was the best positioned brand to mainstream this... by miles.

Volkswagen... another weird'o!

If I ask you to name a sports car from VW, you will, unless you've just landed on this planet yesterday, say: Golf GTI !

I'm not a Golf GTI fan. I think that they are like an iphone... to much overprice for too little delivery. However they are probably (in exception of the Corrado G60, VR6 and PD engines) the best thing that VW ever did.

Except for the fact that they didn't want to!

Yes that's right. The GTI should have been called VW SkunkWorks.

Golf was the replacement for the beetle, but the first ones where built with very little quality and VW was not really going anywhere.

In 1974, a group of people that included the man responsible for VW communication, decided to create a sports Golf. They gathered engineers and top mechanics, and they let loose their desires. The board, that dismissed the idea. They went underground and while the majority of the board was looking the other way, they quickly assembled the a prototype. Simple recipe: Big engine, light car, stiff suspension.

When presented with an almost finished product, the board decided to change their heart and embrace the project. GOOD... it kicked started something brilliant. No not the hot hatch... this crown does not belong to the GTI.

The first hot hatch EVER came from... wait for it... the AMERICANS. That's right. The first Hot Hatch ever was the AMC Gremlin in 1970. A full 5 years before the GTI. Not only that, it featured an inline 6, from the land of the V8, with more displacement than your living room and 2 and a half horse power.

The GTI was an important mark, in my opinion; because it kicked Ford in the chin... and they immediately started working on went to become the Escort XR3i, a Fiesta XR2i.

VW went back to its idiocy and spent the next years producing mediocre GTI versions and weird R versions that really should be the GTI's... and apparently the latest one (the mk8) may be the only good thing coming our of VW since the mk1.

It's safe to assume that Golf GTI mk16 will be also a good one, then.

BMW doesn't come out clean either!

BMW never wanted to create the M1. Much like VW didn't what to create the GTI.

This must be a German thing, there management has no vision and employees take or their blindness and solve the problem for them. It's like a company ESP!

While the Division manager took 2 week vacation, the engineering team, overtimed to created the M1. Upon return, he had an M1 prototype with zero development cost ready to go... so they went with it!

But the idiocy isn't done yet! At that point in time, BMW had replaced the E46 M3 beautiful master piece 3.2, 260ps In line 6 with an american type v8 style monstrosity in the E92. They did it because the E92 was bigger and heavier than the E46. The result was a worse handling car that lost al the nimbleness that E46 was known for.

The E46 was no more and the E92 was big and sluggish compared to it. But the M1 was much lighter than the E92 and with the same engine, it became what you would have expected the E92 M3 to be as an evolution of the E46. This could not be! an M1 better than the M3! So, instead of allowing this throught the doors, they've got the in line 6 engine from the z4 and turboed it for the M1, but still shaving 80ps out of the total package.

Still, If the race track is sufficiently filled with corners and with little long stretches, the 340PS M1 will sill outperform the 420Ps E92 M3, so you can imagine just how much of a facedrop would it have been, had they not crippled the car. In truth I much rather have it like this, the V8 weight would have messed the balance and perfect 50-50 distribution anyway.

And here we are ladies and gentleman. Brand decisions to cripple their products in the name of brand policy, and ignoring the "let's put the best product we can out there rational". We could have much better cars than we do, hed the engineers be left alone and away from politicians and marketeers

When the Snake-oil salesman loses charm and becomes seen as it should have always been seen.

2025-02-16T17:01:00.014+00:00

I've never been an elon fan. I would actually not give a flying f$%# about the guy, had it not been his position to EXPLOIT human stupidity for profit, with a cocky attitude. And that's why I absolutely hate the guy. He profits out of people not really using the brain. Sure...a lot of people do that all over the world, stating by 99% of governments...

...but this dude POLLUTES the environment in a very hard to reverse way (lithium contamination is BAD), then he flags his mediocre products as top-stuff (sure apple does the same, but if you crash your iphone it doesn't trap you inside while bursting to flames like a crematory)...

... not to talk about the impact on electricity cost for having EVERYONE charging cars off the already stressed power grid...

... not to get into the absolutely stupid marketing around his batteries that CLAIM to last twice as much as competitors (the reason is that they have twice the cells and as cells go bad the battery chains engages the backup cells, and that's why ludicrous mode voids your battery warranty as they juice them all at once... meanwhile, you accelerate, break and turn twice the weight you would actually need to, for... marketing purposes).

Sure it makes me the exception, in a world that envisions him as the supreme lord of intelligence, but at the light of facts, this becomes more a fact of "in the world of the blind, the one-eyes is king" theory, rather then "the man is a messiah"... think a bit about it and take your own conclusions... oh meanwhile read https://www.tesla.com/pt_pt/blog/tesla-lithium-refinery-groundbreaking

The legion of musk lovers is such that it managed to shift a US election (sure WOKE stupidity helped a bit) towards the only US president with pending sentences from being convicted.

A Sieg Heil was the trigger

...but, in my opinion, the most damaging is the tremendously low quality of his teslas and the suing attitude to anyone voicing the tesla BS.

It didn't help to voice his mind in CNBC and CNN interview: "I say what I want, and if the consequence of that is to loose some money, than be it"

... JEEEZ! If I was a tesla investor, I'd dump the stock at that moment... I mean, go play with your own money, you megalomaniac fool!

Still the charm is coming out, FINALLY, and the world can now see him as he is... a megalomaniac idiot with too much money in his hands to play god. But there is a plus to all this: His leach is getting pulled and all that cockiness is falling hard.

HOW HAS THIS anything to do with a car blog? Well the guy is trying to ruin the car industry with electric cars claiming the internal combustion engine is a bad thing. Not only he deserves the bitch-slapping, he must be brought into light.

Tesla is bleeding sales TREMENDOUSLY (as one should expect from a bs product) and the Chinese, using more and more solid-state and sodium-carbon batteries (PLUS better conception and construction) are taking his business away. Plus all proper car manufacturers are turning to hydrogen and nitrogen as their fuel for the future, with hybrid drive car designs (what really makes sense).

Again, nothing I didn't warn about over and over, but people love hypes and the loud mouths always get every monkeys attention.

Now? Now you have this and this

...sort of gems to read and laugh, if your like me, at least, and didn't buy the hype.

If you did, well, get books to read at gas stations while your bs car charges for hours... sure carrying books is dumb as they are heavy, but so does 50% of unused battery is, and don't use electronic reading as that requires juice you desperately will need to charge your bs car... because of massive adoption of electric cars form idiots like you, on an already stressed power grid.

all of this, form the agenda of this character:

Ahhhh the joy of thinking for your self.

So why oh why is the tesla product bad?

First thing : If your car had a limitation of life on the fuel tank, and replacing it once elapsed cost more than the car's worth, then you would build the rest of the car to last the same... it's a make to recycle market... like laptops or cellphones. Problem is that your laptop does not cost half the house value.

Truth is that the teslas steel panels are "stamped" with little to no metal fatigue recover process to them. This makes the metal lose most of it's corrosion resistance, this would be minimized by galvanizing the chassis but then... they don't! They will rust away like an italian car.. but without the beautiful design and the charm of the italian car! oops

Second thing : STUPID design. A single motor tesla MAKES MORE SENSE than a dual motor! Weird thing to say... looks like saying that a mustang Inline4 is better than the V8. But then why? Electric motors generate torque instantly and without need for acceleration, unlike a diesel or petrol one. But there is always physics to take into account.

The diesel engine is good generating LOW end toque, but they are nonexistent at high revs. Petrol engines are the opposite, High revs is their home and low revs is where they miss the torque... People have been turboing the cars to compensate but it then kills response! Electrics, are a bit like a steroid enhanced diesel: huge torque numbers down low, but tremendously inefficient HEAT and bearing stress at high speed. In truth, without having electronic throttling, the electric engine spins to destruction as it will burn out from bearing load and over spinning. So how to you fix this?

You can have a small engine with a lot of torque - But then your customer will sell the car after the first highway trip not being able to drive fast.

You can have a big engine - But then the customer will sell the car after thrashing it on the highway for less then 10 minutes and then stop with a drained battery and a burned engine...like teslas

You can have the big engine coupled with a gearbox so the high rev engine is nit revving that much - but then the extra torque will make you smoke the wheels everywhere else outside the highway.

You can couple the big engine with gearbox with a ESC like you do with RC cars - But then the ESC dissipates the power into heat throwing battery life out the window... RCs allow you to change battery, your car... not!

The reason the hybrid hydrogen engine is the future lays here precisely. Hydrogen powers a fuel-cell to generate electricity for a low rev high torque electric motor that then transits to a hydrogen burning, high rev internal combustion engine. Same fuel, best of both worlds, no need for batteries except for starting the car.

So the low-end tesla, is more logic than any of the dual motors (claiming 1000hp out of a motor that only knows torque...marketing again).

Third thing : tesla is a marketing gig. The car looks futuristic and has all the electronic toys, but then:

-If you slam the door it dismantles the inside covers... worse in the cyber-truck as they get stuck in the seat and makes it impossible to open the door without breaking the door liner to pieces, something hard to do from the outside, and very hard to do from the inside. The modelY door liner speaker mount has a single screen holder... while a BMW, VW would have three and VOLVO 4 or 5.

-Most of the claimed features are a lie and will require you to spend money to use the software... apple style scam.

-Steering by wire is laggy as hell and not a real replacement for a direct steering drive.

-Cars are not water-proofed (most if not all manufactures waterproof their cars to around 1 meter)

-The entire car build is cheap, so they can maximize profit. It's like if FIAT or TATA would charge Porsche price for their cars... and then people brought them! it's mental.

Fourth thing : tesla has been towing their cars from crash sites, not allowing for investigations to happen and flaws to come to light. Some owners have been bullied by lawyers not to publicly complain against the company.

Sure they are a new company and lack most of the experience of a heritage brand. However, they could have fixed this easily by purchasing a brand in need of help, and then revamping it.

A lot of the car design was copied form other brands (and it's easy to show money and hire skilled people from other car brands in the USA after Detroit went to 5h!7), but then the tightening of profit first quality...NOT, ends up undermining a lot of the "power" that skilled employees and their knowledge brings in.

In the end, economics is the best castration engine for engineering. Couple that with blind marketing orientation and you have the perfect storm to build bad product that look good.

So why is tesla loosing to China, the ones known for cheap quality?

There is a misconception that CHINA builds cheap.

China builds to spec... spec cheap and you get cheap... spec well and you get a good product probably a bit less expensive than produced in Europe due to:

1 - Labor cost being lower

2 - Transportation cost being lower due to all the constant stream of LOW GRADE products that justify and then deliver good products on between them.

That being said, the size of the Asian market is so big on its own that they have been building knowledge for a long long time. This means that companies like BYD, SAIC, GWM, GAC and Geely can choose to produce the quality level to the market they aim for, at the price they aim for and in numbers they aim for.

And then... as any good Asian, they don't really need to buy a marketing machine or sell bad products at high price! They capitalize on the sheer fact that, the ones doing that (tesla), and then failing to deliver, allows them to capitalize on that.

musk is loosing his "star dust" and tesla will be either PIVOTING HARD, or BYD'd to death.
Still, pivoting, would you really buy a cheap car with a high price, or go for a Toyota or Honda with years for experience and incomparably better products? I know how I would choose, but then again, i never brought his snake-oil.

..and just to help him bed-in to his new position, the DOGE site got hacked.... I LOVE IT! Wasn't me... I promise I had nothing to do with that, in exception of applauding it.

Conclusions

Like any con-artist, he BS's people around a narrative that is based in lies and manipulation, then like a megalomaniac he gets inebriated with himself and starts abusing his new found "fairy dust" (brought by legions of followers, most with questionable sanity), and then... well then you overcook it in front of the camera and it all starts to crumble.

After the collapse starts, you must find strong allies. So you copy'paste what your competitors (that don't invest solely in marketing) have been doing... the actual science... and you pivot towards them.

It's just too bad that you've spent years deconstructing what you now see as your salvation.

Well at least you can claim to be the one inventing the electric car, right?

1881... Gustave Trouve in his ELECTRIC CAR

...ok...ok... the first 4 wheeled electric car, then! right?

1888 Flocken Elektrowagen

...ok... ok... then... then first electric SPORTS car! right?

1899 Le Jamais Contente

...hum...crap... ok, then the first electric car sent to space! Can't beat that! right?

1971 NASA Lunar rover

...ok...ok... the first mass production electric car with futuristic, aerodynamic looks then! Right?

1999 GM EV1

...errr... the first EVER BEAUTIFUL EV sports car? right?

Lotus Elise (design by Julian Thomson)

Tesla roadster based on the lotus Elise

...anything else you care to try!? no? ok... time for the :

wooops

Car engines and Golf... no not that VW thing... the sport!

2025-01-12T21:05:00.008+00:00

What do Golf (the sport) and Car engines have in common?

Easy answer would be physics... duh... sure! But if you consider a simple design of the golf ball and the latest trend in engine head porting, things start to get more clear... and complex all at the same time.

Why? Well that is ways of the very tortuous world of : FLUID DYNAMICS (yes yes every mechanical engineer will have nightmares about flow calculations in Fluid Dynamics discipline and also thermodynamics applied to flow in fluid dynamics... I gather that bumps in suicide rates are probably related to these sort of calculations).

Fluid Dynamics!

And this is what we must understand in order to understand the concept of dimpling porting of engine heads. Why? Well because the concept divides mechanics and most of them are right as most of them are wrong!

Wooops? Right and Wrong all at once!

Most will defend you should port the head like this:

They are partially wrong!

Some will defend you should port the head like that:

They are also partially wrong!

But before we get into the details, let's look into the first counter arguments of Using or not Dimple porting:

Argument 1 - F1 cars don't use them

Sure but there are SEVERAL reasons for that.

1 - F1 engines run at VERY HIGH RPM, meaning that the CFM through the head is HUGE and the dimple designs work better for High and Low pressure areas. The F1 head channels have very little of those.

There is a simple theory to explain the engine CFM importance and that is the principle behind the not very well known Torque oriented VTEC system from Honda.

The Low rev Vtec system consisted in a capping of the 16valve head to run almost 12valve mode, so that the air going into the engine, at Low engine speeds, would have a higher velocity and uneven geometry while entering the cylinder

At low engine speeds, a smoother and spiraling flow of air an fuel optimizes torque.

To produce Power numbers, you favor High speed, High turbulent, high flow instead of this non-turbulent flow. F1 engines are made for High Revs and as such High RPM. Not really for torque at low engine speed. This means that all optimization goes towards Direct, high speed flow... as we can see on point 2

2 - F1 engines have a HEAD design that is purposely made for high flow speed. While production cars consider space and compactness due to the valve train losses, the same principle does not exist in an F1 engine due to point nr 3.

F1 Cosworth v10 engine head port design

3 - F1 engines have Pneumatic Valve trains. F1 engines use a pneumatic valve train. This allows for a narrower angle on the valve train, and as such more direct port designs.

It also generated a valve lift time with a rather square wave, making the input of air FAR greater and and abrupt, making the acceleration and deceleration of air going in and out of the cylinder less progressive. Those are circumstances of a high rpm flow, and as such, the entire design considers flow and not particularly flow speed ant specific RPM's.... they are.. closer to forced induction than NA's in that manner.

Sprigged valves

Pneumatic Valves

Argument 2 - But then why aren't cars built like that?

Mythbusters had a saying about this. They tested a car, then the same car with clay added dimple panel features. Even considering the weight, of the clay the same car made a run with 27 and 29 mpg proving the dimple works of the airflow.

But if that is not enough for you, NASCAR rules banned dimpling the hoods, roofs, and trunks of their racing cars!

Argument 3 - My turbo engine didn't see any improvement... actually it makes less power.

Same principle as the F1 engine. The FORCED induction engine has ALL AIR under high pressure, so the regions of lower and higher pressure that an NA engine would suffer from are minimized by the forced induction nature of things. You don't really look towards minimizing pressure zones and looking for air velocity there! just size of ducts to make the air into the engine. The larger the better... simple math... dimples reduce this in 2 different ways as we are about to understand.

OK... so back to Fluid Dynamics.

An NA engine, particularly with a high efficiency intake plenum, or ITB's , needs to Accelerate the air into the cylinder, then decelerate as the valve closes, then re-accelerate, etc etc etc... and the acceleration will be crucial to allow the dynamics of the air flow to pull more air into the engine by using the flow inertia. So the speed that the air goes into the engine if very important, particularly on specific regions of the intake tubing (this very important part will be revisited later.)

Back to the golf ball

A clean surfaced ball will not go longer than the dimpled ball. will go slower than the dimpled ball and will be more prone to deviation by wind than the dimpled one.

Known fact for years that are easy to explain. The dimples "catch air" and create tiny swirls around the surface of the ball, as it goes through the air, the swirls become sort of a cushion of air. See how hovercrafts move? lookalike principle. Ever tried to move 2 glass sheets stacked together? Hard right?But if you add water or air between them, you can't make them stop!

Air is a fluid and as such it has a viscosity element to it. It sticks better to smooth surfaces and it slips better on fluids. So if you can make the layer slide to the surface swirl back and generate a cushion, the next layer of air slips through this cushion much faster than it would if in contact with the surface.

Not only that, but the drag that the swirl of the back side of the ball generates, also tends to break apart and not pull back on the ball as much, reducing the area exposed to back pull... Even cooler then!

Cool principle right? Right! So it must work with in any other situation... err no!

1 -First of all, the ball move through the air, not the air thought the ball so the principle is not exactly the same

2 -The ball is round and the main pressure point faces the wind... the inlet manifold tubing have bends and curves and features that can generate low or high pressures... it's not homogenized at all unlike the golf ball.

3 - The ball spins through the air. The engine inlet manifold doesn't.

4 - As you add dimples to a flow pipe, you are generating an invisible layer of air around the surface effectively REDUCING THE bore size! And the dimples alone, if surfaced clean, it would mean 1 to 2 more millimeters in bore size! AND THIS IS WHY ladies and gentlemen that:

- The turbo guy hates this because it produces less power

- The High speed engine hates this because it reduces intake tubing diameter.

HUM.. ok you're mean. You show me something cool and then it's is not applicable.

No... I'm not mean. Physics is thought... get a grip!

So so far we can conclude that dimpling can solve the drag problem.

That under pressured flow this is not really important, and that under NA flow this can be the result to more air speed and as inertia shows, quite more air into the engine.

We've also understood that the dimples will reduce physically and then in flow terms, the usable diameter.

So you are wrong! Dimples are bad and the smooth fellas are right.

Nooooo I told you physics is tough and fluid dynamics is even worse... so suck it up and let's continue our roller-coaster ride.

As usual, engineers base a lot of technology in studying, testing and resulting data.

The Intake ports have the following naming:

Different areas have different drag and high/low pressure zones:

It also has different types of design, called Tangential port or Helical port.

Tangential ports are straight and very good for high speed flow. They product better high end power and are the preferred design for high performance engines.

Helical ports twist the air before the entrance of the cylinder, making the air enter the cylinder in a swirl movement.

Some cylinder designs used to have one Tangential port and a Helical one to generate a sort of compromise, sacrificing high end power over low end torque and usable mid range.

The Honda Low-rpm vtec explained earlier combined manages the best of both worlds, by allowing the low speed valve to open slightly, while the other opened fully, inducing and uneven air entry and resulting in a swirl, and then fully opening both valves at top end RPM with 2 Tangential ports providing the best flow.

Different port designs favor not only different engine applications, but also generate different low pressure zones.

Let's look at high pressure images of an intake side of an engine:

Hum... so if we where to see the same thing on a Golf ball, The High pressure would be at the front at it impacts air, and the low pressure at the back as it has less pull of drag.

Now, for the proud of my physics teachers,

let's look and solve the problem on this very well designed intake:

This thing is a piece of art from HONDA. The design show zones that will naturally generate small low pressure swirls and allow for the fast air to pass by! Here represented in green.

The only places where the design would benefit from dimples would be the places shown in red.

Summing up:

- Large, flat, PARALLEL surfaces.

- Pre- high pressure "squeeze" areas, generating pre squeeze and air speed increase.

Conclusions:

Good one! Flow Proven to gain over 5CFM / port over engine mid-range without losses on top range!

Bad One! Lost 2 to 5CFM over the entire engine range.

Fair.. could do a little less on the shoulders and a bit of a strip of triangular shaped dimples right through that division

No!If softened with epoxy and left on the division and bottom middle, would flow more!

Same...soften with epoxy EXCEPT in the middle and division and see gains.

Hell no! Lose the shoulders dimples, add right down the end of the port where you have a smooth fully dragging surface before a squeeze!

The first 2 examples should be clear enough. Do it right and gain, to it all over the place like a maniac and lose.

This is why people do not like the Dimple porting. Easy to fail, at a high cost / not that easy to gain little for a high cost.

Turning up the pressure on the turbo sure is easier, but then again, fine engineering is not about easy, now is it?

Hope you've enjoyed this.. tried not to deviate a lot into the nightmares of Fluid Dynamic calculations... I still have PTSD on that one my self.

The Diesel is dead, long live the ....errr... hybrid

2024-12-08T13:19:00.002+00:00

Diesel has been the drug of all nations (perhaps except for the US, Venezuela and UAE countries).

It's been so for all the wrong and all the good reasons.

Diesel has always been a child for the industry.

The fact that Diesel was a by-product of OIL refining, composed mainly from grease, meant it was a cheap fuel.

Also, the type of slow burning combustion, made the engine design long in stroke, and the injection cycle successive instead of a sudden violent explosion like the gas powered engine. This means it's got torque because of the long stroke design, but also because of the constant explosion happening all the way down stroke, one after the other.

In order for this to work, the engines quickly evolved from the pre-chamber indirect injection design, into the Direct Injection phase of design where you could control the injection much better.

Since the Diesel engine inputs just air and then squeezes the diesel fuel into the chamber by injection, it reaches very high compressions...20:1 for instance. The air will not detonate on it's own and the higher the compression, the higher the temperature, resulting on an easier combustion of diesel as it gets into the chamber (or pre-chamber on old ones).

The slow explosion and constant supply of grease down stroke also meant that the output generated less heat, but more emissions, as there is only so much residual oxygen left to burn as the explosions succeed each other, and fuel coola down the chamber... you see those tuner diesels generating clouds of black smoke, some are bad tuningz wome are on purpose to avoid hmthe piston to melt...depends on how extreme it is tuned.

This means one thing: Diesel was a perfect fit for the TURBO charger. It can input air at huge pressures without detonating, compress it further and then, the extra air, means extra oxygen to burn, and less emissions (this, of course, until the hillbilly tuner comes along and ups the injection map, creating some disastrous cuttlefish on wheels).

Emissions aren't really a problem on the industrial diesel. The exhaust temperatures can be sustained high and the burn process completed at the catalytic converter, while the filter grabs most of the carbon dust.

The problem becomes when you miniaturize the Diesel and put into your car! The catalytic converter can't run at the same temperature or have the same length, the filters need to be able to endure between maintenance cycles and we end up adding urine to the thing and call it ADBlue... yes AdBlue is just pee! expensive pee.

Das AUTO

Back in 1993, Mr. Ferdinand Piech (grandson of the great Ferdinand Porsche), was onboard to VW (in ruins) and picked it up from the ground floor, up.

His great ace: the TDI. The diesel that has both the power, the torque and the size for a small car.

Sure you had small diesel engines in cars, but they where... well bad! They were used in cars that needed to transport heavy loads and at a low consumption form a cheap fuel.

VW TDI spawned the new Diesel with the lively feeling that all other cars didn't have.

Sure pollution standards where a problem because the diesel car doesn't have industrial sized catalytic and filter to make it clean.

This lead to the now so well known Diesel-gate. Why? simple... it's not industrial, it's not clean. In order to be clean it would have to have much less output for the non industrial catalytic converter and particle filter to run efficiently. This meant burning less, inputting less, so less diesel and less air = less power and no one likes the TDI as the old diesel it's been marketed to replace!

