On 2005-12-08, Nige <
[email protected]> wrote:
> I used to take the cossie out for fun in the snow!! You can't beat a
> good old empty car park & a mega powerful RWD car to learn how to
> correct oversteer!
When I were a lad I used to take my old 1.19 litre Opel Kadett into a
field and feck about. A friend of mine suggested we swap cars, he
then promptly doughnutted on a playing field in my car while I waved
at him from the sidelines to stop it, too late though, lots of
residents took my number! Never heard anything back though.
> The really odd bit, is the Subaru (basically a rally car
> with road going expectations)
Har har, the amount of Scooby owners who think that their car is the
same as the rally cars they see on telly is amazing.. There are no
shared parts, the cars aren't even built by Subaru. There is a
"production class" in rallying, which is almost never shown on telly,
but even those cars are heavily modified and aren't very similar to
the road cars. In Classic And Sports Car magazine there are
occasional auctions of Subaru or Mitsibushi etc WRC rally car parts
and they always have in very large letters "No road car parts
available" on them to stop the owners of the shopping trollies turning
up trying to buy bits, 'cos that's what was happening and then they
were moaning about the bits not fitting!
I can remember an interview with Colin McRae where he said that the
car he was driving at the time shared just 13 parts with the road car,
and they were the lights and the dashboard to make the external and
in-car shots look like the road-going car. Personally I think it's a
monumental con, but it works well and sells cars. WRC rules for the
top of the line cars state that the car has to look like the road car
and that's it. They're built from the ground up for rallying with not
even a thought about the design of the road car they're pretending to
be, and made by dedicated car building teams with some small input
from the road car manufacturer, mostly money though.
Ditto Touring Cars BTW, feck all to do with the road-going cars, all
custom made race cars by dedicated racing companies with look-alike
bodyshells on. Not keen on it but it keeps the money coming in at the
sake of any pretence of honesty. It's the same in pretty much all
top-of-the line racing, I'm a Lotus Esprit fan but their GT racing
Esprit was a dedicated machine built from scratch, bore no resemblance
mechanically to the road-going car, which in my experience is probably
for the best! (looks mornfully at pile of parts in corner of garage)
Oops, sorry for the rant, it's a pet subject of mine ;-)
> is nowhere near as good in the snow! It is a lot better than the
> wifes Golf gti though (we aint even tried it yet, but you just
> know!)
Front-wheel drive sucks monumentally in the snow, although I got out
of a bind once when I'd gone down a hill into a trough in my Audi and
couldn't get back out, so I turned it around and reversed up the hill,
worked a treat!
--
For every expert, there is an equal but opposite expert
