fixed the suspension.
Rear-engine, rear-drive cars (early Porsches, Corvairs, VWs) had serious power oversteer problems. Well, the original beetles didn't have enough power to make this critical. They would hold the road like glue, feel really great, until they broke loose without warning. Maybe a few seconds later they might roll.
Ernie Kovacs, a technical and comic genius of early TV, died when he spun his Corvair.
You should have tried a Beetle in Northern winter conditions.
On ice, a Beetle is about like a hammer thrown the handle first. I have spun a Beetle in a speed of about 20 mph on an icy road. I was at right angles to the road when the ice ended and around we went. It was a Beetle of 1951, in 1966.
fixed the suspension.
Porsche owners didn't consider it a "problem". They used this to power their way around corners to win races. I've seen photos with three or more Porsches in the same turn, all of them angled to the path they are following. I bet those tires don't last very long.
I've met a number of autocross drivers who used Corvairs in the same way.
I much prefer RWD in the snow--being able to break the back end loose with the throttle is a big help.
Oversteer on a dry road can be fun too, if it breaks loose gradually enough. The combination of oversteer plus a large polar moment of inertia makes it much more difficult to recover, and of course the 911 was famous for breaking loose without much warning.
The modern ones have so much traction-control software in them that it's much harder to hurt yourself.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
My Audi quattro is amazing. It's like a cat on a rug, claws on all fours. It's fun in rain or snow, distinctly different feel from fwd or rwd things. 250 HP doesn't hurt, either.
Life was cheap in those days.
Some engineers don't understand it, either. They have more time to tweak things on prototypes, than someone in production. They have months to ship the first unit, but production may only have a few days per unit.
Not many. It's was a required skill anywhere I worked.
tion.
But the prototype isn't what gets produced. Finding out what works, and how it works, can be part of the design process. Proof-of-principle machines t end to be very different from pre-production prototypes, and pre-production prototypes tend to be test beds for what the engineers fondly hope will be manufacturable boards.
ew
Shipping the first unit is usually a bad idea. The service engineers tended to replace the boards that were tweaked to get them working with the redes igned parts from the production line as the redesigned boards came availabl e.
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