And BOOM goes the scandal.

Scandal was out, VW was cheating the certification tests making the car run really lean, and nothing to do with what you'd find out to be the performance (and resulting emissions) on the road.

Surprise surprise, all other brands, that managed to follow the TDI trend with more "interesting" diesels, where cheating too.

And the reasons are not hard to understand: If you comply with emissions, you create an engine that is just as un-interesting as any normal turbo-diesel where before them.

But the problem was:

That the scandal generated news pieces and documentaries, so all the sudden, the sheep population had the knowledge that: Diesel engines produce NOx, NOx reacts with Ozone in upper atmosphere and generates smog and anyone coming into a metropolis can see the smog dome form the distance. OOOPS the sheep had awaken a tiny little bit.

VW had been selling the CLEAN Diesel Idea and it was just a lie. Go figure... a big company and their marketing department lying to public... tststs.

Now? Diesels are bad! Simple

guess what they've always been!

But people like their SUV's and Minivans, and trucks... so, if you're pulling 2 tonnes of metal around, you're gas engine will not be good to use unless it it huge. If it is huge, it takes up more space, needs more cooling, drinks more gas, needs bigger catalytic... the scaling becomes a problem.

AND THAT IS WHY small engines with big turbos are a trend. Manufacturers look to use the Turbo as a replacement for displacement and make the engines smaller, to pull the necessary weight us monkeys have gotten used to go around in!

But this doesn't have the low end torque that every one got hooked on with the TDI.

So what's to happen to the world now?

There is a new kid on the block.

The Electric car! A bad idea made public, much like VW's clean diesel. The electric car is not really the problem. The marketing is!

musk has been selling his teslas as a green solution! however the lithium in it's batteries is a real problem for ground contamination, the electricity it runs on is not clean at most countries and the battery suffers from memory degradation, meaning you'll be changing batteries every 2 to 4 years, and it will need to be discarded and new ones need to be placed in. That means more lithium and cobalt mining and pollution.

However the Electric motor has a very high torque and it's instantly available. That is why trains use them.

Electrics are then the new Diesel: torque as hell and bad for the environment.

And this is without considering the safety hazard. Lithium batteries tent to explode and burn for weeks, and by doing so, not only they cook people inside the cars, they also exhaust VERY HARMFUL GASES that can harm anyone breathing them.... from fire fighters to people living nearby the fire.

Fires in lithium battery factories are well known (recurring fires actually), fires with crashed electric cars are common and normally they are left to burn for a week inside a warehouse with vents and filters, as is next to impossible to put out a fire on a battery that generates it's combustible components.

There is also an important thing to consider - The electrical grid!

If everyone starts using electric cars (and if you ignore the suicide rate increase due to the non masculin experience of driving them) then it means that people get turn on the lights, the oven, the computer, the tv, the music amplifier and the car charger. So when people need more electricity will be when everyone will be overloading the grid while charging inefficient lithium batteries. Not smart. Would make more sense during the day as they are away at their work places. But if they start doing this at the workplace, the grid will suffer the hit of all those cars, computers, office lights, elevators, coffee machines... The works!

The solution: aside form carbon batteries, is using battery packs, that you leave home to charge during the day and then exchange when you get back home at evening. It's everyone's dream, to get back home and perform dangerous car maintenance while shifting a heavy, high energy packed with a direct voltage discharge hazard, power unit on your car... so no... not really a solution.

But there is a difference!

You see, the Diesel engine produces torque and pollution, but with electrics, the engine does not produce pollution, it's the battery that produces pollution and potentially, the generation of energy to store in the battery that produces the pollution.

And this does open the space for a solution!

Welcome to sodium-carbon and solid-state capacitor-battery:

Some brands that do not have a private ownership of South-African lithium mines, diverted from the lithium-ion battery. As such, you now have BYD, Honda and Toyota working battery solutions that do not contaminate soils forever... of course this goes against musk agenda of contaminating the world with lithium using the Clean car message! seen this before? I'm eagerly expecting the muskgate scandal... got popcorn and all.

This means there are several solutions out there to fix the pollution problem and allow people that love torque to enjoy the electrics.

Solid state batteries live way longer than lithium ones and can charge in 20 minutes.

Sodium Carbon ones will be even more efficient and never need replacing... and then, then there is Toyota and Honda with Hydrogen fuel cells that can both be used to produce electricity and be burnt in combustion with a bang far more explosive than gasoline.

Meanwhile, in Porsche land

Porsche, as usual, is the last brand that keeps pushing boundaries instead of trowing in the towel.

Porsche has devices a carbon neutral fuel. It's synthetic gasoline used carbon pulled form the air, meaning that it will produce exactly the same that was pulled form the atmosphere... and hence neutral.

This will allow for the Gasoline engine to live longer as a viable option.

So, diesel (at least in the small car), seams is dead.

So, diesel (at least in the small car), seams is dead. Makes sense that it is. I've explained this over the years to several people and it was a matter of time until it became clear.

SO IF diesel is dead and electrics blow up and contaminate worse then diesel...

I believe the future is hybrid and Toyota and Honda are on the right track.

By having a fuel cartige of hydrogen, you can use it to light a fuel cell that produces electricity for a electric engine for all the torque needing functions, and then shift to internal combustion for high revs and hydrogen explodes even more violently and faster then gasoline.

There is also the fact that, if your car produces water as a result of either fuel cell or internal combustion, you can recicle them into a sodium rich deposit inside the car, and then use the ceiling of the car with solar panels to generate hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis and either recharge that hydrogen cell or just plainly charge a carbon nanotube battery pack.

Carbon nanotubes are able to store 3x more energy under the same density as lithium oxide ions... and they are lighter, and being carbon, they can be also part of the car's structure... This means that your battery can be the same carbon monochoque that supports your car and saves your like if you crash.

The Diesel is dead, so is the electric lithium polymer battery, long live the hydrogen hybrid.

In the engine is the Heart of a car, the chassis is its soul... and there are several types of soul.

2024-11-24T23:59:00.003+00:00

It's common to hear that the engine is the heart of the car.

The electronics are the brain and then there is, to my view, one of the most important things in a car > the chassis. What are we to call it? My atheist brain points to Character... but for the sake of generic compatibility, lat's call it: soul.

Souls seams important enough to consider and mention.

Several cars have very different chassis, and it's really hard to categorize them, but let's try to explain and have this split into sections.

And that means a series of POSTS as the data is quite a lot to process, but I'm really having very little tine to dedicate to this, so... all in one, read it in sections... you'll be fine.

The build type:

This relates to the design on the main structure of the chassis. The basis of the design, per say. It will have different results depending of the different suspension design applied to it, but you can split the chassis design base into 4 main designs:

- Tubular:

Tubular chassis are common in fully race built cars. Nascar cars are tubular designs that have a "body" looking like the model they are supposed to reflect for marketing purposes. It's a design that brings in the best torsional rigidity with the lightest design. The main problem with this design is that, if damaged, it's very difficult to repair, the time and skill to build it is quite high and as such, race driven design.

Dragsters are tubular designs... and one of my favorite cars of all time, the original Gull-wing Mercedes, is , as a race bread animal, tubular framed too.

- Ladder frame:

Ladder design is very common on old cars or contemporary Heavy load vehicles such as pickups, trucks and military vehicles. This is a easy to build design, but it is a heavy solution ( the chassis will then get married to the body and both will be heavier). It's a strong design but tends to suffer from poor torsional rigidity, and as such only really usable on cars that aren't made to corner as speed, both because the flexing will be bad and the weight too.

- Backbone:

The backbone centers the concept of the ladder design in a sort of an X and reduces the parallel sections with a central beam. It's a concept suited for offroading due to the clearance the chassis provides to the moving parts of the axles and suspension. By tightening the design, there are instant improvements over the ladder design. It is however a costly design, both to build and to maintain the car.

Due to robustness it was applied to military vehicles that have to endure offroad ability while supporting massive loads.

But there are exceptions here. Build the backbone with metal sheet profiles welded together wit proper welding, and you may end up with an excellent and light chassis base... but don't crash it!

This is the chassis of the first Lotus Elan. The body of the Elan was made from fibre glass, the chassis had to bear all the strength, so, as you can imagine, this Back Bone design opening with the shape of an X, sure was strong.

- Xframe:

The x frame is step forward from the back bone design by making it almost like if a giant had squeezed the ladder design right in the middle. Torsional rigidity is a problem but it is much lighter than the backbone. This meant that, as long as the body was string enough, it could result in a decent amount of torsional rigidity, at a lower weight.

In order to fix this, lateral ladder structures where added to the xframe, making it less dependent on the body rigidity.

- Monocoque / Unibody :

It's a design that was adapted from ship building, airplane manufacturing, and evidently, being string and light, it quickly found it's way into cars. It's the most used method today, and even the variations of today's chassis are to a point, monocoque + some other design hybrid. It offers a design easy to repair, strong and light, but also (if with a roof design) with an excellent torsional rigidity.

Sub-type -The Xbone-Frame design:

This is an innovative design form Honda, that fuses concepts, in order to address the main problem of a monocoque design on a topless car: no roof! It's a simple concept to understand. Grab a shoe-box and, with the lid on try to torsion it... it will not flex... even being made from cardboard and being light. Now remove the lid (roof) and try the same.. it flexes all over the place.

Honda, while building the Honda S2000, had specific needs for the chassis, as the car was purposely built as a high performance sports car with impeccable handling. If couldn't be heavy the having a monocoque without a roof and added reinforcements (as they normally do with topless cars) is out to the question. So Honda turned to the BackBone design, the xframe design and the ladder design and adapted them to the monocoque, creating the x-bone frame design.

In essence, they use the standard floor pan on a monocoque design, but then they move what would be the roof of the design into the high part of the transmission tunnel of the car (much like the back bone design), Squeezed it together making a sort of an X out of a Ladder design, much like the Xframe, and then the ladder design surrounded this and bound it to the monocoque. Brilliant!

It looks like a Ladder design and an X frame all together

But then The X is elevated like the Backbone as if it was a top that was lowered...

...to the mid section of the car, right on top of the transmission tunnel like the back bone.

But then integrated with the monocoque profiles.

and reinforced with stronger profiles like the reinforcements on a Carbon monocoque design.

It's the ultimate hybrid to have on steel.

Sub-type - Carbon Monocoque:

If price is not a problem, ans lightness is the word, then nothing beats the carbon monocoque for torsional rigidity, lightness and expensive price. It's the unicorn of chassis designs and it's reserved for super and hyper-car production due to the price, lack of massification of the process and the requirements of tools to be able to produce them.

BUT the chassis is not only the frame:

Sure the main thing about a chassis is the frame as it makes the car what it can become from design, but then there are options regarding the accessory elements on a chassis that will either enhance its design, or show it's flaws or limitations.

Because of the Myriad of options, unless the chassis incorporates the suspension type in it's design, there is a common SUBframe that supports the suspension and attaches to the frame. There are 2 reasons for this, the support for several options over the same chassis design, and the maintenance/repair options that having a subframe separate from the main frame allows for.

1st - Suspension design:

- Types and implementations

Why? well because:

- Independent

The concept of the independent suspension is simple! Each wheel is independent form the other and free to move. This allows for adjustments to the way each wheel maintain the camber and toe angles while cornering or digesting road imperfections.

- Trailing Arm:

Probably the most simple design in a suspension. If you like lego like I did, you can build one with 4 pieces! As such, as one can imagine it is the base of all suspension designs and all the changes done depart form this. Either by shifting the position by 90% and stabilizing like the wishbone, or Mcpherson, or maintaining the angle and adding rigidity, as the twist-beam. Even the simplest solid axle is supported by the trailing arm design, so... this is the father of them all.

- Citroen's ingenious Pull-rod trailing arm:

If there is a way to explain Citroen is their ingenious suspension designs. It all started with the 2CV that had to be both tremendously good at digesting country side and war destroyed roads, and also be very simple do produce, maintain and at a low cost... I mean.... the list of demands is the size of texas. What they've come up with was the trailing arm design, coupled with wnat today we use in F1 as the push-rod, but in this case, inverted as PULL-rod. They then mass the rod over a tube along the chassis that has both springs of both front and read suspension systems, minimizing space usage, allowing for a more generous cabin. It's just brilliant and simple... take a good look:

- Double Wishbone:

Double wishbone is a perfect way to control the car wheel movement, and as such it is used on 90% of sports cars. It is an expensive design and consumes space, being less frequent in axles where there is little space to use. Front engine'd cars with transversal engines would be an excellent example of how space does not allow for double wishbone.

- Double Wishbone with push rod:

This is the pinnacle of suspension design. All the strengths of the double wishbone, in terms of independent wheel movement and maintaining road contact, while reducing the sprung weight by moving the coil-on-damper assembly to a fixed location inside the chassis. Why don't we see this in all cars? COST! But F1 cars extensively use this.

The problem then becomes:

Where are we going to place the engine?

...or the golf clubs for that matter.

- Macpherson

This desing is an atempt to simplify cost and space on the doubel wishbone. It essencially uses a very robust damper to use it structuraly as both damper and the top wishbone.

- Multi-link

Multilink tries to address several problems all at once. Cost savings by making it usable on several models with simple adjustments, space for potential differentials (manly on AWD applications), cabin space. It essentially brakes-down the wishbone into several links that anchor to different point in the chassis, maximizing space usage. Since it is more compact, it's often seen with the shock absorver separate from the spring.

- Volvo-s Delta-link

Citroen may be excellent at suspension design, but Volvo is not bad at all. In a way to improve the multi-link with a passive rear steering system, Volvo designed the delta link.

Much like the Multi link breaks the wishbone in several independent links to the chassis, Volvo decides to stretch the wishbone across the chassis and try a hybrid between the wishbone, multilink and the torsion beam. And it worked beautifully.

Why was it only used on the P80 chassis and then abandoned? Well Volvo customers aren't really the racing type, and the feel of the chassis having to bend the bushings before turning in, scared a lot of customers and then... it was no more. I still have one and it is very fun to drive... but you do have to know what is happening before panicking. I admit, first impressions, unless you are very sharp and spirited with the steering wheel, it will feel like the car is under steering, until the suspension load overcomes the bushings strength and then it will graciously start to turn in, allowing for a faster corner exit. The stronger the bushing rubber, the worse this feeling is...but you need to understand that this is a passive system, and as such it will require physics to happen. Turn in like a pilot, though, and you're right in the zone the system was built to excel in... and there lies the paradox: you buy a family saloon, fill it with the kids, wife, dog, luggage for the weekend, and then steer into corners like if your in a time attack... hummm not! I mean, sure, I do that, but my wife has the same sort of madness i have, and the kids are a genetic milkshake of the 2 of us, so naturally they love the tires screaming thought the corners :s! BUT the majority of people our there don't really do this.

- Dependent

This is an old design but it is still used today on cars that work on extreme torque levels or terrains. But guess what: it is still supported by the good old trailing arm... it just tights the trailing arms to a rigid structure and then makes the wheels dependent on each other.

- Semi-independent

This design focus on 2 principles. The first is cost reduction, the second is space saving, allowing for more boot size. However there are advantages to the design, under some circumstances and that may be the cause of some decisions that, at first look may seem dumb. But we'll get to the point soon enough. The semi-independent suspension design is a rigid structure much like the solid axle form the dependent suspension, however the hay it connects to the chassis and some structural flexibility will annoy it to, under some circumstances behave with wheel independence... and that is what it's semi independent, the semi relies on bushings strength and torsional rigidity of the assembly.

- Torsion beam (twistbeam) : try evolving the Trailing arm, and adding a ladder design to it, with a rigid main beam nest to the bushings, and a less sturdy on half way through... and you get a torsion beam design. Is it better? is it worse? depends who you talk to, but IMO it will depend on the usage or purpose.

However think that for some reason, Ford Motorsports changed the normal torsion beam on the MK1puma to a independent trailing arm for the S1400 and S1600 chassis.

They changed from this...

...to this.

So if you think about this for a while it should clear notions in your head pretty easy, but we'll get back to this latter on the article.

- ScottRussell

The ScottRussell is a type of trailing arm suspension, but the coupling of the trailing arm is not done at the top oh the H structure, but rather half way through the beam it self using the coupling method called ScottRussel. The movement is then limited to up and down, over a possible angle on the axis, but there is no change in the wheel position on the chassis towards the ground, unlike the trailing arm that describes 2 angles. to the chassis. This means less movement, and as such less more control on the physics.

- Damping implementations:

So now that we've covered the majority of designs for the linkages of the moving parts to the chassis, and chassis types, the works. It's time to look at how the energy from the movement is dissipated and controlled.

- Coil and damper

Typically used on multi links, trailing arms and torsion beam designs.

- Coil over damper

This design is used on double wishbone, McPherson and push-rod designs. Some are adjustable (racing ones) but the majority is manufacturer fixed.

- Leaf springs

Used on simple (cheap) designs, or on extreme load designs where handling in not an important factor. Military vehicles and trucks normally use this design.

One might argue that the loads are what determines the leaf spring instead of the coil... and that a coil to handle all that load would be huge, but then:

so if it's good for trains, it's good for trucks, and the only excuse left is the cheap one!

Well this is, old technology. No really... it is!

see?

And yet, Corvettes till the C7, use this still!!

You see, they claim that they needed to lower the car for aerodynamic purpose and that a coil would take too much space... sounds interesting...err delusional. That's maybe what they should replace push-rod with, in F1!

That's probably why in the C8 they decided to change that with coil springs... or maybe because it was designed by an European team, the cornering abilities where part of the equation :s

I'd ask for my money back, but then again, I'd never buy a vette.

- Pneumatic

Pneumatic suspension have long been used on trucks and also luxury cars. They allow for adjusting of ride height and stiffness. Particularly interesting in the truck world, where you may have uneven cargo and as such the suspension may increase pressure to compensate the heavier side and not as much on less heavier one.

On luxury cars it is used to enable quick changes between ride height and softness, but also, because luxury cars are heavier than they should be, help to control body roll.

It would make sense on sports cars, but the weight of the compressor and tank, plus the piping, plus the space used normally loses to active systems that can improve the spring on damper tremendously and make the advantage of the pneumatic, null.

In order to be effective as a active suspension at the speeds a track car needs to, it would have to have extremely high pressures and a tank to match.

- Hidro pneumatic

Hidro pneumatic tends to solve the fully pneumatic usage issue for fast response. By combining oil and gas, Gas allows for the damping part of the equation while oil takes care of the height and reaction time (being oil a non compressible fluid, unlike air).

Some of today's shock absorvers use this principle, and although the article focus on the entire string /damper assembly, the principle is still valid.

- Hydragas

Hydragas is a concept that uses the exact same principle the amount or gas and the pressure is used to support the spring effect.

Some hydragas applications cross link the oil deposits so that the car right tryes to maintain the same height going through bumps.

- Citroen Hidractive

As expected, Citroen innovated on this concept and created their own system. Their Hydro pneumatic suspension debuted in the Citroen DS was remarkable and used compressed air to generate the spring effect, but the pre-loading of the compressed air deposit was controlled over with oil. There was then a valve to connect that secondary compression chamber with the direct oil chamber on the damper.

This system allowed for control on both ride height and also stiffness of the damping, by managing the oil going into the primary chamber and the pressure regulator that allowed oil into the secondary chamber, next to the air precharged balloon.

The way that the dampers interconnect to each other and the extra dampers placed in the middle of the system, then allowed for a very intelligent and comfortable suspension system.

This system was so brilliant, that the DS could run on 3 wheels! Literally!

This then evolved and pinnacled with electronic adaptive control over the pressurization of the dampers and resulted in the Xantia Activa. This baby was able to use lateral acceleration and ground level distance to then send oil to the dampers on that side of the car and maintain a perfect ground clearance, maximizing grip like it was on rails. Just brilliant engineering.

Yes, it is THAT brilliant. Check the video:

- Hydroelastic

This is one of those hybrids that really didn't work all that good. But the concept is simple: grab an hydragas, dump the air pressure balloon as use a rubber expandable one filled with fluid, and make the elastic expanding force your "spring".

2nd - Drive train design:

The drive train design has a tremendous impact on the chassis soul. Not only regarding how the power get's delivered to the ground, and the reactions the car has as a result, but, their connection is a bit deeper than that. If you are smart enough to by your car from a brand that fine tunes the chassis for fun, you may end up discovering that, under grip driving the chassis may seem unbalanced and under-steering, but when you unleash it's full potential under a controlled drift, you get the why as to that specific chassis tuning setting.... I'll expand on this later.

- Types

- FWD

Stands for Forward Wheel Drive. Also known as called FF, standing for Front Engined Front wheel drive. The front wheels are the ones passing the engine power to the ground.

This simple fact means several immediate considerations. First of all, the front wheels will be overloaded with the burden of steering the car and delivering power to the ground. This is minimized by the fact that the engine and gear box will be sitting in the front of the car, helping the car squeeze the wheels to the ground and maximize traction.

HOWEVER, it generates 2 problems: If you accelerate, the weight shifts to the back of the car and the nose of the car lifts, making the power delivery more difficult. The chassis suspension tuning can help by softening the back and slightly elevating it, but does not fix the issue. The second problem is the fact that, being front heavy, the car has a tendency to maintain it's inertia of movement and changing direction is hard by definition.

These factors normally translate to, inf ignoring electronics, you do not want more than 250bhp on a FF car, nor to you want more than 300nm of torque. Electronics and active differentials have allowed these numbers to be pushed forward but always at the expense of tire thread and with a lot of help form active rear axles to cope with the understeer feature of this chassis type.

This does not mean that it is bad. It just has it's limitations and there is a reason why hyper-cars and super-cars are either AWD or RWD. There is just a limit to what you can load the front wheels with.

The FWD chassis, mainly if you have a high torque engine, is better enjoined with LFB, that stand for Left Foot Braking. You can use Left Foot Braking in two ways, one to control the weight distribution, the other to tame down engine delivery and minimize wheel-spin... this is the case with the FWD chassis, is you are flooring it our of the corner and the burst of power makes the inner wheel spin... you can lift, tame, or use the left foot to try to tame the power and force it to the wheel with better traction. Some electronic differentials apply this principle.

- RWD

The front wheels are the ones steering the car, and the rear wheels responsible for passing the engine power to the ground. This simple fact means that, as physics are concerned, the system is much more stable.

Driving a car however means that you have to have a profound knowledge of physics, and the RWD platform, although more efficient, demands much more understanding of physics and it's conception than the FWD. It is... less forgiving, and as such, paradoxically, seen as less stable.

The problems are mainly 2.

1 - While cornering under acceleration, the front weight over the front wheels may unsettle the rear that, under torque from the engine, may brake-away more abruptly.

Not a friend of the rain, particularly with big engines and load shifts. Say, you are going around a bend and then you need to break... as you lift of the gas, load shifts to the front and unload the rear, as you then start to brake, the load shifts further, but the engine, (not decelerating) with it's compression may act as a handbrake and totally unsettle the chassis. This is why you should use the gear box ans heel and toe as you decelerate on a RWD machine. It may feel strange... using the gearbox to shift down may generate even more unsettling load on the rear wheels as the drive is lower and torque more influential... sure, but as you wheel and toe, you'll rev-match the gear to the engine rotation and that avoids the unsettling of the rear by matching rotation of the engine with rotation of the wheels.

2 - While accelerating, the rear end is the one transmitting the torque to the road, and as such will try to overtake the front of the car. Wheel spin requires precise steering input to be controlled.

Again, in this case for a different purpose, the left foot breaking may help brake into the corner and not allow the rear wheels to induce spin buy minimizing lift from the weight transfer, and the torque difference bu not decelerating abruptly.

- FR

Stands for Front Engined Rear Wheel Drive.

These cars, normally have a very comfortable steering feel as it's not too light, like MR and RR models due to the engine weight over the front axle, but there is no torque steer, you have a much better feel.

