erioshi wrote:
With a typical middy, all the weight is concentrated in the center with a very short polar moment of inertia (think two weights in the center of a weight lifting bar) which makes it harder to catch and correct the vehicle's behavior. Part of the problem with the short PMI is the car reacts more quickly, and corrections generally need to be made more quickly, and in in finer increments.
Those examples are kind of the extremes, but they illustrate the point. The Miata, Elan, Caterham, most locosts, etc. seem to sit in a sweet spot for most driver's ability to feel and react to what the car is doing.
That hasn't been my experience at all, but then again nearly all my rear, longitudinal, middie experience has been Ferrari's and Lambos. My wife buys me cool birthday & Christmas presents - driving experiences, not the cars themselves. (I don't want to spoil it for her, but indications are for this Christmas I'll be getting a school at COTA driving the McLaren.)
Every longitudinal middie, I've driven whether it was a front middie or a rear middie, has been extremely stable and required very little input to keep it going where I wanted it. More importantly it changed directions easily and with little hesitation.
I agree with the statement that the car reacts more quickly or would it be better said to react more easily. And it doesn't over react. Now should
I over react, which is the most likely thing to happen, I've found them much more forgiving.
An MR2 is the only rear, transverse, middie that I can remember driving (there may have been others but they don't come to mind right now) and while I loved it and thought it handled very well it was a lot more work to get it handling like we liked it. We had to throw more time on sway bars, wheels and tires to get it so that it drove as well as we liked. We eventually made it work better than the Miata, but it took a lot more work. The Miata was much nicer out of the box and much easier to work on. Which is another problem with a transverse rear middie - access. Well actually that's a little bit of an issue on every rear engined car I've ever played with except an aircooled VW or older Porsche.
And if you are moving around one of those weight bars with the weights on it that you were talking about, you'd rather carry it around with the weights in the middle. It's much easier to move it around and it's less likely to give you a hernia as one end takes a sudden dip when you change the horizontal axis or try to swing one around a corner. Same applies to a car.