Toymods Car Club Inc: General Car Talk => Front wheel Drives: fun or no fun

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ozzy31
Occasional Poster

Location:
Edmonton, AB
Registered:
June 2005

Re: Front wheel Drives: fun or no fun

Sat, 13 August 2005 04:34

berad wrote on Fri, 12 August 2005 19:48

lol this would have to be one of the dumbest threads in a long time this is like asking how long is a piece of string of course rwd people are going to say there shit and fwd are goin to say there alright/good.. lol

To further the dumb thread, I figure I oughta chime in with my Canadian perspective. I've never owned a fwd, but I have driven a few over the years. The off-the-line torque steer of even the tamest of grocery-getters has me spooked... I can't stand it.

Anyway, I remember one year driving the girlfriend's fwd car... it was highway, it was icy and snowing... being a rwd-only driver, I backed off the gas coming over the top of a hill and the thing swapped ends on me! It was a manual and I wouldn't say I let off fast or that it even had much in the way of compression - but it was enough to suddenly be going backwards at 80kph. I managed to keep it between the ditches and the oncoming big-rig was still miles away - but it could have been deadly!

However aside from maintenance, geometry and other technical issues - the obvious thing interesting about driving a fwd is that unlike a rwd where you feather the throttle to corner fast when traction starts to get scarce... in a fwd you don't let off, you actually give it more gas to power (pull) yourself through.

I could see pulling yourself through corners at full-throttle, wagging out the back end of the car - fun if you're into that... but since I have to contend with ice & snow in the winter, I like rwd. I throw on a good set of winter-tires all around and now I have balance between how fast I can accelerate and how soon I can slow down.

I think the scary thing about fwd is that if it allows you to 'go' better, it doesn't guarantee you can 'stop'. It's like having 4wd... sure you can go better than the 2wd guy when it's slippery but doesn't really mean you can stop any better than anyone else. Here in the winters, it's all the 4wd SUV's ditching it because some think they can go faster than they really should...

Speaking for pure race cars, road-course... I didn't notice a clear advantage either way... we were racing a rwd GT3 up against other rwd and fwd's... one might approach driving differently, but it wasn't clear that either had an advantage...

I don't know what I would do if I had no choice but to give up on my rwd's due to their age and feel there was no clear choice but to settle for a newer fwd... might have to quit driving...

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