The balance is more difficult to obtain as, having the heavy engine at one end of the car, the polar moment of inertia will be harder to control.

- Front MR

Stands for Front mounted Mid Engined Rear Wheel Drive.

Quite a pearl of a chassis. It is Rear Wheel drive, but the polar moment of inertia is handled by placing the engine in the front part of the car, but behind the front axle, making it as easy to control as is comes.

This sort of chassis, generated a rotational tendency on the car. It means that it can rotate without generating difficult to control polar moment of inertia. It is very fun, but the fact that the car can turn easily means it can also do so while you don't expect it to so... requires much more experience to be driven... much more experience as in borderline racing experience.

- Rear MR

Stands for Rear mounted Mid Engined Rear Wheel Drive

Another pearl of a chassis. Similar in feel and reactions as the Front MR, it's a VERY demanding chassis.

- RR

Stands for Rear mounted Rear Wheel Drive

Only 2 cars I can remember are like this, and they are based out of the same design. The VW beetle platform and the Porsche 911.

It's a ginormous paradox! The engine in top of the rear drive-train means HUGE grip, and the steering is light as a feather... but overcome the grip limits, and the rear heavy thing will try to overtake AGGRESSIVELY.

This nature has been solved over te years with TREMENDOUS amount of investment fro Porsche in electronics and vehicle control systems. Today's 911 is a masterpiece, not only because of it's rewarding drive experience but mainly because, the engine was in the worse possible position for managing polar moment of inertia, and they've managed to tame it. It is also 4wd and not just RWD, but you can get the Carrera 2 versions.

But remove the electronics and you get a car with 60% of its weight at the back, a lot of engine and power... and a gasoline tank at the front that started to get lighter and lighter as you drive along, offloading the bias even more to the rear. That's why it was called, the widow maker.

Not a car for my engineering brain, for sure, but place a true excellent driver at the wheel and you get some spectacular drifts at brutal speeds:

- 4wd

Stands for 4 Wheel Drive.

Regularly confused with AWD, the 4wd system is a mechanical linkage between the front and rear axles that it always coupled. There will be 2 differentials (3 on more sophisticated systems), depending on the sophistication of the system, but the coupling is mechanical and the torque is divided depending on the type of differential used.

A lot of the implementations of 4WD systems implement the torsen torque sensing differential, that will lock if it senses on of it's splits is slipping.

- AWD

Stands for All Wheel Drive and it is not a necessarily a 4WD system.

What do I mean by this? Well the electronics and differentials make the difference.

On an AWD machine, the differentials are not torsen. They are Electronically controlled Limited Slip Differentials that can choose the drive-train to send power to, and then the wheel to send power to. The All Wheel drive stands for, any one of the wheels is able to get torque in different levels.

So why "not necessarily a 4wd" system. If you look at Xdrive from BMW, it will have a minimum 70% rear and 30% front bias setting, meaning that there will always be power to the 2 axles and then they split between them, meaning that, bare minimum you get 35% torque to each rear wheel plus 15% to each front wheel. This means that it is 4WD. But if you look at a Volvo Haldex, the front train will have the full torque and the rear will only get coupled if the front loses grip, meaning that it is a AWD system but not a 4WD as there are times where there is no torque being sent to the rear wheels.

The world of AWD is spectacular as, the electronics, can be made clever enough to perform the so called toque biasing features and help the car corner better (say like the focus RS) or drift perfectly (say like the Mitsubushi Lancer Evolution and the Focus RS).

- Implementations

As you would expect by now, the type is not were it ends. There are ways to implement the drive train design and these go into 2 categories.

- Rigid Axles

Rigid Axles are the oldest design.

Rear axles are a cheap way to build and require less maintenance. They also are preferred if you are talking about big power numbers. So cheap and big numbers, meant that 90% of american muscle cars will have Rigid axles and 99% of offroaders too.

The problem with rigid axles is that they generate a dependent suspension design, that at the very best can be twisted into a semi-dependent design.

- Independent semi-Axles

The best design IMO and allow you to have an independent suspension.

Noticeably more complex than the solid axle, but do understand that most of the complexity comes form the freedom to design a better suspension.

The "feel":

Finally we get to the point where all things combine into what you actually feel behind the wheel.

Let's try to categorize the chassis as an experience.

The Comfortable Chassis

Gonna say it right out : NOT my thing! In my book, the comfort is in your living room sofa and not around a bend on a twisty road, so whenever I see people drooling about some Mercedes that weights 2 tonnes because it has electric motors to massage your back while driving I just make a tremendously caustic comment in my mind, and move away in hopes that it doesn't surge out of my mouth while I'm making my run out of audible range.

The comfortable chassis is normally a BAD dynamic chassis. Why? well normally it is part of the design of a luxury or family car, and this means that it will have items that, dynamically speaking are pointless. You do not need luggage space to drive fast, you do not need the heated seats, infotainment systems for the kids or any of those things to drive fast... they's just weight!

So being biased towards those, it is heavy by design, being heavy also add inertia to the movement and if it is bad while cornering, it is not really that bad while going over a lump in the pavement, as the weight of the inertia works towards comfort and works the suspension harder than in a light car.

It's like flying on a airbus 320 and a 380... go over an down draft on the 320 and your stomach glues to t your lungs... but in the enormously heavy 380, you just feel light for a bit and than that's it!

This is the grounds of most Marcedes, Volvos, Audis and top lines from other brands. I left BMW out and Volvo in for one reason. Volvo no longer builds sporty models and BMW never stopped trying to have the driver happy about driving their cars.

These sort of chassis will make you feel relaxed in your driving. If powerful, normally the electronics are tweaked to produce a smooth power delivery. First because no one buys a limousine to escape from the police, except maybe Robert DeNiro and Jean Renault... but still they are exceptions. Second because it will not be a trust building moment, as you feel all that weight jumping around the soft suspension.

Of course, independently of how competent they tune the handling, you will feel it negotiating the tremendous inertia during corners, something that should be VERY noticeable on a weight transference on an S curve.

The comfort will mean that, not only there is weight and filters, all round those will go all the way to the commands. Turn the wheel slightly and there is little to no reaction... add 1mm of throttle and ... no reaction... everything is totally filtered out and this makes the driving experience disconnected.

If you want a perfect example of this, drive a P80 based V70 mk1 Volvo ... comfy but not too much. Then drive the P2 based mk2 V70... it will feel like you steer and then the orders are communicated to the chassis by voice and then someone steers the drive train. Comfort was pushed too far IMO. Then drive the P3 based V60 and you'll find a less comfortable but much more dynamic car... since the P3 platform is based on the Ford Mondeo platform.

The Bad chassis

Ever driven a car that is not competent, not comfortable... just plain cheap? Dull? Frustratingly stupid?

Those are the bad ones.

One of the worse I've had was the Audi A3... yes the same crap that audi TT's where made from... and people payed good money for it.

I hated the thing. Steering was filtered, it under-steered like mad, and if you left'foot brake it will safemode the engine and remove ALL POWER till it decides it's ok to bring it back. Mental! You you really provoked it with ESP off, using the hand brake, it would bring the ESP back on.. I mean not only it's not good, it thinks it knows more than your!

The only good thing was that it was based out of the Golf chassis and the Seat Leon chassis, so if you request it to be setup as a Leon, and then over fill the rear tires, the under-steering is ALMOST gone. But man... worse spent money in cars I've ever had.

Ever tried a Mercedes SLK? Don't! Get a Megane Mk2 SW and it will go around corners better than that thing, and with more confidence and feedback... for pennies compared to it!

Oh and the Chrysler crossfire, manages to be worse. Same chassis as the SLK, but with heavier engine, heavier interior... hopeless.

The Welcoming Chassis

This is the sort of chassis that, right up front, will tell you how things are, and make you feel welcome driving it.

Typically a chassis that will feel solid, transmit orders from the pavement and to the wheels with a good feel, without entering the discomfort zone.

Get into a Megane, or a Focus, or an Civic EP3 or EP4, a Fiesta, and you will immediately feel that the chassis is firm but not uncomfortable, competent and informant of the limits ahead, giving you quite the confidence to explore the limits.

You will feel right integrated to the car and while it feels sporty, you do not have to wrestle it to go fast. You can go for a drive on a Broad, and feel right relaxed while having fun. One of those chassis that can make you smile without the occasional "oh shit" that compresses your sphincter.

The Sports Chassis

Things here start diverting. There are lots of sporty chassis around. But you can't really classify them in the same sub categories... so let's branch.

The Fun Teacher

Remember those teachers that where really cool and loved to teach, but then when things got real, would sit besides you and guide you through the problem out into the solution? That guy... That is the sort of chassis you'll find on an ST fiesta or a Ford Puma (MK1.... forget about the suv nonsense).

It's firm, it's light, it's fast and then it will give you loads of confidence to abuse... however, there will come a time where you really go sideways and all seams lost.. and then, the chassis will maintain neutrality, allow you to counter-steer ad step on the gas full throttle... drift out of it and get back to line without countering the inertial or going side to side while dissipating the damping force.

That lightness together with excellent balance will get you through.

You will learn, and you may not crash while doing so, as long as you don't go trying tricks in the middle of town whee you have no where to go if things go wrong.

The MILF Teacher

I don't know if all students had a MILF teacher, but I've had my happy young times. You know that teacher that is way older than you, but she is sexy, and the knows it, she dresses like she knows it and loves to tease their students. You know you shouldn't, as much as you know you want to.

Welcome to the MX5, the GT86, the Lexus ls200, Front Engined Rear Wheel drive cars...

...with rear wheel drive but rear tires as thin as the front ones, you know it's going to get sideways and it will happen on the first date!

The problem with the MILF teacher? Any one of these chassis will know more than you and expand your concepts of driving over the limit with confidence and trust... but the MILF has a husband, and he had a shotgun. Overcook the driving and the linearity that would let you go sideways while maintaining the trajectory will turn into a no grip spin.... Get it in too hot and the husband will find out and shoot back.

The Karate Teacher

The picture of efficiency. The razor sharp, non compromise, perfectly efficient chassis.

Get into a Megane RS on a racetrack. You'll get into a Karate teacher. It will expand your limits like you've never thought possible, while making the life of a "Ferari" 355 miserable.

It will allow you to enter the corner way to fast, and mess up the exit but still on the track, and then went you get it right it will put a smile on your face. That car has one problem and one alone... the engine. A chassis like that deserved an NA screamer. Put a K24 on ethanol pushing 400 NA HP at 11.000 rpm on that chassis and no one will be able to get you on the track. Some people may say there are 2 problems with that car... the engine and the rear suspension.

You see, Renault Sport changed the front suspension design unto quite a masterpiece, but then the rear... well the rear is this:

Yup that's a torsion beam.

Why? I don't think they where trying to save cost. I believe they just focused on the road handling to the road to handle on, and built a trackday car.

Evidently, if you take an MRS over a road like this:

You'll be begging for a EP3 civic, or a FordFocus with:

Independent rear suspension! CLEAR!

But I disagree from the 2 issues on that car... You see you need to think of it like the Karate Teacher... it was built for the track. For smooth tarmac. Not the bumpy B road. Don't expect the Karate teacher to also Ballet!!!!

And this get's us back to the PUMA. Remember back when explaining chassis designs when I talked that while transforming the PUMA, Ford did not change the rear suspension on the upgrade of the Puma to the Racing Puma, but they did so in the Rally S1400 and S1600 versions. So let's think about this for a minute or two. The BODY of the Ford Racing Puma is the same as the S1400 and S1600, it would be logic to just separate the production into consumer / racing and use the racing line to product the FRP.

But if you think of this for a bit, the FRP was sold in England alone, and it's a 500 units limited edition. It will run on English roads. So they created it with parts from the standard model, lowering maintenance and production cost, and just tweaked the body for better road holding and stance.

But the S1400 and S1600 would have to go an all sorts of terrain, so the result was a much more expensive but crucially independent rear suspension system.

So why doesn't the Karate teacher also do Ballet? Well... This, really:

the torsion beam axle

the torsion beam going over a bump on the left wheel

the torsion beam compressed position in comparison

You may say... so what? seams like the torsion part on the torsion beam worked and the wheel did move independent form the other!!! Sure-thing but then look at it from the back:

As one wheel goes up, the torsion beam changes the camber on the other wheel, disturbing the road holding capacity from the bump and the changes in camber on the only holding wheel.

And the you say: So why not increasing the torsional rigidity on the bar...

well both wheels would jump when compressed and the car would hoop... not good mid bend!.. just not!

The Stilgar

Ever seen the Dune Movies? the new ones... brilliant and highly recommended, but still, Stilgar is the Fremen warrior trying to train Paul Atreides on the ways of the Fremen warriors. Part of that training is to master riding the Shack-Hulud (the ginormous worms that destroy everything). And Stilgar says: "Well noe you must ride Shack-Hulus and he will determine if you are ready.... or you die!"

Well come the the Toyota MR2, the NSX and the Honda S2000. The Silgars!

There is an enormous set of skills for you to learn from them and your driving limits will expand to universes you didn't comprehend until experimented... but it's a Stilgar sort of thing... you will learn or you will die. Simple!

In the case of the S2000 chassis, it tweaked to become full racing, this is even more clear. The need to control every aspect of the car dynamics is crucial to avoid it running wild on the worse possible moment. These where cars tuned by professionals and expect professional inputs on both throttle and steering. Take a look at Senna driving the NSX or GanSan or Keiichi Tsuchiya driving the S2000 and it will become clear.

And that is the ways of the Stilgar.

Hope you enjoyed this. See you soon

The ways of the dark side of the force are...plain devious.

2024-11-20T23:11:00.003+00:00

Hi all I've been cooking this one for a while now.

If you know me you also know I hate deceptive things, so naturally i hate 99% of marketing out there.

I also am a proud engineer and value quality engineering over everything, so, this trend of lying about car's engine capacity and other aspects has been slowly but steady boiling me in a stew... time to serve then :)

It started with Volvo:

When Engineers where running things at Volvo, a T4 engine meant a Turbo 4 cylinder engine, a T5 engine meant a Turbo 5 cylinder engine, a T6 engine meant a turbo 6 cylinder engine and a V8 meant a 8 cylinder engine in V shape. And guess what, a D5 would be a Diesel 5 cylinder engine, a 1.6D would be a 1.6 Diesel and a 2.0D would be a 2.0 diesel engine... Simple! Clear! but above all, HONEST!

Then for some reason I fail to understand, they decided to stop producing interesting cars, but did a last effort on maintaining some spirit with the dual charge 2.0 4 cylinder engine able to produce 400 bhp out of a simple 2.0 with turbo and supercharger combined. Bold, crazy... very Volvo... and then...

..and then... all the sudden, around 2016, some marketeer must have taken over and we started looking at: Hi all I've been cooking this one for a while now.

T2 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo engine

T3 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo engine

T4 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo engine

T5 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo engine

T6 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo + supercharger engine

T8 - 2.0 4 cylinder, turbo + supercharger engine

I mean... I can understand the production scale and the appeal of having a low cost 4cylinder across the low end range... but call the T4 eco (instead of T2), T4 versatility (instead of T3) and T4... but if it has a turbo and 4 cylinders call it what it is! Regarding the T5, T6 and T8 JUST DON'T LIE TO PEOPLE! Damn marketeers and their need to lie to sell is just absurd.

Not entirely happy with the insult, they went further and add batteries and electric engines... and power cord ...and.. elon stuff to make it completely ridiculous:

I mean, in white it's just like a tampon; don't pull the string unless you are ready for what comes next.. that T8 is not a 8 cylinder engine! they got you! too late! sell now... dump that thing before people start opening their eyes.

It evolved with Mercedes and VW and their wannabe exhaust:

It's just too idiotic! I mean look at this:

Some call them cheesy, some call them stupid... me? Childish! You see it's like the kids running around with pedal karts but faking the engine sound with their mouth brrrr-tsss, brrrrrr-tssss, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-tssss.

It's just as childish and stupid as having an electric wannabe thing and make the stereo mimic a real automobile engine:

.... oh wait:

It's just mental! It's bad enough it runs on batteries and it is not a vibrator, but at least assume the dull product you've just created, leave the engine vibration and noise to the real deal.. what's next on inventory of tricks? a fog machine? testosterone pills?

It culminated with Audi and their absurd any "your name here"tdi technology:

Again back in the day, 1.6tdi means 1.6liter engine, tdi tech. A 2.0 tdi meant a 2.0 liter engine with tdi technology, they even had the 1.9 130PD and 1.9 150PD standing for 1900cc, 130 or 150 bhp and Pumpe Duse (u-boat diesel injector technology where the injector is also the pump as it is manually operated by a cam shaft and produces injection pressure with mechanical direct drive). Now?:

35tdi - 2.0 4 cylinder common rail tdi engine

40tdi - 2.0 4 cylinder common rail tdi engine

But it does not end here. Remember the glorious Audi Quattro?

With that Rally winning pedigree QUATTRO system?

You think your Audi TT, or the 1999 on A3 has the same tech? Think again. It uses Haldex technology! It does not mean it is bad... it's JUST NOT QUATTRO AND YOU BADGE THEM AS SUCH STILL!

Just tell the truth... state, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE: AWD! easy... and, most importantly, true.

But still,

...while all of these brands made their marketing efforts do defraud their customers, BMW on the other hand didn't...almost... almost didn't. And I can almost forgive them for that!

You see They lies still, they are just giving you more than you think you are paying for... on most cases, but not all.. seams like they feel bad when they lies so they make up on other models... either that or they suffer from bi-polar marketeer disorder.

BMW x16D - 2.0 4 cylinder Turbo

BMW x18D - 2.0 4 cylinder Turbo

BMW x20D - 2.0 4 cylinder Turbo

BMW 123D - 2.0 4 cylinder Turbo ( the ALMOST)

BMW 330D - 3.0 6 cylinder Turbo

BMW 335D- 3.0 6 cylinder Turbo ( the ALMOST)

Conclusion:

The world has gone crazy with marketing. It's like humans has stopped evolving and started a regressive process that makes them sheep , easily controlled with lies, delivered with a new sort of tool called marketing... and we can claim this without instant rebelion and blood on the streets. I can't understand!

Is Honda dead? You see It looks like so, but they still try to produce Type-r's... but then it does smell rotten!

2024-10-27T16:07:00.526+00:00

It's Halloween season, so its time for some creepy stories.

I've been a Honda fan for long.

I loved the B16A EG6 and EK9 civics :

Both 1.6 with 160 PS

... the B18 EK9 CTR and DC2 ITR:

Both 1.8 with 200 PS

....I almost got a divorce because of the brilliant EP3 CTR:

a 2.0 with 200 PS

... and really sad to know the DC5 Integra TypeR, would not come to Europe (but I do get why...I mean... EU treats you bad -> they deserve punishment!):

a 2.0 with 210 PS

... And hey... the NSX... oh the NSX! break-time for some ME time, in the bathroom, with this:

3.2 with 290 PS (could do better, but it was the first port of VTEC to V engines. VTEC was designed for Inline layouts)

AND I'm back!

I'm back with you. I'm such an Honda fan that, the moment my divorce came through, I brought my S2000 (which I still hold today), and I never sold the EP4 Civic Cdti my new wife had (its one of the daily family cars).

To me, Honda was on the right track, while Renault went the easy way and VW group, Peugeot and alike followed Renault.

In essence Honda opted for FINE engineering to develop 2.0 4 cylinder engines with VTEC solution to aim for High RPM, while all others just turbocharged the 2.0 4 cylinder engines and aimed for torque.

The Displacement urban myth:

You see, any american v8 fan will tell you that there is no replacement for displacement.

But then, the same people that claim this, drive cars with 5 liter engines that produces less 500 Bhp TODAY.

We can Make the math simple for you, so you have an IDEA of efficiency in producing power, and compare it to the vehicles from that age.

Year	Model	Layout	Size	PS	Torque	PS/liter	Torque/liter	Max RPM
2000	Mustang	V8	5.4	385	522	71.29	96.66	6000
2000	Mustang	V8	4.6	260	409	56.52	88.91	6000
2000	Mustang	V6	3.8	190	298	50	78.42	6000
2000	Corvette	V8	5.6	344	483	61.42	86.25	6200
2000	Viper	V10	8.0	450	664	56.25	83	6200
2000	Civic TypeR	IL4	2.0	200	193	100	96.5	8250
2000	S2000	IL4	2.0	240	210	120	105	9200
1989	Civic VTI	IL4	1.6	160	150	100	93.75	8200
1999	Integra TypeR	IL4	1.8	200	181	111.11	100.55	9000
2000	Golf GTI	IL4T	2.0T	200	280	NA	NA	6800
2000	Megane RS	IL4T	2.0T	221	300	NA	NA	6700

So as you can clearly see by the table, THE REPLACEMENT for DISPLACEMENT is called EFFICIENCY, and that is the measure of Fine engineering, not the clumsy stuff that the auto industry now sells as engineered products.

Some old guy will tell you:

an engine is a pump and they are closer to be right that the 'there is no replacement for displacement redneck'.

An engine takes in air and fuel, burns that fuel and produces energy that in translates into movement (kinetic energy) within a combustion cycle. But this is half the equation! It needs to be able to deliver this mechanical energy from the explosion, without self destructing, to the drive-train.

But you can accomplish this with controlling the production of mechanical work.

You can either have more air into the engine by :

- Increasing it's size (the american way)

- Adding a turbo (the European way)

- By making it work more cycles per minute (the motorcycle way, the F1 way and the good OLD Honda way).

Now, again this is only part of the story. The way this mechanical energy is delivered is also important, and influence the design of the engine. For instance, you can design for torque, to drive an heavy car, or for power to drive a lighter car.

In the end the design decision goes like this:

Are you aiming for Power or torque?

Two things influence here:

1 - MPS (mean piston speed) - There is a limit of friction that parts endure before melting...and cycles of constant change in direction the piston can endure before disintegrating.

2 - Scale of physics - The longer the leverage, the easier to break a part, consequently the beefier it needs to be, consequently, the heavier it needs to be, consequently the more inertia it generates.

From this point on, the design will be:

OverSquare - Bigger bore than stroke

Square - Equal bore and stroke

UnderSquare - Bigger Stroke than Bore

The following image from wikipedia should provide a visible example:

So while designing, you should consider :

Power bound design - Oversquare engine( more bore and less stroke...like an f1 engine)

Torque bound design - UnderSquare engine )more stroke and less bore...like a diesel engine)

Compromised design - Square engine (like a normal daily driver that also likes spirited driving).

Obvious advantages and disadvantages come form these designs, but the examples are clear:

- Wanna go track racing (or mountain pass racing), you will desire usable engine rpm's or you:ll be losing precious time to shifting back and forth.

- Need to pull the weight of the mini-van, the kids, dog, luggage and infotainment system? go torque and even think diesel then!

- You need to get to work and then shred the tires on your way back home to, at least have 20 minutes of joy that day? Compromise and save some money for the radar detector! Having thought like that make you a maniac vandal in this day and age.

So the compromise isn't really for track? what about my love for the EP3 CTR with a Square engine?

Well it really depends. If then track is Nurburgring, with those enormous straights and the need to accelerate out of corners to make good lap times, the EP3 with the i-VTEC is the thing to go for,

but if you go Tskuba, or Suzuka, then the s2000 will give you a tremendous advantage with the extra rpm and no need to change gear so often.

So there you go... a Compromise can give you some interesting track times, but if it's hardcore club-racing, the oversquare will give you better engine powerband to use, and not lose time shifting.

So what do you mean with torque is for your minivan!?

No place in "your book" for the gasoline-turbo engine? sure there is... but this then leads to the next part of the equation : the drive train.

A rear wheel drive turbo is an inherently unstable design (unless there is a very precise control of boost and fueling), a front wheel drive turbo design is another problematic design...you just can't floor it mid-turn...or you will end up playing off-road racers down hill and upside down!

