Alan Baker
On 2014-02-23 20:54:27 +0000, -hh said:

-hh
So then you are agreeing with me that it isn't ideal.

Alan Baker
From a pure, "platonic" view of "ideal", perhaps not, but no car is designed in isolation.

... but when you're relatively close>to 50-50, it's just not a big deal.

-hh
That's a "significance" judgement on if a suitably-small difference is noteworthy or not: it doesn't abolish the fact that a difference nevertheless exists.

Alan Baker
I guess I'm only really objecting to the word "will", as in "will induce more understeer plowing", and phrased that way, I'd have to grade it at best as "incomplete". "will induce more undeersteer plowing unless the designers appropriately design for that weight distribution" would be better. :-)

-hh
All you're saying is that you're agreeing with me that a departure from ideal results in deoptimization and trade-offs...but you also believe that from a pragmatic standpoint they may not necessarily be of great enough magnitude to be of general concern.

Alan Baker
Correct.

-hh
If we were only talking about advice for Nicolas and his fellow drivers of the "Soccer Mom" skill set, I'd be inclined to agree with you on that point. But Nicolas will invariably claim superiority, even though he's IIRC never taken any performance driving training in his life, nor tracked, nor AutoX'ed and so forth. FWIW, there are some vehicles which do things like relocate heavy components such as the battery to the opposite end of the vehicle so as to improve vehicle weight distribution...a contemporary example is the Audi SQ5, which is front-engined but has its battery in its trunk. The Q7 on the other hand...

Alan Baker
Sure. But these tradeoffs aren't really big enough at the magnitude under discussion to concern even a car that is raced...But I ramble... ..this really has been a passion of mine for a long time. :-)