But if you place a normal engine on a 4wd chassis, well it will turn like bonkers, but will feel... dull. HOWEVER, a 4wd TURBO gasoline engine...well that's a mach made in heaven!

That is why you love the Subaru Impreza GT, or the Lancer Evolution, or the Escort Cosworth, or the Focus RS(last one... not the FWD ones)... my point being : A hell of a marriage, a hell of a car!

So you have endured my rambling so far,

...let's talk why Honda as doing the right thing and not follow the Renault trend:

The K20 and K24 engines that are standard to the EP3 Type-R and DC5 Integra, where a Square engine design, with i-VTEC, meaning that it had the VTEC for crazy power and revs, but also the I part to maximize low end torque pre-VTEC.

Sure the European Civic Type-r had 200PS the Japanese one had 215PS (better fuel means better pistons for higher compression), but several tuners have produced 260PS out of the production engine, and the BTCC CTR where running 300PS.

4 Piston has built K20's that handle 11.000RPM and over 400PS and K24s that produce 500PS NA and scream beyond 11.000RPM

This means there was a way forward with this engine. A path of engineering and craftsmanship... something that has defined Honda in the past.

And that is the main point of this article - The way to produce power.

Back in 2000, Honda put some real engineering to product 2.0 engines that could NA produce over 200 PS and next to the same numbers in torque.

VW, had to boost their 2.0 engine to produce the same amount of power, and more torque. Renault used the same concept and boosted the MRS engine to 221.

Boosting an engine is easy! Beef up the rods and screw a turbo and bigger injectors to the engine! I mean, my 7 yo kid could do this!

On the other hand, making an engine rev beyond 6000 rpm regularly and not self destruct, THAT ladies and gentle man, requires engineering knowledge and precision craftsmanship in the production line.

Honda has chosen the superior way of doing things wen the rivals had gone the cheap way.

Now the math shown before is not usable for a turbo engine!

A Turbo, uses the exhaust gases to spin a turbine that forces air into the engine.

So an 4 stroke, NA 2.0, at open throttle, uses 2.0 l of air at 1BAR every 2 rotations.

If you add a turbo that has a 1BAR boost, then same engine would be consuming 4 liters of air on the same period.

This is, however not linear. The air is a fluid and as it compresses it heats, if it then passes through hot piping, say, like a turbo charger connected to the exhaust at over 800 centigrade degrees, it heats plenty.

Heat messes air density, so those 4.0 liters of air would not have the same amount of oxygen molecules at 140 degrees as they have at 30 degrees centigrade.

Because of this, any turbo system cools down air by passing it through an inter cooler or a charge cooler. Inter-cooler efficiency means business, but factory inter-coolers are rarely the best out there and they are built for price and not efficiency.

So a table would have to correct the boost gains as a partial of the inter- cooler efficiency, as:

Corrected Displacement = Displacement * ((1+boost)*(Inter-cooler efficiency/100))

Year	Model	Layout	Size	PS	Torque	Boost	Inter-cooler efficiency	Corrected Displacement	PS/liter	Torque/liter	Max RPM
2016	Golf 7 GTI	IL4T	2.0T	230	350	1	75%	3	76.66	116.66	6800
2014	Megane RS3	IL4T	2.0T	275	360	1.5	75%	3.75	73.33	96	6700
2000	Civic TypeR	IL4	2.0	200	193	NA	NA	NA	100	96.5	8250
2000	S2000	IL4	2.0	240	210	NA	NA	NA	120	105	9000
1989	Civic VTI	IL4	1.6	160	150	NA	NA	NA	100	93.75	8200
1999	Integra TypeR	IL4	1.8	200	181	NA	NA	NA	111.11	100.55	9000
2000	Golf 5 GTI	IL4T	2.0T	200	280	0.82	70%	2.55	78.43	109.8	6800
2000	Megane RS2	IL4T	2.0T	221	300	0.7	75%	2.55	86.66	117.64	6700

And the Table should clear all doubts about the the efficiency of Turbos.

If you compare a V8 4.0 with a 2.0 turbo equivalent to 4.0, the turbo is clearly more efficient in both less moving parts, weight, inertia, and produce the same results, but with a variance that allows for low speed economy.

But if you compare it to a VTEC engine, then the edge goes out the door as the turbo is, in fact adding displacement, but at the expense of engine response and usable power band.

So Why is Honda dead?

Well, after the glorious EP3, the FN2 lost the rear suspension to a more economic design and the car gained weight without gaining engine power... so ALL BAD NEWS!

Honda came back with the FD2 and FD2 Mugen RR, but only for the Japanese Market.

For the poorly behaved EU people, Honda decided to sell mediocrity, so they added a turbo and produced the FK2 with 306 PS and reduced the rev limiter to 8000 rpm. I mean!!! JUST GET THOSE ENGINES FROM BTCC you dumb idiots!

As this seems a bad idea and europeans prefer bad ideas that claim not to hurt birds and trees on paper, the FK8 came our the same way! 2.0 turbo and more pressure on the turbo for 320PS and 7000rpm rev limit!

This blind pursue of mediocrity and going towards stupid regulations, managed to have Honda produce a car that, although it is named Type-R, if driver hard on the track (as it's always been the design) will over-heat!

Do you want to know why? Someones (other than an engineer) designed the cylinder head with an integrated exhaust manifold with the exhaust gases passages surrounded by the same water cooling ducts that the engine uses to cool. This means that on situations with heavy stress but not extreme air flow through the radiator... like say.. a race track, the radiator function gets overwhelmed and the car overheats! BRILLIANT! I'm sure it's excellent for emissions and to maintain the catalytic converter at it's best but then what about the poorly designed car, being marketed as a race-car and... not one???

So Honda was going in the right direction and away from Renault and VW... but then turned a 180 turboed the once glorious K20... and manage to make it worse that non turbo while trying to copy-cat Renault and VW. I can't compute! I just can't!

And there we go! Honda is now, in fact, dead ! it's just that, no one seems to have told'em so, and as such it wonders around like a rotten zombie. SAD SAD SAD.

When Engineers stop being engineers and start being... well something else!

2024-10-25T01:29:00.006+01:00

We live in the world where, much to blame the EU and its lefty majority for, the automotive industry is being punished by absurd laws and regulations.

Its a world where idiotic minds like greta the brat and elon musk strive, by tapping into the lack of knowledge the majority suffers from and twists the narrative towards their own personal interests.

Together with harsher fuel taxation, harsher motoring limitations and an investment into a machine of ticketing motorists (as if they didn't pay enough tax already), created a youth less and less interested in the thrills of driving a proper vehicle on the open road.

It's quite a shame, really, but it is the world most automakers need to produce products for.

This absurdly retrograde reality, generates a sentiment in the auto industry that producing mediocre products, is ok as long as they earn money while watching the world burn.

So far, it's sad, it's disgusting, and makes me feel like humans deserve the asteroid... and have been deserving it for quite some time now.

However,

It was my understanding that, some engineers where still working at most car manufacturers. Sure... bound and tied up in the basement with gaggles so they could not insult economists and marketeers during meetings, but still engineers.

Then Ford unveils the 3 cylinder 1.0 ecoboost... and gets claims as engine of the year!?!?!? corruption alarm!!!

I never took interest in this, as it is a cylinder too short of my minimum acceptable engine size.

I obviously steered AWAY from it and evidently recommended all my friends to buy the 4 cylinder fiestas while they where available.

Some months into this crazy nonsense...

... and i manage go get an episode on engine disassembly of this same engine, on youtube...HERE.

The video starts with : this was difficult to find, you never find these out there in any junkyard as they are highly requested.

THIS immediately triggered my brain: Why? 3cyl.. useless piece of ... and if there are none for second hand parts market then: Either they run forever and so slow that no one ever crashes. Or they all DIE prematurely making them hard to find functional and highly requested as such.

The introduction also said : "this is one of those infamous wet timing belt type of engine".

WAAAIIIIIIT a minute. Belt? wet? nahhh not possible.

As the disassembly continued i was astonished with the design i was whiteness.

In truth, that engine and some other engines form PSA group (and some more brands are drifting into this absurd trend) use WET BELTS.

WOW

Let me take some time to explain:

There are mainly 2 designs to connect your crankshaft with the valve train, creatively called engine timing system:

- Timing chain- a metal chain, much like your bicycle chain, with metal dented wheels. Evidently, metal on metal will require lubrication, so those are naturally wet:

- Timing belt - made out of a rubber dented belt with fabric and metal reinforcements. Obviously this last system is dry:

Why obviously?

Funny you should ask: Engine oil attacks rubber, engine temperature attack rubber, engine oil get more acidic with usage and as such: hot acidic engine oil AGGRESSIVELY attack rubber. Rubber gets cracks, and hot acidic engine oil reaches fabric and metal inside the belt...and, for your surprise, again - It attacks those components too.

Timing belt's are´t forever... they need service:

How do you know the timing belt is new:

... or old:

...or just bad:

... or maybe "So bad you shouldn't start the car":

.... or the... shit, too late!

Now let's compare an old NORMAL timing belt, with an old WET timing belt:

... or even a BAD NORMAL timing belt with a BAD WET timing belt:

... or maybe a "don't start the car" NORMAL timing belt with a WET one:

Finally, a comparison between the belt as new and as it comes out of the engine when replaced:

It's not rocket science! right!? You don't need an engineering degree to see what's wrong here, now, do you?

SOOOO

a very fast and easy conclusion:if you want to have a WET timing system, the chain will live happy with this setup.

If you what to use BELTs, you CAN'T use the wet system!

It's fairly straight trough!

You don't need an engineering degree to make this decision once you've read these VERY SIMPLE characteristics of the both systems and reaction to oil.

The remaining video...

... was just a bad-to-worse critique of this absolutely stupid design:

- oil pump scavenger blocked with bits of rubber from the timing belt that disintegrated.

- bearings and journals scratched by lack of oil pressure...because the oil pump was driven by another wet, rubber belt!

- obvious engine catastrophic failure due to lack of oil pressure, but plenty of cases out there are due to premature timing belt failure and scavenger blocking... I mean talk about a perfect storm.

This is becoming such an issue, that Peugeot is selling a measuring tool to check in the belt has swollen enough (by absorbing oil) that need replacement! I mean... how ridiculous can this be?

Ok...

we've established the design is absurd, that lot's of people buy these engines either new or second hand because they disintegrate themselves, but why!?

Easy to maintain?

NO! way way worse!

The belt will live less(duh) and even the Kevlar reinforced ones don't really manage as long as any dry belt or a wet chain!

To change the timing belt you need to dismantle engine panels and re-assemble with new seals(as opposed to a few screws and plastic panels on dry belts).

You will need to regularly remove the carter and check the oil-pump scavenger for molten or disintegrated rubber.

Well...

... there is one and one justification only for this : brands what to sell you a competitive product, cheap as the crap it is, then squeeze all your money out in unnecessary maintenance complexity or, if you decide not to play the game, new engines every now and then.

So...

...it's clearly an economist or marketer decision. Point to which, my question becomes: What where these engineers thinking about? or then...are they still engineers at all?

Group B - The best sport ever, managed by the biggest imbecile that ever walked the earth.

2023-07-03T16:12:00.003+01:00

Back in the 80's there was an automotive renaissance - Rally Group B.

Till then, rally was made from standard production cars. And was amateurism from start to finish.

Back then, FISA was managed by someone I hate to my gut (and that I hold so-responsible for Senna's death) Jean Marie Balestre. Balestre was a PowerMonger with little to none engineering background and a true "chauvinist". He is responsible for some of the worse decisions ever made into the automotive racing world... but, there is proof that, at least once in his lifetime, he made a good call.

Knowing nothing about engineering, but eager to make rally " a thing ", Balestre made a laisser-fair decision, and being him the biggest of idiots, this proved an excellent decision because it fell right on the hands of the car manufacturers. Those where interested into showing off their cars and as such proposed the UNREGULATED group B. Balestre, signed off and GroupB was born.

There is some logic behind the "fear of GroupB" Somethings where good and others weren't.

The good part:

This is the best possible spec. No limits to car power, car tech or engineering evolution. It spawned stuff that, today, we take for granted in our everyday cars. However, for some reason, the majority of Hairless Monkeys (a.k.a. people) out-there, seam to understand it was a bad thing and that the ban was good! This is mental!

Group B unleashed the first chain of them all: Manufacturers could start a car from scratch that had nothing to do with the standard selling model.

This lead to light tubular frames with fiberglass bodies on top. The old Lotus recipe had reached the rally grounds. The cars where light, as a consequence fast and maneuverable.

Then Audi unchained the second chain: Add a small engine with a big turbo to a 4wd system, and you have a pocket rocket that can go around bends like a bat out of hell... and full sideways while stable and under control. Till then, Rally was mainly Rear wheel drive. Audi shattered that.

Peugeot unchained the third chain: The 205T16 was the first ever Rally Mid-engine, 4wd car. The balance was tremendous and the compactness of the car meant is was much more nimble changing direction, because the weights where in the center of the car, and the wheelbase was short (being based on a hot-hatch).

Ford unchained the fourth by creating the RS200 - a car for rally and then only building enough homologation vehicles to make the rules... unlike the previous where they would build a rally car around the stream line model they wanted to leverage sales on. Ford stated that the sport was good enough to advertise brand and not just model.

Audi replied to Ford's and unleashed the fifth chain by pushing the output of their engines way beyond the 500 BHP mark.

And the final word was Lancias. The last chain was Lancia DeltaS4 that joined the Audi4wd + Turbo idea, Peugeot's Mid engine, short wheelbase Idea and their own Volumetric compressor + turbo Idea, making it a car that was nearly unbeatable, ready for all challenges (except crashing, with the drivers sitting on top of the fuel-tank).

This was the marvel of Group B. and It made Rally, more interesting than F1!

The Bad part:

Nothing bad so far... Unleashed engineering, fast and powerfull cars, happy drivers.

The problem with driving a monster is that you get drained fast. The Rally was 500km long and that meant long stages. The drivers where being drained of their strength and concentration and that is when it gets dangerous.

Solution would be easy: shorter the stages!

Another problem was crowd. I'm a portuguese and I remember people bragging about having touched the rally cars as they basted through and thought to my self (as a kid): how stupid can that be... you've gained nothing from it and if the driver made any sort of correction you'd end up with a broken hand, arm or worse! The heroic reports just translated to Moron-ish acts to me.

Once again, a solution could have been implemented as it is today! Police forces people to specific areas where the probability of a car (or flying car parts) lands, so people stay withing a controlled area and away from obvious danger.. but DO BARE IN MIND, EVEN INSIDE A CIRCUIT, YOU CAN GET INJURED. Motorsport is dangerous, accidents do happen, and by taking place there, YOU ARE IN DANGER at least up to a point. What cant happen is having people cause accidents, as that is beyond acceptable. That, unfortunately happend in Sintra when Joaquin Santos corrected to avoid an idiot that stepped on to the tarmac and lost control of his car. He crashed into a wall of people killing 3 and injuring a lot more.

Looking at BBC4 documentary Hell On Wheels, it is clear just how stupid people can be: Out of the victims, Nuno Sadrinha, clearly understands that the crowd is to blame, while another victim, Helio Tomar, thinks that by standing on the side of the road (no sidewalk, no barrier) was safe while a rally was going on! Just how stupid can you be to claim such a thing, mister Helio? Take a lesson from your colleague Nuno. He clearly learned something that day and has a lucid picture.

Latter that year, Corsica Rally took another victim, as the roads didn't have any sort of barriers, so a car out of control would fly into trees and break apart. HOW HARD would have it been to force the local governments to implement steel rail-guards? What to host Rally? Install steel road guards!

Evidently, Pilots started demanding Crowd Control, better security measures and Shorter stages but then again they were going against the biggest idiot of them all - Balestre.

The result: BAN! And the best automotive sport that ever existed was gone.

Looking back, I'm grateful to have lived it first hand, and I feel lucky to live right next to Sintra and also to have family up north. I can drive these beautiful roads filled with heritage. If you where physically there, you would not have believed just how fast (and loud) the cars were... TV makes it no justice.

As a human being, and an engineer, it saddens me and makes me ashamed to be classified as the same species, as people that think that repression and bans are solutions to problems.

The only Bans I see valid are reserved for politicians and leashes alike, and being Balestre a political animal, he would be the one to be banned.

This sort of dementia has took over the world. We now live in a planet that thinks in it's majority that motorsports as something bad and that GroupB ban was a good decision.

We restrict engineers and manufacturers to tight regulations that make rally cars product little over 300BHP.. but then we sell road cars that have twice as that. It's mental and we, humanity, deserve the asteroid... it's actually a good 2 decades late :s

When automotive press is just press under disguise and publishes really bad advice as an opinion article!

2023-05-15T17:03:00.006+01:00

Not too long ago, I got presented with an article from the so called automotive press that really gave me the goosebumps.
IMO if you are an AUTOMOTIVE press professional, but then you have no insight into what you are writing about, and to you, writing about roses or engines is just as different and the poor googling you've done before writing anything is research, then you are just another reporter! Better stick with TESLA reviews as no real petrol head will read'em anyway.

But what you never ever do, is write an article advising people to 'fix' your car in a way that will make things worse.

I've recently came across an article about a easy fix for yellowed headlights.

https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/auto/2302682/so-dois-ingredientes-o-truque-caseiro-para-deixar-os-farois-a-brilhar?utm_medium=email&utm_source=gekko&utm_campaign=auto

It's in Portuguese, but don't try to read or translate as it's mostly a bad advice.

What makes your headlight acrylic or plastics turn from transparent to yellowish is : the sun... ot better: UV light. Yes street dust act as sand blasting and acid rain accelerates the process, but the main guilty part is U.V.

As new, your plastic or acrylic headlights are protected by a U.V. resistant varnish layer that, as time goes by, scratches and peels away (from projection on the road, to scrubbing to clean, to you're new polish that you don't need but buy anyway).

Without this protection, the U.V. light hurts the plastics and create tiny fissures that will start to make things fuzzy, and also provide habitat for micro organisms and... dust.
As time goes by, it will be encrusted into the headlight and you'll end up with diffused beam projection and insufficient lighting from both beam refraction and dust particle obstruction.

The article tells you to 'clean' with baking soda and lemon juice.... ok STOP the clock!
This is NOT cleaning... it's abrasive thinning! You don't clean your skin with acid and particles... you exfoliate! This is as aggressive (if not more) as sanding.
Toothpaste, baking soda or fine sand are micro particles that, together with acid (lemon juice) will eat away the superficial layer of the plastic and expose an inner layer that has not been hurt enough by sunlight and dust.
In the end you've just made the plastic thinner and more fragile.
It will look fine for a few months and then go back to what it was, only worse this time.
The plastic has lost thickness and the U.V. fissure will crack sooner and deeper.... you can keep this going until your plastic is so thin that you'll crack-it by applying some pressure while cleaning... then you'll be replacing it!

NOW...
If you were to inspect the varnish coating layer and replace it with U.V. resistant clear coat, you would never need to do this in the first place.
If you try to extend this coating lifetime by applying a ceramic clear-coat protection, it would be even better.
And if the worse happens and you have to sand down your headlight, DO remember to pass a clear-coat of UV resistant varnish, the moment you finish it ... and a couple more withing the setting time for that same varnish (instructions should guide you) just to be on the safe side...and then the ceramic coating.

Test Drive - 2017 Jaguar XF 2.0d R-Sport vs the 2013 Mercedes E Class Coupe cdi AMG plastics pack.

2023-05-08T23:41:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I've posted.
Not that I haven't tested cars, I actually continue to test cars frequently, but time to sit down and type words other than the so very urgent work emails is getting harder and harder to find.

Still, after 2 sleepless nights traveling to Tokyo, I'm not sharp enough to work, and having to wait for my US colleague to land, I find myself in a very rare moment of nothing to do.

So let's optimize time and write about 2 cars at once. Why? Well No time to cover both with detail, not as interesting to me as most my posts and they both surprised me positively. You got it... I didn;t believe my self either, but the did.

I don't have pictures of the Mercedes as it was totaled by another colleague 3 days into the test, but I did manage to drive it a good 1300km.

Let's start with the Mercedes. (image source CarThrottle)

I must admit I was not expecting that car to be like that. 99% of all Mercedes are built as if they where supposed to replace your sofa. Comfort first, so you have a heavy vehicle packed with all sorts of gizmos, on an typically comfortable setup of wheel-Tyre-suspension and then all sorts of soft rubber filtering out feedback from the wheels all the way up the steering.

Then comes the "AMG pack"... 99.9% of those are plastic bolt-on and big rims. They improve things marginally, and look good, but there is a very valid reason why AMG's are built out of the shell of the based cars instead of just bolting plastics and placing stickers.

But this...this is a different sort of transformation.

Immediately you feel the car tighter and less comfortable (AKA worse sofa but a better car). The rims and tires do increase the feedback trough the steering...it's not a lotus or an s2000...but it is better that the original car by a considerable margin.

Then there is the suspension... you instantly feel bumps and road imperfections and you feel very little roll and a firmer response. Either they got lucky, or an engineer back Mercedes was left out of the cage for a while and done his part.

Particularly in the wet. The 3rd generation E-class was a PIG in the wet and this seams much more refined and with plenty grip-limit warning and positive feedback.

So is it good? yup! is it good enough to make me rethink my "Mercedes position"? no

The competence of the chassis is clear and it's road holding abilities are noticeable, however the weight is there and you feel it moving around generating inertia all places it shouldn't. A simple "s"curve will show the chassis under work to manage all that weight.

As the road holding is good, the let-go is also a bit on the violent side, However this feels more to do with the setup trying to compromise less and still be slightly comfy. A set of EIBACH springs would certainly fix this and give it a bit more progressive feel. But then the middle age crises customer would complain of back pain... so... it's a compromise that I hate to say I understand, but given the customer base for Mercedes, I actually do. And then. there is the ever intrusive ESP that almost stops the car. On this front, Mercedes has a lot to learn form BMW. And yes I know there are more read accidents with BMW sliding out of control, but if you don't know how to drive, call a cap, take a uber, use the metro system...or get proper driving lessons on a race track.

So Overall, the Benz is by far one of the best Mercedes I've recently tested (I admit not to test a lot of them because I really don't like'em, so population on my sampling is small by criteria) when it comes to being able to handle the sheer mass of the car. You really need to provoke the chassis to get a glimpse of reality.

Reality however is that the car is heavy and as such, a competent road holding will depend a lot on the tires... so the grip-limit-let-go of the continentals sport contacts is violent. You should be expecting it, because the abused needed to provoke is rather considerable, but not as high as a race track experience... I mean if you need to dodge an obstacle on the road, at speed, you can induce this rather easily. Then you'll experience a brief panic as you feel it sliding violently, and then the ESP takes over and the thrill is gone.
So verdict is : competent but not funny. And just too heavy to make the tires comfortable.

Imagine that you weight 150Kg and you are running the marathon. Your cardio-vascular system will be struggling to handle this but your ankles and knees will end up shot for good half way through it! That's what it feels.

Now the Jag : (image source AutoExpress)

Another surprise! First time I sit on the Jag I had to lower my head to pass the a pillar while sitting. I was expecting that! it is a Jag... so sporty by default. But then I look at the massive hood, from the driving position, and if feels like I'm higher than I should and that the bonnet seems huge. It's weird.

You feel like going into a sports car, and then once inside you feel like your's looking through an SUV. Definitely not the experience I was expecting to have. So first thought : Jeeez this thing feels massive. It's gonna drive like a truck!

Then you key the car and you see the aluminium side to side bar with some parts of it slowly opening and starting to show air ducts. OK... I understand that Jag also implies luxury, but c'mon how many more of these gizmos are going to overweight the car and spoil the experience?
There is an answer for that: a bit too much.
I started the car and drove away and immediately it feels massive. It is not light and nimble.

I get it It's a Jag and not a Lotus, but I can't stop thinking how many kg I would save just by removing pointless luxury items, and make it more like an E-Type than a living-room Sofa-ype.

So far the Jag is losing to the Benz.... they both are heavy, they both are massive, they both are more suitable for a tank driver than a true sports aficionado. But the Benz feels less bulky and more closer to the ground. It' feels more connected to both you and the ground... less sofa-like.

Don't get me wrong... the Jag has a firm ride, but the body movement is instantly more noticeable than the Benz.

However, and do remember that this was a series of surprises, the first roundabout I managed to get for my own self, I started pulling it hard, trying to find the limits, and what do you know.... it started a gracious, controlled and very predictable rear slide. I would expect everything from a brute let-go as the Benz to a under-steer safe as the Audi's, but not a controlled, progressive, slide, from the massive SUV like feeling I was having. It truly puzzled me.

In the end, the Benz has a better driving feel while in grip drive, due to being lower and stiffer, but the balance on that Jaguar chassis is very good.

So these 2 cars managed to surprise me. Wouldn't buy either because:

1 - they're diesel

2 - they're massive

3 - they're comfy disguised as sporty filled with compromise that never really gets hardcore sporty, so they don't feel into any category I like.

Having said that, If I was grip driving, I'd rather be in the Benz, but if i was to shred a set of tires on an afternoon, I'd take the Jag out for drift.

Ford Racing Puma, the way Ford should have done it.

2023-03-27T23:42:00.012+01:00

In the late 90's, the small coupe market was dominated by Opel with the Tigra mk1.

It was brilliantly based on the Opel Corsa B chassis but had better aerodynamics and styling.

What it didn't have was better handling. Sure it was decent, but the enormous glass over the rear, coupled with front vented disks vs rear drums, and an over powered brake bias to the rear, would grant you a spin if you slam on the brakes or had to brake hard mid turn on a slippery road.

You see, historically, Opel tunes their chassis at Lotus Engineering services. So even if the design was not original Lotus, the final handling has a very decent feeling to it. This, however, does not mean that one recipe fits all, so by adding weight to the rear of the corsa b chassis, with the Tigra, Opel kinda messed up slightly.

Ford, at the time had just released the brilliant ford fiesta mk4. Ugly yes but a joy to drive with a brilliant Yamaha Zetec-se engine and a flawless chassis, the fiesta was an excellent platform for Ford to copy Opel's recipe and sill take the lead as the basis was so much better.

However, and unlike Opel, Ford chassis design and tuning was made in-house, by people that has rally pedigree and the results show up till this day... with the focus chassis being the pinnacle.

And so, copying the recipe, but caring a bit more of engineering into it, the Ford Puma mk1 was born.

Unlike the Opel, Ford took much more care with the puma. Sure the chassis was Fiesta based, and the engines too, but they fine tuned it to be even better, lighter, more responsive, and even with the same vented disk front and drum rear, the breaking under cornering was far more composed and progressive.

The Puma was an instant hit and it is, till this date, the best handling small coupe you can find. That's probably why It's now gaining value.

As the industry messes up by creating Under-engined and over green, all the same, dull as is gets, cars, older cars have been gaining value.

The new Puma is partially to blame. I mean a SUV?!?!? seriously ford? Wouldn't it be better to build a car that would improve on the Fiesta ST, instead of fitting a 3 cylinder 900 cc engine in it!?

To me, Having ford Kill the Focus RS, and having a 3 potter with 900cc wear the ST badge on the Fiesta, is as bad as making the Puma a mini-kuga!

Deception to the levels of seeing Honda Type-R vtec atmospheric masterpieces turbo-charged, learning that Mitsubishi lancer will also be a SUV. I mean, the industry has gone mad!

Something must be done, and, for once, I've been doing that to my cars what the manufacturers, influenced by the idiots from the green party, have failed to do.

So back to the PUMA.

Back in the glorious late 90's early 00's (before economists and marketeers driving car manufacturers, and Elon Musk and His legion of sheep pollute the world with lithium and the car world with 2ton electric cars), the car industry was putting out marvellous machines. Ford, with their chassis tunes and excellent engines where shining, but the high performance was still our of reach.

You see, they has just ditch the old models XRi fiestas and XRI and RS Cosworth escorts, but they still didn't have a new line of cars to pick that market with their brand new fiesta, puma, ka and focus line-up.

At the time you had Subaru and Mitsubishi carving the Rally grounds and also the market with the road legal versions of their Rally champions, that had an easy way in with the passive Ford retirement of the RS cosworth line.

Ford was working the new sports line. It would have the ST and the RS. ST would be the Sportive option over standard, and the RS would be the Racing Specs but road legal option.

So with the success of the PUMA, ford presented in 1999 what was internally known as the ST160 the first ST ever.

If was based on the Puma, but wider (with bigger suspension components, no spacers), disk brakes all round and more power. It was named the FordRacing Puma.

The engine was the 1.7, but the power was tweaked by means of a new plenum design, cams and remap, to 153bhp... a bit shy of the 160 mark.

The interior was way better, with sparco Torino2 seats all trimmed in blue alcantara.

The FRP was a hit, but for some reason, ford produced only 500 units, at a prohibitively high cost, and only LHD.

Lack of vision? Focusing on something else? Had the ST150 fiesta on the forge and didn't want to cannibalise it? IDK... however, costing the same as a Subaru impreza GT in the UK (the only market for the FRP) it was doomed to be a collectable and not a main streamer.

Around the same time, the Puma was rallying in the s1400 and s1600 categories. It was based out of the 1.4 and 1.6 zetec-se units, but tuned to scream past the 200bhp in atmospheric form. It also had the wide-body aggressive looks and improves chassis, but underneath, a secret was hidden from the public eye.

The Puma handles brilliantly, the FRP handles even better, but if you take it out of the race-track tarmac and experience an uneven road say a broad with some tree-root bumps mid-turn, you'll find it rear happy...or... say... bumpy. Approach a corner while breaking and you'll find that tail happy to be a bit too scary for the majority f drivers. It's one of those aspects you need to anticipate.

The reason for this is the Fiesta heritage. You see independent rear suspension is expensive to produce and the Fiesta was at it's core an entry level car. So the PUMA rear axle was the exact same as the fiesta.

A rigid torsion beam design was used. In this design, The rear wheel alignment is easier to maintain during even cornering (and that is one of the reasons Renault did not change that design while upgrading the normal megane to the MRS), however while loading the outer wheel during corner, if the unloaded inner wheel suffers a bump, the entire system is twisted and the outer wheel looses alignment, generating a jumping attitude. That has actually caused some MRS owners to not understand why a car that feels glued to the tarmac 90% of times, just let go all the sudden on some b-road and... crashed'em.

So now you're thinking of the rally PUMA, and you say: jeez rally is uneven roads with bends all over and you floor-it and break hard and late in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM bends!.

Well the Rally puma has independent rear suspension. Like all cars should IMHO.

So that was the great secret that the FRP missed and I think it's unforgivable that ford overlooked this detail.

So why mess with a good car?

First because Ford neglected the non UK customers, so you do it or else Ford will not.

Second because 2 guys in the UK (that I know of) have done it and with good results.

Third because all conversions retained the gearbox and i'm about to change that, all conversions retained the puma front geometry and added spacers and i'm about to change that, and finally because unless you are a rally team, no one has an s1400/s1600 chassis to build on.

Finally because they killed a brilliant concept for the American SUV supersize trend and killed it, so no point in expecting anything good from that department.

This will then be a UNIQUE car. And that alone makes my day.

In the end, like a lot of good brands, Ford replaced reason for madness, engineers for economists and marketeers, so you should buy the good old stuff, improve it, and stick to that. Ignore the fruitcakes out there following Musk Electric trends and 'Suburban Soccer Mum' i-wanna-have-an-SUV trend.

So what am I about to do?

The FRP the first ST, should then have been exactly what it was, but with a 2.0, over 200 bhp, independent rear suspension, 6 speed gearbox and an LSD... and a good 5k cheaper than the sale price (but having a GLOBAL sales strategy and a mass produced model would have solved this).

The best news in this department is that I'm having a custom build rear independent axle for my ST220 Puma.. so with a 2.0 ST170 engine and 6speed gearbox, plus an s1600 chassis, well, it will be difficult to beat.

As with the Volvos and the s2000 i'll be posting along the build progress, so you can follow the quest so subscribe or make sure you drop-by often.

Why not AWD? well a bloke form the UK managed to source some badly crashed escort RS cosworth and adapt the drive-train and engine to the puma. It was a beast... but this would then be the PUMA RS.

You see, as much as I love that Volvo t5 engine on the MK2 focus RS, without AWD it's just not worthy of that badge. Should be ST.

I would love that, but truth be told... I'm realistically sure i will never be able to source a cossie and let alone scrap-it for parts... my heart wouldn't survive the pain of killing a landmark of human evolution.

Don\t get me wrong, it's a blast of a project car, but way out of my reach. Still take a look at one:

My PUMA:

Last summer, tired of using the V70 T5 or the s2000 as an everyday car, I decided to buy an old MK1 puma 1.4.

Immediately decatted the car, added a racing filter, remapped the ECU and got around 100 to 105 bhp out of it. However this is really not enough for me. I was sure that pulling it the way i find satisfactory on my commutes, it will suffer catastrophic engine failure in the near future. And then the daily driver was... no more.

Enter the project CAR - Fixing Ford's lack of will.

OK, so O would be transforming the Puma, as a ford racing puma should be. After all those would be my one and only critics on the car.

Soooo the first step would be to find a donor car.

Little after launching the st160 as FRP, Ford finally decided to use the ST badge and launched the Focus ST170.

The ST170 was an evolution of the 130 BHP 2.0 ZETEC engine. Bare in mind that the Puma was ZETEC-SE (yamaha based, all aluminium block and head), while the ZETEC is an older design here the block is cast iron and only the head is aluminium... it's so different that they have different I/O layouts, the Zetec-SE intakes front and exhausts rear, while the ZETEC intakes rear and exhausts front.

Ford tasked their friends at Cosworth to upgrade the 130BHP unit so Cosworth changed pistons to higher compression and forging spec, forged rods (crank was forget as standard), added bigger oil squirts for the pistons and worked the head.

Head work includes better flow, but, more important, better valve springs and Variable Valve Timing and Lift.

The st170 produces a mild 170BHP, but a simple decat frees 5BHP, air filter box a further 3bhp, remaps can easily manage 18 to 20 BHP and if you remove the RAM system and go for full on ITB's you're looking at an engine that can produce 220 to 225bhp ALL engine. This is Honda territory... i mean OLD honda. Today all they accomplish if copy-catting renault and VAG recipe while they add hair-dryers to the k20a engine, only to produce as much as the k20a would in NA form at BTCC over 10 years ago!!!! ridiculous... evolution is going backwards and we deserve the asteroid to wipe us all out... please... anytime now... no asteroid? let's continue then.

Obviously, being an ST, I'd source the st170 engine, getrag 6speed gearbox and the focus braking system too.

Now doing the math, 220Bhp on 900 kg of lightened car is 244bhp/ton

A brand new MRS trophy 300 is 194bhp/ton

A Golf GTI 7 that most sheep love is just 162bhp/ton

An all mighty S2000 is around 196bhp/ton

Now, before the "hairdryer" fan-boy team starts puffing away that a turbo has more low end torque, or the VAG fanboys talk about the wonders of DSG think of the following:

The St170 gear box is a short ratio one. so much that the top speed of a focus is 215km/h, while the puma 5speed is 203km/h.

Add to this that a light 1000kg (125bhp/ton) puma takes 9.3 seconds to reach 100km/h, while the 1300kg (130bhp/ton) focus takes 7.9 seconds to reach 100km/h.

So an even lighter car, with an even more powerful engine and no excessive torque (like the hair dryers do) is just going to be a bullet instead of sitting still, smoking the tires for the ape crowd to go mad about.

This then should be a clear indicator of the thrills ahead.

Again and putting things in perspective, the Ford Racing Puma VK16 , also known as the RALLY S1600 Puma, was a 880Kg 200 Bhp machine. That's 227 Bhp/Ton

And it moved, as you can see.... here:

Getting Goose-bumps just by writing about it!

So from the ST170:

- engine

- gearbox

- rims

- brakes

- possibly the focus front frame (under review. I need to make sure it fits).

- eventually front coils.

Sourcing the donor CAR:

The car i was looking for would be dismantled and sold for parts, however, I found out the hard way that the price of a ST170, in Germany was way beyond 3000 euro! Add the transportation to it and we-re looking 3500 to 4000 euro. Not doable.

Then a quick look into the Spanish territory (a territory i often visit and know very well) got me a TRACK DAY car, for sale. The ask price was 1800 and I managed transportation for 800, so this meant a good 2.2k euro less than initially predicted.

Not only the deal was PERFECT, the guy was SUPER nice. He is also a petrol-head, he loves cars and project cars and he has a mechanical fabrication company. If you need precision manufacturing, https://www.ribaforja.com/ is an excellent option and run by the nicest person.

I gained a car at bargain price and a friend as this dude is super honest and trustable.

The car was pulling out 175BHP, full inox 3' exhaust, black diamond race disks, racing wheels with full slicks, normal wheels with rain tires, coil-over set + standard suspension set, full roll-cage, full-stripped car.... i mean... nothing to choose from. Buy and ship! now! please!?

The car was chosen:

Diet:

The st170 engine and gear box is heavier then the original 1.4 and 5speed gearbox. So we-re gaining weight here... not loosing.

A ZetecSE 1.4 weight around 90kg (full accessories)

A Zetec 2.0 without A/C is around 110kg

We're looking at shifting about 25kg out of the front-end.

Solutions? well plenty of weight to save on the puma:

Rear spare tire... really? out you go! the maths is easy: if you have a flat, a spray-can fixes it! If on the other hand you blew the tire, other parts are damaged and you pay road-hazard option for a reason! tow home.

Rear tire holder mechanism? nothing to hold, buddy, remember? it's gone! and so can you.

Carpet lining? really? it's not a house, it's a car, remove that stuff and just use smaller mats in the areas they make sense.

Bonnet! Ever tried to hold a PUMA mk1 hood? I mean it's massive as in it has a lot of mass. Fiberglas or carbon it and save weight.

Then comes the battery relocation. Good bye front, hello boot.

A/C !?!? what? you pay for the sauna extra in the gym, why the A/C in the car? out!

Finally, the pumaspeed fibre kit. Everything lighter and wider too.

The front fenders, bonnet and battery relocation and removal of the entire a/c system, should compensate the engine/gearbox differential... hopefully. The frame here is the key. If we fit the focus frame, we're in the green. If not and we need to space out the puma geometry, it will add weight for sure... let's wait and see.

But there is a cherry on top of this cake:

Racing door interiors:)

yeah, i've just got and excelent contact in the UK (Andrew) that manufactures race-car doors. Check https://www.ebay.com/str/atechmotorsport?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=GLgQUURIShS&sssrc=3418065&ssuid=lftu7HVjStW&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

You chose the materials and models, he builds them for you and ships them to you.

Nice, decent guy, very easy to communicate with and, above all, trustworthy.

So yeah, Puma is getting fomex door interior.

The climate controller console is also out, a New part with minimalistic buttons is in.

And the bulky 2din radio:

Radio, again is... useless. Wanna listen to music, use your High-fidelity Stereo at home of just rev that 4 cylinder under the hood. Inside the car? Radio serves to run Torque pro and get you a decent dashboard:

The SEATS:

Well a car is not your living room sofa. You want comfort, buy a sofa, a car doesn't need to carry carpets, the seats don't need to be fully adjustable at a turn of another heavyweight mechanism.

So Carpets are off. The rear seats are to be re-trimed in Gray-black trim matching the front bucket choice.

The FRP had Sparco Turino2 customised with ford racing logo, but, the Turinos no longer are sold and the R100 that replace them seem less than of a bucket than the Turinos, Sooo I went for the r333's:

Holding you in position, will be a 6 point sparco harness:

Steering wheel is already installed. I opted for a SimoniRacing With quick release and hub.

Handbrake

well that serves to park the car, or go faster around bends, so:

yup hydraulic hand brake

Exterior:

Exterior goes for the Pumaspeed body kit (light glass fibre like the S1600 and S1400)

Engine Tune-ups:

Ever heard a vtec owner saying that nothing is more.glorious that vtec? He is wrong, Vtec on CAI is better, VTEC on ITB is sublime.

This boy doesn't not have VTEC but it does have Variable Valve Timing and Lift control... and there is a trick about Zetec engines and ITB's (not yet, i'll disclose after making my shopping).

Build progress:

The build is starting Next month, so expect progress reports. Stay tuned.

Update 1:

Car started to be stripped down, and the new seats and harnesses where installed.

The 6 point harnesses require drilling the floor and installing nuts and washers. But they are all all easy tasks. Do not forget to paint the holes to protect from rust. I've also used big washers to split the load on the metal panel and added A LOT of paint to both FILL and remove any air, but also help locking the nut in.

The factory seat-belt harness can be used for the mid left and mid right harness... the rest, you drill'em to the car floor panel.

Some matching floor mats and we're done for this part:

More to cone. stay tuned

Update 2:

Mechanic is now starting to dissemble the Focus, Puma to go in for surgery soon enough.

1.4 Engine is out, and it's being worked to fit another 1.4 puma with "heart problems".

Update 3:

Guess what I've found : https://www.plastics4performance.com/ford-puma-lexan-polycarbonate-rear-screen

Yup the rear glass heavy, High standing, weight is now 50% gone.

Plus I've managed to contact a fiber glass manufacturer that probably will be making the bonnet, and HOPEFULLY, the doors :)

Doesn't get much better than that.

I'm also looking into the Roof scoop, because I'm ditching the AirCon, and Portuguese summer is hot.

Credits and Special thanks for this build:

(to be filled at the build end)

The Ford/Yamaha Zetec se engine a.k.a sigma engine

2022-10-28T20:12:00.005+01:00

The sigma engine was a Ford/Yamaha venture that debuted with the mk5 fiesta, mk1 focus and the mk1 ford puma.

It's a brilliant piece of engineering built by Yamaha.

The production technology behind these engines is as such, that they are said to be 'not serviceable' on the bottom end, side of things.

In fact, ford sells entire armed blocks, and the typical part supplier has no parts for the bottom end in stock.

This, of course, is just a quality sealing way of doing things.

There is engineering to the engine that makes them very tough on the bottom end, also very technical in terms of service procedure. So being inexpensive, it's easy to opt for a armed block replacement, and being so demanding in terms of service, makes sense that Ford claims it not to be serviceable and just replaceable.

But I'm not much to stick with rules made for majorities that are not tech savvy.

Truth is, you have SEVERAL engine builders that use normal production engines, disassemble them and rebuild them to new specs.

The fact alone that they are assembled at a point in their initial production life means that you really can assemble these yourself, as long as you know the secrets and have the gadgets needed to do so.

These is and excellent paper by William PERRY, Malcolm MCDONALD, Peter C. CHARLTON called "Quantitative Analysis of Big End Journal Form and Bolt Installation using Ultrasonic Time of Flight Measurements" that actualy take the SIGMA engine rod assembly.

the Why:

The Zetec SE is a very interesting design. For starters the bottom end has a ladder design (much like the Honda's High Revving engines).

The Crank is forged much like the rods, but the way the rods are built is in it's self different. Ford used a Metal Powder Pressure mold forging process. I essence, the metal is in powder state and pressed liquid into a mold that is then further pressed into shape. This results in a close to Forged strength and durability, but in a less inexpensive way to produce.

But then, the rods are forged into one piece, so they are then thermally stressed on the division point and broken by force, The face of these now 2 parts is rough so they will not be able to slide away under stress. It's like a fingerprint.

As such, each rod has only one way to slot in correctly. And this method also requires your torquing to be equal across the rod surface contact between the 2 previously separated parts.

Taken from the referred paper:

They are, as such, torqued, both screws at the same time, and then after the max torque is reached, the bolts have been slightly stretched for increased strength... reusing those is, not recommended... go for fresh new bolts.

So, by looking at the graph, it's easy to say that the proper torque is between 45 and 48nm.

You can torque further into the 52nm range, but you'll be fully relying on the bolt fabrication quality to be that close to the limit. I wouldn't!

Stick with 35nm + 90 Degree (should get you close to 40-42nm)... there are yamaha engines with 25nm + 75 degrees torque specs.

You can go up to:

Initial 42nm (BOTH screws at the same time)

Secondary to 47nm (again, both screws simultaneously).

If not possible to screw the 2 bolts at the same time, make a max 2nm stepping per screw till you reach the figure you want.

This is a lot trickier to do by steps, so I really recommend you to have 2 torque wrenches.

So there is no real dark magic as to why these engines are considered non serviceable... but in truth, they are and have been serviced by a lot of tuners over the years.

Remember that the Fiesta and the Puma used to compete in the s1400 and s1600 classes. So these engines ARE serviceable as they are also tunable.

It is, however, difficult to find the parts you need to rebuild. Most Tune-shops really only focus on big engines and forced induction, VAG or JDM engines.

However, you still have the Good old brand specialists, particularly in the UK.

For Fords, I STRONGLY recommend BurtonPower.

These are images of the parts I've brought to rebuild the bottom end of my old 1.4 zetec-se... and as you can see, IT IS POSSIBLE AND THE PARTS DO EXIST, regardless of what people sell you.

The factory rods handles A LOT more than what the car has standard, and the bolts are good for turbo applications, so they too can handle a lot more.

Sure you can go all out and forge the thing, but unless you are force-induction"ing" the car, beyond 250 bhp, I see no reason for that.

Old dog needs new tricks

2022-09-09T23:27:00.040+01:00

Old cars normally die due to overheating problems. Some times it's the fan that gets stuck or the sensor that stops sending data properly, then you stop at a red light and don't mind the needle going up till the red, and then it's too late and you've burn the head-gasket.

The the majority happens with overheating for lack of water.

Out of these a good percentage of cases is attributed water circuit purely falling apart from cracks on tubes and vaporizing or dumping the water out. Other times the car has overheated before the owner understood it had a cooling issue, and the burnt gasket allows water to combustion passage, and the car will consume water, only noticeable if it is enough to cause compression and detonation issues.

All my cars are old, and with this trend of building worse cars, I'll keep having old cars.

So the first thing I do is to setup an alarm system for the water lever in the expansion tank.

Some cars have an embedded solution for this, others don't as making you replace the engine or buy a new car, is preferable to allowing you some quality for your money.

So on my 2 Hondas, 2 Fords and a Volvo made by Ford, I decided to add a water level warning system... the old 1997 Volvo v70t5 has this from factory... a true sign of times. It's clear to me that somewhere in 1997, engineered ruled and the economists where tied down in a closed room, without windows, down in the basement.. but then someone forgot to lock the door and they got out.. and then they over-thrown the engineers and it has been getting worse by the year.

Shopping list:

5v trigger 12v operation relay module like this:

https://amzn.eu/d/cySr42T 5V trigger is important as some relay modules are 12v operated, and the sensor does not send 12v to trigger the relay. Be careful with this.

led with buzzer alarm 12v:

https://amzn.eu/d/apxafaF

liquid sensor (external):

https://amzn.eu/d/hlVArrI

The schematics:

Explaining:

You will need to wire the sensor and the relay module to a 12v power source. Obviously this circuit doesn't make sense without the engine running, so I recommend you look for the fuse connector that is switched by ignition. That way, your circuit will only draw power with ignition on.

Next you need to ground the GND and (-) connectors for the same devices. That is Sensor, Relay and LED.

Now comes the interesting part. Since you want this circuit to default to trigger mode (in case something fails), so the power to the led should be set as DEFAULT on the relay as pictured. In essence, as you power or the circuit, you should hear a short beep then the triggering of the relay and silence.. until sensor stops sending level data, or the circuit fails for some reason.

Finally connect the sensor trigger to the relay trigger and test the circuit.

The last part is using T-Rex to glue the sensor to the expansion tank.

Use a lower placement of the sensor and remember that water will be jumping around that reservoir, while you drive... avoid areas that could get dry on hard cornering.

On my Puma, it looks just like this:

So now, If water runs too low. because of anything and old car can manage to break to do this, starting with a rotten radiator, or dried and fissured rubber hoses... maybe even a gasket starting to go... the red light, together with a buzzer will start sounding.

You can stop the car before you really burn the gasket and make a mess out of things.

Project Volvo V50 t5 awd "more than" Polestar - Forged t5

2022-09-01T18:09:00.017+01:00

The Why:

Some time ago, I decided I should buy my wife a car. Why? well... I believe because it was monday! As long as I like the car, I don't need justification. If i don't like it, on the other hand, I find every possible excuse to rule the thing out... So SUV's are immediately out of the equation, 99% of diesel's too and regarding the crap the auto industry is selling out today, 90% of every other car too.

Wasn't going to be easy!

First candidate was an Peugeot RCZ with 200bhp 1.6 THP engine... beautiful, well built, and fun. But she said: 2 kids with chairs + 1 13yo, this is not practical! And so I had to let the RCZ go.

Then a BMW 320D CC came up... it was beautiful (for a women... I'd never ride a champagne colored car), but, once again, it failed the rear seat space test.

I was giving up when a Volvo V50T5 AWD popped on the market. It was wonderful. The V50 T5 is not the best T5 engine, but then again, there are no BAD t5's. It's a Low pressure turbo K04 version of the same block on the S60R, with smaller spec'd rods and pistons. The great thing is that it has VVT on both Intake and exhaust and, since volvo was transitioning from TWR and the R badge cars to the Polestar branding, this series, along with the C30, S40mk2 and C70mk2, where left with a R-design trim option but no juicy stuff as the old R's used to have.

Because of this, Volvo dealers offered a Polestar Optimization Pack for the standard RDesign T5's, that you could buy and request installation.

Guess what else I found online: The map, the specs for the dampers, the wheels and the numbered kit documentation. So, In order to have a very valid Volvo V50t5 Polestar, all I had to do was to kit the car with wheels and suspension, add the map and the 2 badges together with the manuals and certificates.

And guess what: the engine block on this one is a Polestar branded one. Care to guess why?

Well, Polestar was preparing and racing the s60r back then and the 2.5 t5 engine block is shared across s60r mk2, and that block fits the v50... as it apparently did :)

So why isn't it the best T5 out there? For starters the turbo is low pressure meaning that this is capped form factory. Then the rods are not near as tough as the S60R ones, also unlike the S60R, the pistons do not provide high compression.

However, much like the S60r, it's a 2.5 with the same block as the S60R. The Volvo t5 are aluminum blocks, open sleeved design with a hard steel liner about 1 or 2 mm thick(depending on the engine). As the block stresses under boost detonation, the block and cylinder walls giveaway a bit to accommodate, but the sleeves liners, in harder steel, will eventually just crack.

The best t5 is the legendary 4T5 engine on a 2.4l configuration NOT BY BORE, but rather by stroke (long block...or longer that the other 2.4 by bore, low power options).

I knew the pistons are good for almost 500bhp, the rods shouldn't go beyond 330/350bhp and the sleeves, when they are known to crack on standard setups, so having a figure is just nonsense.

I didn't really like the Polestar rims...

...so I decided to go for MAK ones with a better design (particularly for portugal where you can have holes in highways and crack a rim easy.... that is exactly why, for the s2000, I chose the 5Zigens proracer gn+ and not the Typical Volk Cn28).... the MAK have a split mid arm that helps spreading the load across more radius then the Polestars. And price was equivalent, even though the polestarts where 20" and the MAK 18", tire wise it made a difference, and I'm not going go extreme on breaking, so ... 18" is enough.

The rest made into the car. And so a 250BHP T5 AWD was born.

I also wasn't 100% happy with the remap and tweaked it a bit, while installing a 3Inch CAI, aluminum wrap turbo ducts, full decat and a cut-out installed just before the rear box.

The car jumped to 280bhp.

The standard Haldex is a gen2 that BIAS the car towards the front-end... HOWEVER interesting this was for her to drive the car (not too much tail happy), it needed a personal touch. I then installed the Gen3 Haldex controller from the Volvo XC90 V8 and that fixes bias to 60%front 40%rear.. yes it issues errors but then again, as long as the power gets to ground, I'm cool.

The car was fitted with MAK wheels and Bridgestone Potenza Sport, and some polyurethane bushings, so it glued to the road and just powered towards the end of the roads all too fast.

Surprisingly the K04 is good for 280bhp and while one thought the car was quick after remap, the moment VVT kicked in, you would feel a tremendous pull towards the car in front of you... or the next corner. These engines are known for starvation limitations due to turbo size, but It didn't feel like this. Probably it will be perceptible from 300 bhp on, and that is maybe why you rarely see them going past 300bhp without major turbo/injector upgrades.

Was really fun, however, some months into this, we felt an occasional stuttering, as if the gearbox wasn't getting into gear, but it was... strangely!

A week into this occasional stuttering at low speed, the car seized and cylinder number 4 said it was time to go on strike.

I'm still to eval if this was a piston carving (the car used to have bi-fuel BS) and we all know that gas conversion presents lubrication challenges, or a stuck injector... or a MEGA crack as compression was totally lost on that cylinder. But the piston scratched the wall and that means trouble either way you put it.

UPDATE: piston scratched the wall because it was fully cleansed by water from the block and petrol from the injectors. The gasket gave away!

After a small talk with the mechanic, we figured that the torque specs for the that part of the head where WAY OFF... so a hypothesis can be formulated:

Former owner overheated the engine, a leak formed, he asked his grease monkey to tighten the block where it warped and sold. Typical Latin BS. I'd have brought the car if he had told me this, anyway, as some tweaking was to happen... but people are shit! We deserve the asteroid coming our way.

So I had 2 options:

1 - buy an engine and have this fixed in a month

2 - buy parts and forge this thing to 1000BHP capable, set it up to 500 bhp to be very unstressed, and allow the wife to thrash a 400-500bhp AWD Volvo to pick up the kid at school

... hum... decisions decisions.

With me, as you can gather with other articles, there is no decision. Replace factory compromised stuff with tuner or racing uncompromising parts and stop worrying.

So a build it was and a big one it would be.

Well I've just start receiving parts!

K1 I profile Forged Rods

Darton MID sleeves:

Wiseco, HighCompression, Forged Pistons:

ARP 2000 Main studs:

ACL RACE Tri-Metal Rod Bearings:

KING Tri-Metal crank bearings:

Also arrived:

ARP 2000 head bolts

Athena 1.6mm full metal, reinforced gasket

The Turbo is to be hybridized to a K24 core good for 420 to 500 bhp. As a result, I'll look at the injector charts and choose accordingly.

The Idea is to have a dual map with the minimum duty cycle the injectors handle for the minimum pressure on the turbo (IDK 180bhp maybe), and either 400 or 500 bhp for the max duty cycle on the injectors and turbo feeding.

I think the Wife will be pleased.

Stay tuned for more info and pictures. I'll be showing off my friend Fabio's skills during the build, in case you wanna try the same recipe.

UPDATE 1

Finally, after a long wait (first gather all the parts, then waiting for the mechanic to have time to assign to the build), I've got word that, next Thursday (in 3 days) the build will start, and the photos will start popping on the blog. Stay tunned.

She is now dry (engine coolant, engine oil and gearbox oil).

Tomorrow, engine and turbo comes out and off to the machine shop. Weeeeee ;)

UPDATE 2

wow this was a mess... no wonder it failed.

Gasket blew and coolant went into the combustion chamber.

Gasket let go almost 50% of the contact patch... it was a matter of time before we had trouble. You can clearly see how clean and washed it is:

And a bench of parts that (about 50% of'em) will never be used in this engine again.

The rods seam thin if you look from this perspective, but turn them sideways and they look like toothpicks. The 2.5 t5 low pressure options is built cheap to it's very core. Disappointing, but a clear tell sign of economists finding their way into engineering departments.

UPDATE 3

Engine is now at machine shop, and turbo has been handed to the turbo specialist for hybridization... in goes a BorgWarner K04 out comes a BorgWarner K24.

Next step: Full destruction of existing sleeves and making the inserts for the Dartons.

Then the cold/hot resleve.

Then honing under pressure plate at full torque (simulating a head in place)... the proper way to do it.

This next phase is expected to take about 1month...so update could be delayed until full sleeved block and turbo are done.

Will try to post progress IF the work shop sends images back.

Update:

So summer came, people went on vacation, stuff delayed a bit, however:

The block is sleeved and parts are now in weight correction and dinamic balancing for assembly.

With the engine now being dynamic-balanced, its starting to get close to assembly, so the logic step is starting to work of shaft reinforcement and brakes.

As such, a set of s60R calipers front and rear...

...those are 4 piston calipers all round, brembo made.

next is 330mm rotors, probably 2 part disks with floating mounts...still under research.

The calippers where the ones shown above, but since the V50 is more polestar than standard, i asked (again) for my friends Diogo Silva's help.

And boy did he deliver:

If you are looking for a proper paintjob (with decalcs) Diogo is your man. You can reach him here: diogo2306silva@gmail.com

+351933590153

Credits and Special thanks for this build:

Diogo Silva - caliper paiting

(to be filled at the build end)

Volvo T5 ... T5R... R ... R-design? Volvo Polestar? Just Polestar? But aren't all Volvo's grandparent's cars?

2022-05-30T23:41:00.008+01:00

No... ohhh no!

Volvo has a racing heritage. Particularly when they decided to market their mad T5 as R and partner with TWR to show-off all over the BTCC scene, but they've always had a touch of MAD in their saloon and vans, it's just that, people don't know that until they try it.

It all starter much earlier than that. Around mid 70's, Volvo debuted a new line of cars: the 240 and 260 series.

There is a constant miss mach on Volvo mode ranges, but I'll try my best to explain this:

*Type*	*BMW Equivalent*	*Ford Equivalent*	*Honda Equivalent*	*VAG Equivalent*	*70's Volvo*	*80's Volvo*	*90's Volvo*	*00's Volvo*	*Today's Volvo*
HatchBack	1 series	Focus	Civic	A3 / Golf / Leon	-	380	-	C30	C30
Sports hatchback	1m Series	Focus RS / Focus ST	Civic TypeR	S3 / Golf gti/ Sirrocco/LeonCupra	-	480 turbo	-	C30T5 C30 Polestar	-
Compact Family	3 Series Compact	Focus Sedan Focus Van	Civic Van	Jetta / Bora	140/240	240/440	-	-	V40Mk2
Family Coupe	3 Series Coupe	Focus Coupe	-	Passat CC	-	-	C70	-	-
Family Convertible	3 Series Convertible	Focus Convertible	-	EOS	-	-	C70 Coupe	C70	-
Family Minivan	2 series	Focus CMax	-	Touran	-	-	-	-	-
Compact Family SUV	X2	Puma Mk2	HRV	-	-	-	-	-	XC40
Family	3 Series	-	-	A4 / Passat	-	460	S40Mk1 V40Mk1	S40mk2 V50mk1	S40mk3 V50mk2
Family Sports	3M Series	-	-	S4	-	-	-	S40T5/AWD V50T5/AWD Polestar kit	- -
Comfort Family	5 Series	Mondeo	Accord	A6 / Octavia	164/260	260	850/S70/V70mk1	S60mk1 V70mk2	S60mk3 V60
Comfort Family Sports	5M Series	-	Accord TypeR	S6 / Octavia RS	-	-	850T5 850T5R 850R	S60T5 V70T5 S60R V70R	S60 / V60 Polestar
Comfort Family SUV	X3	Kuga	CRV	Q5/Tiguan	-	-	XC70 mk1	XC70 mk2	XC60
Limo	7 Series	Scorpio	Legacy	A8 / Arteon	-	740/760	900	S80	S80 V90
Limo Sports	7M Series	-	-	S8	-	740Turbo 760Turbo	-	S80T6	-
SUV	X5 Series	-	-	Q7/Touareg	-	-	-	XC90	XC90

So, back to the 200's...the 200 series where Volvo's bet into the family car.

But the chassis was a significant improvement form previous cars and the engines where over-engineered to stand abuse and engineering refinement over the years. So Volvo, aimed against the BMW and Mercedes market, and pumped up the power on the straight 6. They also added better brakes to

And then, the hairdryer squad hit Volvo and they decided to Turbo-it:

... and later, Inter-cool-it:

And with that, people thought: This could be just good enough to race! Guess what...it was!

The 700 series:

It worked, so, Why not adding another "hairdryer" to the 700 series?

And them all the sudden, Volvo had gained the reputation to create cars that just looked normal, until you floor'em and they burn rubber and disappear like they urged an exorcism. So, cleverly, they started appealing to the "kid" inside every man that once was a petrol head, but then got a kids of his own.

And then the P80 chassis

At this point, things started to get VERY interesting.

Volvo was working on a new line of chassis "p80" and a new line of engines "Volvo Modular engine", and since they where expecting some fast performer versions, and some competition usage, they really thought on chassis dynamics that where fun "within Volvo concepts" and not just safe and habitable.

The 850 was good from start and after some "test production years" mainly with 2.0 and 2.5 NA 5 cylinder engines, then started the T5, T5R, glt(t2) and then the R.

The rear Deltalink auto-steering suspension, meant that the car, though enormous, did had some agility... argumentatively a weird one: You need to go all out loading the rear suspension (typically with a lift-off, yang-in, full-throttle), to smash the rubber bushings and twist the geometry into the turn-in. If you get it right, it feels like there is a magical force holding the massive rear end and helping you corner, while the front wheels shred the tires through the bend... but it does help the massive thing turn. So not brilliant, definitely not refined as a BMW; expensive on tires; but efficient, sure.

So it comes with no surprise that this happened:

Volvo teamed up with TomWakinshawRacing team and then:

yes! that is a van... on the BTCC racing track... and it was tremendous.

The 850 in the BTCC where not even close to the production T5, T5R or R... but the driving experience was not that different (causing Lamers to leave the team, as he had a 850T5 and thought the driving too similar to consider the BTCC car pro enough). And they looked the same, and since the road going versions where crazy powerful, people loved them.

The BTCC was a masterpiece of clever engineering around the rules from the brilliant TWR team.

First of all the car was NA 2.0 and not Turbo 2.3, however, the 5 cylinder aspirated 2.0 rev'd to 8500 rpm and produced 325bhp (with 13.5:1 compression pistons), but it was always publicized as 280+ after catalytic converter silencer fitting, and delivered it to ground via a 6 speed gearbox.

Engine was mounted lower and further back into the car.

Driving position was also move towards the centre of the car, next to the B pillar, full racing car style.

But the best part, the cherry on top of the cake was the cylinder head. You see BTCC rules stated that the angle of the valves could not be changed from production cars... but there is 2 ways to look at this:

1- angle towards the head

2- angle towards the block

The standard head could not be tuned enough make a competitive Turing car engine.

You see, the heads from the production 2.0 and 2.5 engines where built towards easiness in production and cost reduction, so the 58 degree intake-exhaust amplitude is less than optimal and high-range, leaves the engine struggling for air volume. The regulations allowed for bigger valves, but not the angle.

So a prototype was built to study the air-flow dynamics and have a goal. This design alone managed 260bhp. It was still a good 25bhp shy of the standard power output from... well everyone else.

So someone at TWR thought outside of the box and move the logic of looking at valve angles from a head geometry perspective into what I really what is valve-to-block angle.

and regulation said nothing about shaving the head unilaterally and tilting-it.

There was also nothing saying you couldn't cut the head top-off and fit a custom part to allow bigger valves and cams.

The result was sort of a Frankenstein with a small part of the original head, sandwiched between custom parts and angled so the cylinder intake and air swirl optimization managed 235bhp.

And the Deltalink was also

... gone!

It got known for being a susprise, as no one expected a flying brick to have a decent score in BTCC, but it did... and also got known for this spectacular crash, at the hand of Kevin Burt:

With all this marketing, the 850 got a bunch of "variations" of it's powerful form, over the years.

They all differ slightly, but in the end, they revolve around the same basic concept:

Volvo 850 T5 - 2.3l, 225bhp 300nm

Volvo 850 T5-R - 2.3l, 240bhp 330nm

Volvo 850 R - 2.3l, 250bhp 350nm (bigger turbo)

Enter the V70mk1 / S60 mk1 / C70 mk1

Then, it got a revised front and dashboard, but it was still the 850

But the versioning got a lot more clear:

Volvo C70/V70/S60 T5 - 2.3l, 240bhp 330nm

Volvo V70/S60 R- 2.3l, 250bhp 350nm (bigger turbo)

For some reason I'm yet to compute, the C70 got a convertible... good, but not the R! You can have a Family Van R, but oh no not the coupe :s maybe I'm the crazy one.

S40Mk1 V40Mk1

Around the same time, Volvo and Mitsubishi started spawning the results of their affair. The mk1 S40, with a chassis equal to the Mitsubishi charisma was released.

And of course, with a lighter and more nimble chassis, it got straight into TWR hands and this happened:

It got the same engine as it's big brothers, but now on a much more nimble chassis, results where easy to obtain.

For the street? well they used the "modular" word on the Volvo Modular Engine Design, So they lost a full cylinder off the 2.3 T5, and a 1.95ltr 200bhp T4 was added to the range.

It was fast, it was nimbler than the 850 or S70, but the entire car was built with comfort in mind and the steering response on the road car was just too light and filtered for my liking. The one I loved best to drive had just had a failure on the steering assistance :S a car that, broken, is more interesting to drive.

But the best from this Mitsubishi/Volvo romance is still on the forge, and will come to play at a latter time, under the most unexpected recipe.

MK2 V70/MK2 S60

Volvo had just been brought by Ford. So, new chassis where being produced and new cars had to fit them.

The P2 project spawned a lot of new Volvo models, amongst them the mk2 versions of the V70 and S60.

By then, Volvo had ditched TWR and brought a company called "Flash Engineering". It renamed it as Polestar Engineering and tasked PROdrive to help them get going.

But it was not until the MK3 version of the S60 and V70 that Polestar was really "open for business".

And this is going to get a Twist for the smaller cars... later, however having them already planning at this point was very important.

The MK2 V70 and S60 had a clear definition too:

Volvo mk2 V70/S60 T5 - 2.4l, 260bhp 350nm (BorgWarner turbo)

Volvo mk2 V70/S60 R- 2.5l, 300bhp 400nm (BorgWarner turbo) AWD

Hold the press. Everyone goes after the R, but the T5, on had the Unicorn engine from Volvo. The Glorious B5244T5. Internals good for 600BHP, standard with a BorgWarner K24... And the basis that Polestar used to tune for high power applications.

Most people drool about a Toyota 2JZ, or a Nissan RB26DETT, but every one of those engines will require forjed internals beyond 600BHP, much like the Volvo 4T5. So this engine is within that class of engineering, and with one less piston.

Enter the C30 / MK2 S40 / MK2 V50 and MK2 C70

One other Volvo-Ford product was the P1 chassis. The FordFocus CMAX chassis, on a volvo security reinforced frame and crazy Volvo turbo engines.

I don't know if you ever driven a ford since 1996, but they ALL have spectacular chassis (except the KA mk2, based on the garbage fiat 500).

The Focus is and excellent driver's car and the chassis it just perfect. So The brand new C30, The Mk2 S40, the V50 and mk2 C70, all based out of these chassis are brilliant cars to drive... they are fun, engaging and very sporty.

And they all where very easy to understand:

Volvo C30/mk2 S40/ Mk2 c70, V50 T5 - 2.5l, 220bhp 320nm (k04 low pressure turbo) optional AWD

What wait!? The BEST CHASSIS so far, No R, No T5R, No 4T5 and BorgWarner K24, no Prodrive, no Polestar? Has the world gone crazy!? No racing team!? what?

Yeah.. R was transformed into R-Design... a body kit and interior trim option... Pfff

The ONLY real good thing that made the P1 chassis to squeeze it to the limits, was... DSTC.

Sure you don't really understand this, allow-me to explain:

TC - Traction Control (combats wheel spin on acceleration by applying brakes and dosing the engine)

STC - Stability and Traction Control ( it's the Volvo equivalent to ESP from VW, DSC from BWM) Corrects the car trajectory control by applying brakes individually and dosing the engine, depending on circumstances.

DSTC - Dynamic Stability And Traction Control - It's the STC with added Active Yaw Control - This establishes thresholds on the STC so that it only interveins on the the verge of full loss of control.

What does it mean? You arrive into a round about, full on brakes, flick the car with some opposite turn to unsettle the chassis, then turn into the drift and full power on the car... and the car allows you to get away with it! If you steer out of the movement or hit the brakes, the car understands you're in trouble and unleashes the fun-cutter STC to get you back on track and regain your dignity before crashing.

And this we have to thank for... Volvo and Mitsubishi sexual affair!

See what makes the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution perform those perfectly controlled 4WD drifts that seem to last forever? yup Active Yaw Control.

You can have it on your Rally based Mitsubishi... or your wife's Volvo to take the kids to school... and I'm the crazy one. But I'm not complaining! Far from it. I can always add the engine and the R you neglects to the car... not the chassis electronics, so I take that option over the R, sure.

Important Note - DSTC can be present in any P1 or P2 based Volvo... yes the gigantic XC90 has DSTC as an option, and yes I've drifted the monster... it's weird.

So, what happened? Only the Volvo management team can say but rumours are: They invested into the S60Mk3 Polestar for racing and for public "power saloon", based out of the glorious 4T5 unit... but then I've not seen a single 4T5 based polestar.

And that Ford was not happy with the C30 cannibalising part of the Ford Focus sales.

However, at the dealership, you could order a Polestar Optimisation pack for your T5. Composed by some literature, bigger wheels, firmer springs, engine and gearbox optimisation.

Again, easy to understand:

Volvo C30/mk2 S40/ Mk2 c70, V50 T5 Polestar optimized - 2.5l, 250bhp 380nm optional AWD

MK3 S60/ V60 (and Polestar finally out of the box)

So S60 got it's Mk3 revision. A much more dynamic chassis, so nice to drive that even the diesel 1.6 option is nice to throw into a corner.

At this point in time, Polestar was full on racing and the S60 Polestar for the road was based not on the 4T5 but on the T6. So it was a 3.0, cylinder 351bhp 500nm beast.

and the road version:

MK2 C30 Polestar (just a concept)

Just before Polestar lost it's mind for good and turned electrrrrrr (sorry can't pronounce that without vomiting all over), they where actually heading in the right direction.

They used the learned success on the P1 chassis and where working on the C30 Polestar to annihilate all the other RS and GTi's and AMG's and M's the market had on the segment.

Based out of the same chassis as the Focus RS, after the focus RS ended production without a worthy replacement (another stupidity I'm yet to compute), also packing AWD and even more power, this was a brutal little car. .. that never got into production and probably never will as polestar collapsed into building toy cars with batteries and stuff.

How pleasant would this baby be?

2.5 T5 engine producing 451bhp and 510nm with a BorgWarner K26... i mean.... just perfect.

But a Limited 250unit production, fixed this into : another car you'll never have! Why?

Check TopGear opinion on it and you'll get the point.

So now that you understand what is what, lets have a table with Volvo Only and the influence on the sports side of things.

*Car*	*70's Sports*	*70's Production*	*80's Sports*	*80's Production*	*90's Sports*	*90's Production*	*00's Sports*	*00's Production*	*2010's sports*	*2010's Production*
240 / 260	-	Volvo	Eggenberger Motorsport / Magnum Racing	Volvo	-	-	-	-	-	-
480 Turbo	-	Volvo/Renault	-	Volvo	-	-	-	-	-	-
740 Turbo	-	-	-	Volvo	-	-	-	-	-	-
850T5 850T5R 850R C70T5 Mk1	-	-		Volvo	TWR	Volvo/Porsche	-	-	-	-
C30T5 S40T5 V50T5 C70T5 mk2	-	-	-	-	TWR (s40 mk1)	Volvo/Porsche	Polestar (C30)	Volvo (Polestar Engineering Kit)	-	-
S60T5 S60R V70T5 V70R	-	-	-	-	-	-	Prodrive/Polestar	Volvo	Polestar	-
S60 Polestar	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	Polestar	Volvo/Polestar
C30 Polestar limited	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	Volvo/Polestar

So with this graph, you should now know that, at a point in time, Volvo went PRO racing with the 850 under TWR engineering, and used Porsche engineering to soup up the street versions. Then it got brought by Ford Motor Company and severed ties with TWR and started Polestar engineering (brought as "flash Engineering" and now called "cyan" as Polestar was spined-off to build... electric crap), a more "close to the chest" thing. Much like M division for BMW, AMG for Mercedes, etc., But before all that, they got an extra marital thing with Mitsubishi, and AYC came out of it, cloaked as DSTC.

By now, You now know that:

Volvo is terrible maintaining sports teams, Volvo builds some crazy cars every now and then, and that between the jump from TWR to Prodrive & Polestar to Polestar, the C30,S40,V50 and mk2 c70 where forgotten in terms of R options, while the S60 and V70 where blessed with the R option and also a pearl of an engine on the t5 260bhp versions.

Recently, Volvo went all crazy and created a brand new Engine with 4 cylinders, 2.0 and both turbo and compressor in line, copying VW. I got nothing against this engine that can , depending on the version and couplings (electric hybrid BS), produce all sorts of BHP . But I can't forgive Volvo for killing the glorious T4, T5 and T6, and transforming the T3, T4, T5, T6, T8 into marketing labels for the same 4 pot engine and a different config. It's just not decent, and Polestar got it very right by using the true T6 for the S60Polestar and the true T5 for the C30Polestar.

One thing is clear:

If you see a 90's, 00's or 10's Volvo ahead of you, and there is anything resembling a T4, T5, T6, R or a blue label with a white small star in it, don't assume he is getting away from your path and allow you to blast by. It may just, floor-it and leave you in the dust, just because... and still look like Soccer mum's car.

Tire Review - Goodride SA05

2021-03-12T12:55:00.000+00:00

Cars tested with these tires:
- Volvo V70 T5 (with higher compression, and dump valve)

Tests performed:
- Front wheels, with a lot of mountain and highway kms between Lisbon and Madrid (700km trips)..

Dry grip:
- I must say I wasn't expecting much from a Chinese tire. It was inexpensive, however not as inexpensive as some other tires. I honestly was surprised with the tires. Grip is good, but once they break grip (under turbo spool-up) they tend do struggle to regain. This is most likely to do with the design. It has a lot of large surfaces, so I would imagine they will have some difficulty "cleaning up" the patch before re-gripping. Not brilliant but soft enough to deliver good road holding while hot.

- Lateral grip is good, but it could do better. I think the structure is not up to the task that the design and compound promise.

Wet grip:
- Decent. It is not brilliant. Feels a lot like older compound tires (less silica). This could also be caused by the large surfaces on the tire design, allowing for less flexibility.

- It doesn't make you feel like a Gecko as some others do. That's for sure. But not entirely bad... I'd call it honest. It will "warn you" that it slips... and it will then precede to do so.

Aquaplaning resistance:
- Surprisingly good. The Large surfaces that would mean trouble are well channeled and that does show. If the wheel spins loose, the drainage will pump water out and, assuming you are not driving too fast of on a river, drain enough to re-gain ground. The problem then becomes the lack of silica on the compound.

- However, and being quite fair, this HPT (not really but better then average sport tyre) is rated summer. We should expect good wet grip. I think that It would fit an open diff car with a delayed response traction control system quite nicely. The free spin wheel from the open diff would pull water, and then the delayed response form the traction control would help the tire re-gain the grip.

- Good for older generation cars. Just not too heavy

Progressiveness:
- Decent... not brilliant. You know it's about to slip, the problem becomes the regain of grip. A few groves on the large surfaces, and a bit more silica on the compound could solve this.

Integrity maintenance:
- This is the caveat on this tire. There is some sidewall, but it feels weak. The Volvo t5 was a bit too heavy for them. If cornering at over 180km/h you could feel the tire warping from IN on the the pressure area, and then out on the top area of the tire. This was later confirmed with a very high sidewall temperature. This tire could perform better with a lighter car. However the lack of high silica on the compound mean it needs pressure to work. It's a nonsense and ultimately why, in my opinion, it fails the HPT classification.

- Either add silica and rate it for lighter cars, or reinforce the sidewall and add some of cuts in the larger surfaces , then rate it for heavier cars. This seams a compromise that fails at both, rather than win.

Compound:
- It's a soft rubber compound with little wear resistance and designed for hot operation. Could do a bit more silica and get some better wet grip.

Longevity:
- Not brilliant. The T5 cleaned them slick in the normal time it does to any other soft tire. They where however surprising consistent to any other sports tire... to the "Chinese stuff doesn't last" doesn't apply here.

Coherence:
- Lack structure and that makes it weird to use, however the compound was consistent all the way to the metal wires. Pirelli and some Falkens could take a lesson from these.

Balance:
- Well... weird. They are normally balanced tires (not HPT rating for sure), BUT the warping under extreme loads seam to hurt them someway. Then they get out of balance!!! So, do not use these on heavy cars... or if you are going to, then drive like an old lady on her way to the grocery shop.

Load Behaviour:
- If I had to fit these again on the T5, they would probably find their way in the back ad the car normally runs back-empty.

- This seams like a good tire for an old hothatch car that doesn't weight too much. A ford escort, an opel astra, Peugeot 306 that sort of stuff.

Ayrton Senna da Silva - The death of best race car driver even seen

2021-02-27T20:18:00.016+00:00

Hi all

Another big post, as per request of my former colleague Christian Lisboa.

This is a Bitter sweet one:

Bitter because for me, F1 died with Senna. I stopped watching races as I was so disgusted with the way they allowed it to happen, the way the race continued as they clearly knew he was dead... the disrespectful manner they managed the "last squeeze" out of their "golden Chicken", was just too much to forgive. Bitter because he was an extraordinary human being and even better driver, and i respect him immensely. Sweet because during this post I not only talk about the accident, but also talk about who he was and how gigantic he was... both sport and personal wise.

This will be a long one, and I'll approach the explanation of how Senna died, but, more important, the physics behind his crash and the even more important guilt by some people that deserve no respect at all from the rest of human kind (although one of them "presented him self as a friend of Senna").

Before starting:

I'll just start by stating that Senna was the best I've seen... ever. There are authentic Gods of driving before and after Senna, some alive, others not... but Senna was an absolute prodigy that lived to race. His focus was absolute.

A lot of people argue if Messi or Christiano Ronaldo or Figo or Maradona where the best football player... Messi is a natural born genius, Christiano has archived by means of unprecedented focus and dedication and very very hard work, Figo was intelligent and technical and Maradona was all passion and he gave it all to the game... heart and soul.

If you where to Fuse all these together, you would come up with a football player that would still come short if compared to Senna as a Race car driver.

A lot of people misunderstand Senna and come shallow. But if you dig into the documentaries of his short life, and if you understand the culture he grew up in, you'll learn to respect him in ways that may surprise you.

Senna as a race car driver

Senna started driving karts and winning at 8years of age. He was small, light and tried to understand how the mechanics of the kart worked. He used it all to be faster and more aggressive... this physical characteristic was maintained, by means of a tough physical preparation routine, through his life. As a kid, being trained and advised to "cool down his times" he would reply: no! with me it's either first place or no place.

This attitude, however was not filled with presumptuousness like most. His friends described him as someone "big enough to be little". He wanted first place but he knew he had still limitations and he had to learn. So he followed an independent career being champion at all steps. Karting was the one championship that he didn't win, but all the formulas, he followed patiently the path and even declined a jump to 2 F1 teams in the process. He had to reach it and learn the way through... we would not take shortcuts.

He knew he had to build driving skill and also mechanical knowledge... or... engineering skill. And he pursued that with passion and dedication rivalled by no one else. The one other driver that came close was Michael Schumacker.

He was also conscientious that he was small and light, so he build himself up to the task ahead. He started his physical tune-up in 1984 and he never stopped till the end of his life. He tuned himself to have better blood sugar and oxygen levels consistent under stress, and keep his BPMs as low as possible.

Much like a race car from those years (it was light as possible and made "fragile" to the point of minimal needed function) It will hold together and have the strength to suffer stress... until you crash... then you have no possible protection from the chassis as the logic is: this was made to race, not made to crash, so don't!

Senna was light and his physical preparation was always towards having enough strength to race the car without driver-aids assistance and during the race... and not more.

Senna rigorously prepared himself physically for stamina and leanness. He tried a balance between having strong neck muscles, but the remaining muscle preparation was mostly cardio (with LOTS of running) in order to have lean muscles and not big muscles.

Senna has several videos after his races where you can see him suffering in pain and not being able to withstand hugs and shakes due to extreme muscle fatigue and a lot of pain. Those where frequent as he was... building him self to have ONLY the necessary muscle to drive the race... not more as it would be weight and size, no less as he wouldn't be able to finish or drive properly. This sort of "Fine engineering" of your body is some samurai stuff!

The first time Senna lost a race to rain, his frustration led him to get back to a kart, on slicks get to the track and drive in the rain... over and over and over... and then progress to bigger chassis and learn all over again. He would learn and study new chassis designs typically in the rain.

Senna practised what was scary to him until it was actually fun. You can see this attitude on Another genius called Keiichi Tsuchiya (the drift king).... they actually have a lot in common in terms of driving technique both steering and throttle management wise.

The result was a mastery of the car dynamics that no one else came close too master. In the rain Senna managed to find grip where no one else was able to. But this knowledge is also valid in the dry... resulting in the capability of driving CONSTANTLY on the car's/track/weather grip limits.

His win rate in the rain twice as good as Michael Schumacher was (66% vs 36.5%). This was clear at Donington race in 1993 as you can see for your self:

There is something you need to understand about Senna. He looks at all aspects of the race... and that includes the weather. You see, back then McLaren had chassis to race but the development of the engines (leaving the turbo engine and going back to natural aspirated) where still behind the competition's power delivery. So he had to use the conditions where all others couldn't use the power advantage... so he had to use that as an advantage.. and he did so with brilliance yet to be seen again.

He also studied the mechanics of the race cars he drove and while other race car drivers would pit-in, state the car was "loose on the rear-end" and drive of to the hotel, Senna would literally live in the Paddock, with the mechanical team and would tell you that the "rear toe in is to aggressive for the wing down force" for instance. His knowledge of the car systems and tune-ups was so great that he even adjusted brake bias to solve hydraulic issues during racing, or even finished races with a blocked gearbox in 6th gear.

The level of focus he had was tremendous. He was a very religious man (as most Portuguese and Brazilian are) and the fact that he talked about "feeling closer to God" and that " he believed that God would help him out of trouble", etc was miss interpreted by a lot of people... stating with his scared shitless colleague alain prost (small caps in disrespect... yes).

You see Senna did believe in God, but what you believe in is just a figure of speech. Buddhists monks meditate and reach a state they feel elevated, devoted Catholics feel that being indoors in a church makes them feel elevated... it's just a way to picture a strong will to believe in something that makes you re-wire your brain.

There is a reason why training is often repetitive. If generates brain connections that will allow you to react without having to think about it.

If you are able to believe in something that doesn't exist, but you still strongly believe, your brain will rewire and offset part of the "thinking process into a not needed" allowing for the purely physical movements to happen.

You react using per-memorised action/reaction patterns and bypass the thinking process. This is what happened with Senna. By strongly believing in God he reduced the fear of death/injury, allowing him to enter a state of "meditation" if you please and focus his brain activity on the dynamics of the car and not the dynamics of a crash and pain and misery, etc etc etc.

He got so focused in this that during some of his races, Sid Watkins, watching the telemetries, said that he would stop breathing for up to a minute... this is tremendous, particularly in a f1 car form the 90's

Some pilots understood this,, like his team-mate at the time of death, Damon Hill. He would say that Senna would through himself into a corner faster than he ever did and believe that something inside him would pull him through..some people call it faith, some people call it belief, but if you study him,, you understand that he trained himself so he could have muscle memory solve part of the problem, and focus his brain on the physics to make it work, instead of multitasking himself into a crash due to delayed reaction.... brilliant!

Look at this lap on this RUTHLESS Monaco circuit.

Senna got so serious about driving that when he made mistakes, we would stress about them and punitively re-live the circumstances (cry in frustration) and then... learn as a traumatic experience. He must had been half Japanese with this Samurai/Ronin sort of ways.

Last but not least, Senna compartmentalized friendship and rivalry. The fact that you are friends with someone, doesn't mean you are going to giveaway an easy win. Rivals are rivals and the battle to win would happen independently of friendship. There was always respect for life and the individual and the sport was the main driver for this behavior. He would battle to win each corner, each breaking approach, each racing line... the sport. Not politics and deception.

This is why I lost all respect for alain prost. He mixed being competitive with being vengeful and that ultimately strongly contributed to the path that lead to Senna's death.

But Senna the man... has the ultimate workaholic.

The disgusting politics and french protectorate

Back in that day, the president for F1 was jean marie balestre (small caps in disrespect). An authoritative, arrogant and very nationalist Frenchmen.

Evidently, being French and very political, alain prost had a excellent relationship with balestre and he was very protective of alain.

prost was a very methodical driver and also very very egoist. Efficient, but far from genius like Ayrton, we clearly understood we would be eclipsed by the your team mate and as such they started a very nervous relationship.

The problem here was that, as Senna was much better than prost as a driver prost was a good politician and Senna was everything but a politician.

The competition between the 2 got to a point where, in Susuka 1989, prost, leading the championship and having the title IF Ayrton didn't score the race, crashed against Ayrton on purpose (trying to take him out of the race). But Sennas superior driving managed to escape wth a damaged car through the safety chicane and drive to the pit, have the car's nose fixed, back on the track and won the race.

Being a politician, prost rushed to is "mummy" balestre and they both conspired to blame it all on Senna as being very aggressive.

Not happy with it, they also distorted the safety regulations and grabbed the rules book to invalidate Senna's victory. In the end the deliberation was that as Senna "followed through" the chicane, he did not complete that lap via the circuit path. As such the lap did not count.EVIDENTLY the chicane is there to permit the drivers to slow down, and the follow through is there to permit the ones that fail the breaking into the chicane APEX, have a secure alternative to avoid crashing. According the blestre's arguments, Senna should have reversed back into the chicane, going the wrong direction, and then resume the chicane. It's absurd, dangerous and plain stupid.

They managed to sanction Senna with 100.000 GBP fine and a 6 month ban. Ayrton was disqualified from the Japanese Grand Prix as a result, and prost won the championship that year. They also tried to launch a civil law suit against Senna.

As McLaren manager, Ron Denis, tried to save the day, jean marie balestre threatened to ban McLaren from racing.

As expected from a politician, prost pursued to badmouth Senna in public hearings claiming he was a danger to other drivers because he believed in God and drove like a mad man... how bizarre! Senna clearly speaks out claiming: "I'm a race car driver! I always try to win! I never settle! If i see an opening and do not try to take it, then I'm not a race car driver anymore" This is possibly the most professional claim I can think of, as a reply to such absurd claims from prost (and I'm an atheist).

McLaren released prost form contract and prost shifted to Ferrari, running away from Senna as a team mate.

Fate has it's ironic cycles and in 1990, on the same situation, same track, but with inverted roles, Senna did the same to prost ,and took the championship... it's one of those times where you can see Senna being vengeful and unhappy with that. He crashed both cars on the first corner in a very clear statement.

This same year, during driver briefing, the same rule that got Senna to lose the race the year before, was waved away (as it should) because of safety considerations. Senna backfired as you can see here:

Again alain was playing political games with balestre,and managed to steal the pole-position from Senna, after Senna qualified with the best lap time,(as usual)... well our boy was not gonna eat another pile of crap so... here is the what goes around comes around moment:

If you want to see how balestre was, you have a good picture here:

The pressure

As time went on, McLaren/Honda was not being able to maintain technical superiority, partially because Honda was shifting it's "support" for f1 and not giving its best.

Back then, the arrogant alain badmouthed Ferrari's car and engine, and as such, was fired! You can badmouth ANYTHING but the car, if you work for Ferrari.

As he moved towards Williams, he insisted on a clause on his contract that stated that, while his contract was valid, Williams would not hire Senna.

There is a catch here. Williams had just debuted the FW15 chassis. It was nothing brilliant mechanically, BUT it had active suspension... and that made it a complete GOD on track.

Senna's McLaren could not compete with a car that would setup for each curve automatically... and was loosing ground behind prost that had an easy win on the championship...and retired while he was still ahead.

Senna felt unsupported (mainly from Honda) and then from the technical disadvantage McLaren had against Williams.

More Political crap

As expected prost retired. Williams was then free to take on Senna and they did.

But our friend balestre was not yet done. A ban on Active-Suspension meant that now, Ayrtons fresh new Williams would not behave as it did before. In fact the car's chassis without active-suspension (FW16) was inferior to what McLaren (the one Senna had previously) had and was very unstable.

It wasn't all. Back then the cars had jumped from 660Bhp to over 800bhp between 1989 and 1991, and there was traction control and abs available to help the drivers. The gearbox had torque limiting functions to avoid low gear spin.

Guess what... those where banned too (or heavily tamed down).

The consequence was that Senna had a very difficult to drive and less then perfect chassis on his hands.

Frustration was setting in.

The direct consequences of the ban on driver-aids where immediate:

Pedro Lammy broke both his legs and a front collision, after locking his front wheels while breaking for the Monaco chicane.

Ruben Barrichelo crashed badly that fatal weekend, Roland Razenberger lost control of his car and hit the protection wall at over 300km/h. He died instantly.

Senna was then presiding the pilot syndicate and brought this extra pressure on to his shoulders. Something had to be done to restore some safety into the sport. But mean time, show had to go-on... and he would die on that same weekend. Senna had lost his battle against politics... professionalism and passion lost to deceiving and grease (the most disgusting thing in existence).

The crash

The day of the crash, Senna is very nervous. There is a comment that some interpret as a "peace message", I personally interpret as a very intelligent and loaded with cynicism critic to both alain and balestre. Before racing, Senna says "please come back alain, we miss you".

No one will really know what he meant, but what I read is that he wants to say something like : you should return, with you here, balestre would never ban the active suspension so you could win, he would never ban other driving aids so you could win... in the end, we're dying here and having you around would be sufficient to ensure proper rules for you that we would benefit from (or at least not drop dead because of). Some people think that phrase means, I miss you, I miss the constant fight... but if you consider all the pain prost-balestre politics pulled him through, you would think twice. In the end, I believe Senna saw balestre as the chauvinistic beast he was and understood that the past, thought hard, was not as bad, because of the presence of a french champion on the sport... it's a very sad feeling and his face shows evidence of it! he was right.

The cabal moment:

The moment of the crash is a well known film, and it has spawned several theories.

I've heard about tire burst (no evidence of that, on the contrary)... steering column catastrophically failure (another joke... when you break the steering, your hands instantly snap free to rotate due to the breakage on the link between your hands, torsion and the wheels gyroscopic movement)...the list goes on, but I'm sure some ET has a part in the plot.

Conspiracy theory nr 1 - the steering column -

The video shows an erratic movement of the steering column. It looks like as if the Weld-adjusted steering column broke at the welds and cause Senna to crash.

Take a good look at the conspiracy theory video:

There are several problems with this video:

1 - the steering column, at 3 g's will flex and allow movement... it's designed to do so.

2 - the steering column adjustment that increased the length, was done by adding pipe-IN-pipe and then welding them together. So the piece of pipe (that actually broke with the impact) was placed inside the original steering column pipe. This means that the only way the steering would break like that, would be by a fracture being able to crack TWICE the metal thickness (plus the stronger weld)... very very dubious.

3 - The telemetry! The little tell-all blackbox on board the car, measured everything from percentage of inputs to torsion forces, and in included the steering wheel. That actually shows that Senna was 101% throttle through the corner, the torque applied on the steering was quite on the linear side of things (a broken part would generate variations as the frustration of the pilot would ask more form the failing part), It then shows a decrease in torque and 1/10th of a second later, a counter steer (yes, he reacted to his last drift in 1/10th of a second.... wow)... then full brakes as the torque was still being applied by the driver.

4 - the footage - If you are forcing a pipe to turn left... and apply force... and it fails, your hands will cross to the right as you "win" against the pipe fail. Several pilots told that.

So what really happened?

Senna was driving the recently capped down chassis, and struggling to find balance. As a result of the chassis losing the active-suspension it had been designed for, the best way to fix it, was to just lower the car, much like you see today with "bad tuning". Lowering the car kept the center of gravity low and, crucially, would generate extreme wind velocity under the car, generating a lot of down-force that, in turn, generates grip. The problem is that there is a reason as to why cars have suspension.

The reality is that, having the car that low, would depend heavily in other factors that had to be maintained:

1 - tire stress and temperature

2 - track pavement quality and smoothness

Some background: Daniel Bernoulli, back in the 1730's, mathematically describes the relationship between pressure, density and flow velocity, in fluids.

The physics is as follows: if you look at an airplane wing cross section, you will find that the air that goes under the wing has la shorter path to follow, while the the air going over the wing has a longer path to go... so it must flow faster. Faster fluid movement generates lower pressures and that will pull the airplane up.

Now look ad the cross section of the airplane wing and turn it upside down, you will end up with the fundamental design of an F1 car.

In the end, an F1 car is more of an inverted airplane than a car.

At full speed, an F1 car generated 4x it's weight in down-force, without generating inertial weight. The problem is that if you remove the aero dynamics form the equation, its just as you have an invisible hand from a giant pressing you car down a curve, making it grip and hold-in the the road... and then. mid corner, the hand suddenly is removed... you car will be taking too much speed and too little force to sqeeze the tires to the ground and you'll crash! Any high performance racing car will have a minimum turning speed, meaning that if you turn into a corner bellow that speed, the aerodynamics will not be helping you have grip and you will crash.

Back then, Immola had been "almost" red-flagged due to poor track conditions. The track was not smooth enough. Obviously, some careful political negotiations avoided that... but then Ruben Barrichelo got hurt, Ratzenberger and Senna died... well, politics has a way of making carnage refined and inconsequential to the killers behind it.

As any major accident, it gets down to a series of "fails" that pile up and sequence to generate one cabal moment.

So what really happened based out of physics, telemetry data, footage from his car and the racers following him?

Senna's car was too low! It was such way so that, after the initial laps where the race starts picking up pace the car would be at a optimum distance from the ground, as the tires inflated with heat and the ride weight would stabilise into the optimum value to squeeze as much air as possible under the car's flat bottom and maximise grip on high speed corners.

Footage from Schumacher's car and Damon Hill show Senna's car belly hitting the ground constantly and sparking all over... there is a MASSIVE spark shower right at the point Senna lost grip as you can see here from Schumacher footage as he was pursuing Senna:

The car was bottoming because instead of having 7 full laps of tire warming time, the race was interrupted and the pace-car was pulled into the track to reduce the speed while the a crashed car was removed from the track and the track cleaned-up.

This made the tires less warm, and less inflated, reducing the ride weight that was just TOO TIGHT due to the chassis natural instability! As the car passed some bumps on the poorly maintained tarmac, with the tires still under-inflated, the car bottomed into the ground and blasted sparks all over the place as you can see by Schumacher's footage.

This interrupted the flow of High-speed air under the car and stopped "sucking" the car onto the ground, at that point, the rear wheels, under 101% throttle power and no downforce, started to spin as the tires gave away into the inertia of having to turn the heaviest part of the car without assistance.

In 1/10th of a second, Senna counter-steered to maintain the car stable, but the bump is now through and the car is starting to grip. As the grip on the front-end is regained the car violently pulls in the direction of the centrifugal force, throwing the car outwards in the track. Senna, again, blazing fast corrects the steering and applies 100% breaking... but the "tamburello turn" is very poorly designed and there is no space to recover.

The car skids all the way into the concrete wall and violently hits the wall.

The accident was not avoidable.

NatGeo has a good documentary that covers almost all angles. I recommend you to watch it and learn a thing or 2 about how "on the limit" the physics of an F1 car is.:

The bad luck

If the angle that Senna's car hit the concrete wall was a bit less incisive, he would have exited the car maybe shaken but certainly alive.

However, as he right front tire hit the wall and broke, it got pinned between the car and the wall as it was dragged along with the movement. As the car rebound off the wall, the entire tire assembly with all the hub and suspension arms passed over the car towards Senna's head and hit him hard.

The crash point in Senna's helmet shows that the heavy, hard and full of inertia wheel hub, with the attached suspension arm, hit Senna's head just above the right eyebrow, fracturing the helmet and transmitting the force into his skull that fractured and ruptures the temporal artery.

His fate was sealed... the hemorrhage and damage to the brain would leave him suffering and dyeing. Senna died at the track, but he was immediately reanimated several times all the way to the hospital for one simple reason: Had he died at the track, the track would have been closed and the race finished. Imagine how many million would not be won by F1 and the sponsors due to the interruption of that race... yeah the little piggies had to get their dime.

Here are some pictures from the "senna files" website (conspiracy theory website I may add):

Summing up?

1 - balestre... his pursuit to protect alain prost and then "ignore" safety while banning driver-aids like that, makes him my number one culprit. Has Senna had the active-suspension like prost had, the car would be riding at normal heights and not as unstable.

2 - SanMarino race track - if the road is bad... then it is not fit for racing. You need to loose money by not hosting the event and then lose more fixing it... but at least you don't kill people. Also, and that was pointed by Senna before, the concrete wall at the end of a very slim deceleration area, on such a fast corner, would never be a good idea now, would it?

The rest of it is consequences and bad luck,, added to a sport that was pure risk.

But the disrespectful meaner that the organisers treated him the moment he became a threat to alain prost, all the way to his death is just too disgusting to ignore.

To me, it was not just the best driver of all time that died that day. It was also F1 as a sport... just sad.

The one remaining conspiracy theory that makes sense

There was previous to the accident, evidence that, in the pursue for lightness, williams FW16 chassis was very fragile and some catastrophic suspension collapses had happened before.

The same theory could explain a sudden diving of the car front end and that would then be the cause for the disruption of air under the car.

This however is not sustained with evidence and the footage from Schumachers car seem to show the bottoming happening at the heaviest part of the car (the engine/transmission package).

However the same evidence that can't prove that, can't eliminate that.

The reaction from Williams is a factor that could be looked at, but the nervous reaction from the team could be as much fear from responsibility as true responsibility... so it's just speculative.

That however does not remove all the other factors and neither Lamy, not Barrichelo, not Ratzenberger where driving Williams FW16...

... I'll leave it up to you to make your own conclusions.

Driting 101

2021-02-25T21:37:00.003+00:00

After a long consideration period and some requests from my colleagues, I've decided to review a couple of old unpublished articles and compile them into this single small article about drifting.

I'll be using a lot of Keiichi Tsuchiya videos to explain the concepts. If you want to learn, learn with the best, and there is a reason they call him "drift king".

First Things First:

There are 2 types of drifting.. the show-off stuff and the go fast stuff.

I'm not really into the Show-off stuff except for training purposes... so you should try long drifts while learning so you can find the sweet-spot and keep it there easily.

My thing is the Go Fast drift.. this will land us into the good old discussion of grip-driving being better than drift-driving.

Definition

If you consider drift driving as I do, You'll define it as: the control of the car motion during cornering or in-between cornering, beyond the grip limit, while trying to make the drift pull the motion of the car into the desired trajectory.

If you stop and think about this a bit, what you are saying here is: instead of having the car under grip and use the front wheels to steer it into the corner, you'll have it BEYOND the grip limit (so... going faster) and use the drift to control the inertia of the car movement, trying to turn it into the motion that resolves the curve (this is very important).

Now I've claimed the "motion that resolves the curve" and that is the key.

This is the beauty of the well known Mitsubishi/Volvo AYC (Active Yaw Control). If you have the car pointing towards what is the exit of the curve... but still drifting in an arch path thought the curve, you can floor the car most of the time and have a faster way thought than having the grip driving with the tires countering the car's tendency to slide.

In the end, there will always be opinions about grip vs drift but, if there is a grip limit that the speed vs weight (inertia) and tire vs turn radius (drag) will determine and you are OVER it, then, if the car is the same and so are the tires, and the bend on the road, the only chance for you to be over the grip limit is by carrying more speed...so speed is higher... the only remaining argument will be the ability to maintain this speed advantage throughout the entire corner and that is where anyone that has properly driven a proper 4wd or RWD machine will claim that drift driving is faster.

Take a look:

Back to the tech stuff

I divide Drift into 2 main categories : Inertia drift and Grip -Break drift.

They all have influences on each other, as they all are the balance into the lack of grip and the inertia of the movement... but I divide them like this as "ways to initiate the drift".

Grip -Break drift:

Starting with the Grip-breaking drift. There are 3 ways to do this and the most well known is the Hand-break drift. It's then followed by the Power-Over drift and the least well knows one (unless you've driven a RWD PURE car in the rain on snow), Shift-Down drift.

They all work by breaking the grip between the tire and the road. The physics are quite fascinating. As the rubber holds the road, there is an elastic deformation that "much like a gecko" makes the tires design deform to meet the road surface. That is why a pure slick has a much more linear response breaking out if grip then a snow tire: there is less elastic deformation to consider. After overwhelming the grip of the tires elastic deformation, the slide will drag the rubber over the pavement and the rubber will create "marbles" as small pieces of rubber break away and roll under the tire... the heat will in turn start to melt the tires, and ultimately it will start to bun the tire and produce that smoke we all know... the smoke is the liberation of gas from the burning tire compound and that reduces the grip further.This is why the loss of grip is progressive... and this is just assuming dry-grip loss... add water, snow or ice in the mix and this VERY SIMPLISTIC explanation gets a hole different level of complexity.

Back to the methods... you pull the hand break and the car will instantly squat and generate drag! Do that on a straight line and you'll be slowing the car down in the most stupid and inefficient way you can find... if however before you do that, you yank the steering to one side and de-compensate the chassis by shifting the cars center of mass, you'll be inducing a over-steer slide as the rear will follow movement inertia, but will no longer be gripping properly to turn in.

Power-over... Power drift... cal it whatever you want. The grip loss principle is the same but instead of using the car's stopping power, you use the engine to overwhelm the grip. On some cars all you need to do it floor-it, other will not have power delivery with the sufficient brutality and will require a Clutch-Dump. This is when you clutch the car, rev the engine gaining rotational inertia and reaching a good power band, and then dump the clutch in a brute manner.

The wheels will start to spin and IF YOUR CAR IR AWD with a rear bias... or RWD, you'll induce a drift by over-steer. If you own a FWD... you'll just generate wheel spin and eventually (most likely) under-steer... it's still a slide... but it will be towards the tree on the side of the road and then the repair shop... eventually the hospital or morgue! Under-steer is BAD and except for helping to stabilize a 4wheel drift like the video above, you don't want under-steer near you.

I often hear people talking about Powerslide, and that it is the same as power drift... well... yes and no! Yes it is the same "thing happening" to the wheels and basic car motion. But there is a fundamental difference as to purpose.

You Drift the car INTO the corner! that means you are using the power of the car and the motion of the car to slide the rear into the position the car will have THROUGH the corner. Power slide is when you allow the rear to slide after the corner has been "resolved". So if you are sliding BEFORE the APEX of the corner, you will be drifting the car, if it is after the APEX, you'll be power sliding the car, as exampled here:

Finally the shift-down of shift-lock drift. If you own a RWD car... and don't rev-mach your shift-down, you'll eventually find yourself sliding the rear under breaking and shift-down... either while driving through the rain, or on a HEAVY breaking and aggressive shift-down. It's the same effect as a handbrake, but the wheel s aren't really stopped,... they are just spinning too slow for the car's inertial movement and will generate a close to handbrake effect. So, if you own an S2000, for instance, LEARN TO heel-toe and then rev-match you downshifts. If not, then drive really slow in the rain... like an old lady.

In the snow or ice, it can be as simple as just, letting you foot off the throttle. Nasty stuff!

This is also why it is frequently confused with the lift-off over-steer! Lift-off over steer will be explained later because it is a different type of drift induction. However, as explained before, the inertia and grip go hand in hand...they all have a part to play, but we are dividing the categories per Induction of slide method).

Inertia drift (A.K.A. weight-shifting drift):

Yes all drifts will, in the end depend on managing inertia and grip, but this sort of grip doesn't not involve using either brakes, clutch or engine to break grip... This one uses the car's chassis and the way it handles the movement of the center of weight (or mass) your car has, and the inertia the movement brings.

Does it take leverage out of managing the engine or breaks? YES! but then again, not the same way as a break drift does.

Braking drift is done by steeping heavy on the brakes and wanking the steering into the corner as the front end gets squeezed by the weight shift resulting from the braking.

In the end, your suspension will be compressing on the front and decompressing on the rear... the weight of the car will be adding grip to the front tires and loosing the rear. As you yank the steering with a firm but progressive movement, you shift the front of the car's weight into the corner, but the rear will try to maintain it's inertia and slide the rear of the car out.

You then need to have enough power form the engine and grip from the tires to pull through. This is not the drift that can be aborted easily, as you are carrying the car weight into the corner and countering it will mean you will have to counter the inertia you where provoking to happen in the first place. A full spin is sometimes the best way to recover... but not always.

The best cars for this are heavy and soft damped cars. I often use this technique on road cars due to the soft suspension setups, and you can even slide SUVs like this... I used to drift the Volvo XC90 this way... really easy to work the Volvo DSTC with this technique. In this care I just delay the breaking and then last minute, I step a but harder and yank the steering.

This method needs a properly setup front end. If your car is too toe-out or the geometry is bad (wear bushings, damaged wishbones, etc) you can fail to induce the car s front into the corner with enough force to destabilize the rear and may end up under-steering. Careful!

This is an example of a Breaking drift.

The Scandinavian-flick or feint-drift is done by proposely destabilizing the car and making it slide. It is the common cause of accidents on the road while diverting from a collision. In essence, If you want to steer right, as you approach the corner, you first steer left (compressing the right side suspension) and then flick the steering right (compressing the left side suspension while the right side springs back violently). This immediately induces the car into a spin and it does so in a very DECISIVE and NOT EASY TO COUNTER way. You better know what you're doing if you plan to do this at speed.

Take a look at it here:

Financially the lift off over-steer. Lift-off is really easy on a FWD car... and again, a common cause of accidents on the road as people get pulled into corners, they get scared, they lift-off, the car's engine starts decelerating the front, moving the mass and loosing the rear... as the rear looses grip, people get stared and break, making it worse and crashing. This is the reason some cars are "engineered" (if you can cal it that) to UNDER-STEER on limit, as the lift-off scared driver will gently pull it back into a possible apex line.

Take a look at an example here:

On a RWD it is a bit trickier as it requires a provoking of the car with acceleration and liftoff so that, much like the Scandinavian-flick (or feint) drift, the car compresses and decompresses the suspension. It is the same as a Scandinavian-flick, but instead of Side to Side, you compress rear and the front... So you accelerate hard, compressing the rear springs, then lift-off decompressing them and compressing the front and the weight shifts... you may need to do this in sequence at the rhythm of the car's suspension to gain enough inertia to make the chassis destabilization work properly.

This is an advanced for due to the difficulty of matching the cars suspension dynamics, the speed and the simple fact that if you get it wrong... you're gonna crash HARD... it's also the most efficient way to prove that drifting can be faster than grip driving.

You can see itin detail in the Drift Bible video that I recommend at the end of the article.

There is A LOT MORE into drifting and learning how to do so.

My recommendation is you buy DriftKing,s Drift Bible and take it easy and off public roads.

This article has been rushed into editing (due to my lack of time) due to a special request form my colleagues at SwivelSecure team. If you like it, thank them:

Christian Lisboa
David Assuncao
Diogo Figueiredo
Joao Leal
Marco Rodrigues
Ricardo Wong
Tiago Silva

Have fun and stay safe.

2020-01-07T14:55:00.002+00:00

My good friend Mario asked me, if money was limitless, what would be my garage.
Well, I told him that if I had infinite amount of money then a would:

Buy	and use it
Mazda RX7 FD	ohh yeah
Nissan Skyline R34 VSpecII	ohh yeah
Nissan Skyline R34 Mines Tune	ohh yeah
Honda NSX Type-R (gen1)	ohh yeah
Toyota Supra BiTurbo 2JZ (gen2)	ohh yeah
Lexus LFA	ohh yeah
Ford RS200	ohh yeah
Ford Escord RS Cosworth	ohh yeah
Lancia Delta HF integrale	Naaaa, would be stored in vacuum
Audi Quattro	ohh yeah
Lotus ExigeS PrototypeRacing	ohh yeah
Lotus ExigeS	ohh yeah
Lotus Esprit V8Turbo	ohh yeah
Lotus Elan s2	yeah, every now and then
Lotus 340R	ohh yeah
Honda Integra type-r	ohh yeah
Ariel Atom K20	ohh yeah
Ariel Atom V8	ohh yeah
Radical XR	ohh yeah
Volvo C70 T5	yeah
McLaren F1	ohh yeah
Porsche Carrera GT	ohh yeah
Peugeot 205GTI	yeah
Renault Clio Williams	ohh yeah
Ford fiesta 1.25i techno	yeah, every now and then
Ford Escord Xr3i	yeah, every now and then
Volvo 850R	ohh yeah
Volvo V70T5 (gen1)	errr my daily driver... so yeah everyday
Lexus IS200	hell yeah
Honda S2000 (gen1 facelift)	I already have it, so hell yeah
Honda Civic Type-R EP3	ohh yeah
Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution MP400	ohh yeah
Subaru Impreza GT STi (Gen1)	ohh yeah
Mazda MX5 NB	hell yeah
Peugeot 106 rallye	yeah
Peugeot 207 rallye	yeah
Peugeot 405 Mi16	yeah, every now and then
Mercedes GullWing... the one and only	Too scared to break it... would probably just look at it
Renault Megane RS Trophy	Naaah... just to pull another friends chains
Noble M12GT	yeah
Noble M400	yeah
TVR Cerbera	yeah
TVR (brand new one by Gordon Murray)	f$%k yeah
BMW M3 E46 CSL	hell yeah
BMW M1	just for the kicks
BMW 850 V12	Just to fool with the Panameras
Porsche 911 Gt3	yeah
Toyota AE86	hell yeah
Nissan Primera Gt2.0	yeah
Honda Accord Type-r	hell yeah
Volvo S60 T5 (Gen2) POLESTART	hell yeah
Volvo V40 T5 (Gen2)	hell yeah
Suzuki Capuccino	hell yeah
Mazda RX8	sure... why not
...	...

I'll be adding to this list as I remember more... but you really don't see the typical ferrari and Lambo stuff in a list I make...any list I make. It's just not my thing.

The "I told you so" post

2015-10-01T02:36:00.000+01:00

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/22/the-rise-diesel-in-europe-impact-on-health-pollution

Following VW scandal, new tests uncover that Mercedes is even worse, BMW does the same...and peugeot, toyota...well ALL OF THEM.

Why? Well because like I've been saying for years, diesel is a lot worse than gasoline...is engines and obviously pollution.

Of course no one listened to me because the manufacturers say it is good...than I must be true.

Time now for the revenge post: I TOLD YOU! Years...decades ago.

The Diesel is now on count down...finally. Next step: false hybrids.

VW... you are stupid... ballsy but stupid... and also right.

2015-09-23T12:37:00.003+01:00

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34325005

Shocked by the VW scandal, I decided to post this article.

I can't believe how stupid they here, how ballsy they were and ultimately how right they are.

Politicians, in their infinite stupidity think that the world will be better if the clean cars (gasoline engined) are less, and dirty cars (diesel engined) are more and more controlled by regulations that ultimately will kill the engine power making you pull it harder or buy a bigger engine.... ending in more pollution anyway.

There is a why to this: tax! More tax means more money for them... of course the idea of taxing a car that pollutes like a gasoline engine car, is to plant more trees and green areas to compensate... but that money is deviated... lets just say else where.

There is the other matter... by taxing gasoline cars, people flee to diesel ones, and that constitutes a bigger problem as diesel emissions include a lot of carbon particles... this is worse then gas, so the politicians add regulations and taxes to try to baffle the resulting pollution... no trees from taxes still, just more money.

So the game is: Make it as bad as possible and then tax on it and make fortunes.

In order to do that, every car, upon certification to a specific market will have pass a set of tests including the emissions test.

So far so good. We knew that already. The problem is that VW also knows that and ultimately thinks "I don't really care for stupid policies, and if you are making money on us, than I'll fool you".

So now for the news:
Every car that is fitted with ESP will not allow you to properly test it on a rolling dyno. The 2 front wheels spinning while the 2 rear wheels are stopped will immediately trigger EPS into thinking you are trying to accelerate on a slippery surface and dose the engine and apply the brakes... So to solve this issue every manufacturer has input into it's car's software a "test mode" that disables ESP actions.
Now if you are a manufacturer and you want to fool the emissions test, this presents an opportunity, however, if you are going to do that you must really conceal the crafts, as you will be stealing money from governments (the biggest "mafiosos" of them all) in every car you sell from that point on.

VW did just that! they concealed a way to make their cars pollute 40 to 50 time less if a certain type of parameter was met.

This is not the problem. The problem is that if you are going down this road than you have to make it "look like a bug" in the software.

VW on the other hand coded a set of checks that produce a result...and that can be tracked.

Not that if it was a bug you would be out of trouble... it just makes it easier to explain in court, and that means that, out of the total 18billion fine, you could negotiate your way down to say... half that value!?

In the other words: your VW diesel that claims to produce x co gr/km actually produces 40 or 50 times as much. No worries, it still has that big power from a very small package and that is what you pay for actually.

So this is a big scandal not because it pollutes more, not because they are stealing from the government (and in turn helping you do the same... so now you have that instant karma feeling) but because they where stupid enough to do that in the clumsiest possible way.

Practical results form this stunt?
1 - VW will be fined... hard
2 - VW is stealing from govenrments everytime they sell a diesel car
3 - if you own a VW you have been and are stealing form your government every year when you pay your tax.
4 - VW will have to call back the cars and remap... so be careful! I have no idea how they are going to meet CO emissions while retaining the same power and consumption.
5 - VW stock is history.... sell... yesterday.

HONDA: you killed the brilliant K20A from the type-r and screwed-it-up with a turbo... instead you should have gone for full BTCC race tune to 300bhp NA and fit a jumbo catalytic converter that could be removed and replaced with a test pipe the minute one exits the sales stand. That would be legal, that would be efficient, that would still pollute less than any VW... and we would have loved it.

Test Drive - 2004 Honda Civic 1.7cdti (EP4 chassis)

2015-09-23T09:11:00.001+01:00

This a very (very) old post that has been cooking for over 2 years.

There is a reason for this. Firs I tested the car using the standard Michelin energy tires... having driven the Type-r version my immediate impression was: this thing is all over the place! that high roof must really pull the chassis beyond it's limits.
Then, my first recommendation was: change the tires. Go for some proper rubber engineered to grip instead of fuel saving, and then I recommended the Toyo T1-R's I also recommended to increase the 195,60,R15 to a much more sensible 205,55,R15 with reinforced sidewalls to prevent tire wall smash.

The transformation was obvious... having decent road holding from the tires, the chassis actually comes to live and presents all it's magnificent design. Sure it was a bit too high but the stiffness on the tires and the grip was enough to force the chassis into full dynamics (not sure however of it's behavior if you have a transition from good tarmac into a less holding surface).

This was good news but I was out of time and so I had to leave the test... unfinished.

This last 2 months however presented themselves with an opportunity to clock some 10.000Kms on the same car. It was time to to through every type of pavement, road, condition... and check the car properly.

What a surprise. Not a good or a bad surprise but rather a mix.
Chassis wise the car is brilliant... one of the best FWD chassis, period! Grippy and very composed, the lift-off over-steer is controlled with ease and allows for some spectacular drifts...not just for show! Once you've mastered the dynamics of the car, you can keep a very fast pace on any b road. Sure you will kill the front tires fast like any FWD car, but the experience will be involving and with slim to none under-steer.
Turn in is precise and very willingly (surprisingly instantaneous).

Torque-steer however is bad news. I can clearly understand why Honda, having opted for a lower quality, inferior and ultimately cheaper rear suspension design for the new versions of the civic, decided into an improved front suspension design as it was would render anything beyond 150bhp and 200nm/torque problematic. Especially with the worse rear design, the front end would really need to be a charm.

Allow the car to slide a bit further than 20 degrees and you'll feel that the torque for the front wheels will work against you while you steer back when the car starts recovering... unpleasant and eventually dangerous in extreme circumstances. How to sort this out in your own car? kill the rubber bushings and fit some good, hard, polyurethane ones...also buy a bump-steer kit from spoon...now that you are at it, fit a set of coilovers.
That is the single most weird thing about the car. And having a heavy (really heavy) diesel engine, this is more perceptible.

The Diesel engine... not bad for a 1.7 common rail with an old design. The Isuzu unit is robust and bullet proof, but is is very heavy and since it is a diesel, response is something unheard of. So that is the ONE THING that spoils the package. Had this been a RWD it would kill the chassis competence completely (much like the BMW 1 series).

Appart form that it will cruise at 120km/h at 5lts/km (no AC)... and will average 6.2lt/Km in the 10.000km I've tested with mixed city and highway , with AC (with some highway stretches going beyond the 200km/h apparent limit).

The weight of the engine is very perceptible on speed-bumps. The front of the car easily digs into the ground while coping to deal with the front end weight and still remain "decent" in comfort settings.

It is comfortable enough for long trips (over 700km in a row)...clearly not as comfortable as my V70 T5 volvo, but if you compare chassis efficiency and joy vs ride comfort, this will eclipse the volvo anyway... it will eclipse most cars actually.

So this is a good car. Pitty the engine is diesel, so a 1.8i would be better... a lot better... pitty it is so high, to the sports version is the one to go for... and of course, if you manage to source the type-r 2.0 than there is no looking back,

Comparing it with the recent chassis, the EP3/EP4 (EP3 is the Civic Type-R and Civic Si or sport chassis and the EP4 is the regular car with an extra 20cm of headroom) is the last great Civic to have. So unless you are 70 years old and only drive on motorways, ignore ANY civic beyond the Type-R EP3... and that includes the new "shemale" turbo type-r.

Test Drive - Mini 1.6d

2015-09-16T22:39:00.000+01:00

Engine.... engine... this chassis asks for engineeee

The mini is a brilliant little car. It always had been and when BMW took over the new version project it managed to input all the good "drivers car" knowledge they've always had.

It is FWD (not particularly good) but truth be spoken it is a brilliant FWD.
The chassis is very composed and the rear is as live on lift-off as the front is eager to bite into corners... and being so small this means one thing: agility.

This car allows you a very high pace thought a B-road jumping from bend to bend without any sort of inertia issues. It feels a lot lighter than it actually is, but that is good.

Just like it's RWD brother the 1series BMW, this car ask... begs... for a proper engine. And unfortunately just like the BMW's I've tested, it was Diesel.

Don't get me wrong, the car is very lively during acceleration and great for motorway cruising... but when you really need response and rev range, the diesel engine doesn't allow you to properly enjoy the chassis.

My opinion?
Buy the cooper works... the old one... with the compressor. I know the turbo performs better and is less of a pain to keep healthy... but if you want to enjoy the chassis, you need response and the turbos... well the turbos will always have response issues. :)