Bludgeoning Physics To Death With Science
Since I first understood a thing about cars, I’ve been a fan of the Colin Chapman school of automotive design. Chapman, for those not in the know, was the founder of a little sports car marque called Lotus. His basic design idea was “add lightness.” Extraneous components were not needed or welcome. It has been said that he would continue to remove material from a component until it failed, then add a little back in, and move onto the next one. This obsession with weight was obvious in the cars he made. Drive a Lotus Esprit and you can’t have a heavy right foot - the gas pedal hinge will bend under your foot. You want carpet in your Elise? The Porsche dealer is down the road, you wuss.
The reason for this isn’t hard to understand. Let’s break it down. What makes a car fast is, basically, it’s power-to-weight ratio: how many pounds is each horsepower burdened with? The less weight and the more power, the faster a car is going to accelerate (in a nutshell.) So there are two ways to make a car faster: add more power, or subtract more weight.
There are a lot of reasons it’s better to subtract weight. For one thing, the car will turn better. Less mass means less load on the contact patches means higher lateral loads. Less weight means shorter braking distances. Less weight means slower wear on friction items like tires and brake pads. It also means less fuel is used, as less power is needed. A lighter car accelerates faster, brakes quicker, turns harder, and is more controllable AND ecological. This is all obvious, irrefutable fact.
So it’s not surprising that a Grand Marquis sucks and a Toyota MR2 is a lot of fun. In a car, weight isn’t just a number: it’s something you feel every time you turn the wheel, hit the gas, or touch the brakes. It’s why Ryan Ridiculous Ricer pulls the dashboard out of mom’s Accord when he puts in a pair of 12’s. Or maybe he’s just an idiot.
Cars these days have pretty much been getting progressively heavier and larger with each passing generation, with a few exceptions (Mazda 2, Jaguar XJ.) Colin Chapman is most certainly rolling in his grave; the Elise is available with a “luxury” package including air conditioning, a stereo, carpet, and other unneeded junk. The Europa is hilarious; a stretched out, leather-lined version of the Elise but with a boring GM-sourced 2.0L turbo engine instead of the rev-happy, light Toyota powerplant in the Elise.
And don’t even start on other sports cars. These are the cars that the principle of “add lightness” is most relevant to, but modern sports cars are still gigantic anyway. The 350Z is a neat car that is about 400 lbs. overweight. BMW’s M3 is almost double the weight of the original. Honda’s lightweight S2000 weighs almost a half-ton more than the old CRX. Not progress.
But for all the downsides of a heavy car, there is a certain appeal to a big, heavy car. They isolate you from the road much better, smoothing out the bumps and thumps that a flyweight sports car gets all hot and bothered over. And the electronic aids that subtract from the “purity” of a car usually add a much greater amount to it’s actual ability. Sophisticated stability-control programs and active suspension setups allow huge, heavy cars to dance like they were half their weight. All-wheel-drive gives physics-bending levels of adhesion and stability. And today’s ridiculously powerful engines make sedate-looking saloons accelerate faster than the “supercars” of yesteryear.
Nissan’s new (Skyline) GT-R crushes the scales at a preposterous 3836 pounds. It packs a serious amount of hardware: a hand-built 3.8L twin-turbocharged V6 with 480 horsepower, four-wheel drive, a 6-speed twin-clutch sequential gearbox, rear-mounted transmission, active suspension, and more other goodies than I can count. On paper, though, it’s not that impressive. It’s biggest competitor (at least in the US) is the Chevrolet Corvette Z06. The Z06 packs a 7.0L V8 with 505 horsepower, and weighs in around 3100 pounds, giving it a significantly higher power/weight ratio. One would think that in a drag race, the Z06 would curb-stomp the GT-R without even breaking a sweat. The numbers tell otherwise. Car and Driver recently tested one that ran to sixty in 3.3 seconds(!) and annihilated the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds at 124 miles an hour. A Z06 Corvette takes 3.7 seconds to hit sixty and and runs the quarter in 11.7 at 121. The GT-R circles a skidpad at 0.99 lateral g’s on street tires, can go through a 600-ft slalom at 72.9 miles an hour, and just generally shames most every other production car on the road regardless of price or “prestige.” With a base price of $72,000 it offers world-beating performance for less than it’s main competition, the Z06 Corvette. And just imagine what this car will do when the aftermarket finally figures out how to tune it.
Of course a car doesn’t have to be ridiculously sophisticated to be impressive. Take Mercedes’s AMG cars. Perhaps the ultimate expression of what AMG stands for - that is, a gigantic engine in a classy Benz - is the S65 AMG. It looks pretty much like any other S-Class, but it’s got a Biturbo 6.0L V12 stuffed under the hood. This full-size four-door might weigh a curb-crushing 4894 pounds, but it’s got 604(!) horsepower and 738 lb-ft of torque. That’s 1000 nM, for you Europeans. AMG’s magicians had to limit output on this beast to only 1000nM to preserve the transmission- the unrestrained output is somewhere in the neighborhood of 880 lb-ft. So when you put your foot down, you (along with your 4 closest friends in their heated/cooled/massaging seats, navigation, active cruise control, parking sensors, wine cooler, Satellite TV, and god knows what else) can reach 60 miles an hour in a faintly ridiculous 4.2 seconds. That’s faster than a new Corvette. Seeing one of these cars accelerate is a life-changing event. They’re not even that loud - there’s a faint whistle from the turbos and a low rumble from all twelve cylinders, and this puppy is gone.
Another example is the lineup of cars from Bentley. Their flagship model, the Brooklands Coupe, is based on the aging Arnage chassis, but is a long-wheelbase fixed-head 2+2 coupe. While the newer Continental GT’s enjoy a modern, Volkswagen-derived 6.0L W12 with twin turbochargers, the Brooklands is powered by old faithful - Bentley’s 6.75L pushrod V8 with twin water-cooled turbochargers. In Brooklands form, this motor cranks out a surreal 530 horsepower and deforms the pavement with 774 lb-ft of twist. This Bentley is a rolling anachronism from a time when gas was cheap and the American dollar was worth something - and it’s all the better for it. The numbers tell the story. Kerb weight: 5836 lbs. Chevrolet Tahoe: 5265 lbs. Wheelbase: 122.7″. Tahoe: 116″. Overall length: 213″. Tahoe: 202″. But thanks to an epic mound of torque well below 2000 rpm and a ZF 6-speed automatic, this leviathin land barges charges to sixty miles an hour in just under 5 seconds and continues unabated to a top speed of 184 miles an hour, despite having the aerodynamic profile of a barn door.
And there are many others, of course. The Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4, the Swiss Army Knife of sports cars, packed every techno-goodie known to man (at least for 1990) into a tiny coupe that somehow managed to weigh almost 4000lbs. Twin turbo V6, twin cam, 24 valves, four wheel drive, 6-speed manual, rear wheel steering, adjustable aerodynamics, adjustable exhaust note(!), and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things. Car & Driver described launching the VR-4 as being somewhat similar to “getting rear-ended by a fast-moving dump truck.” I’d say that’s apt. There’s also the Viper-powered Dodge Ram SRT-10, which is a single-cab full-size pickup that can pick fights with C5 Corvettes at stoplights. There’s the Vauxhall-Lotus Carlton, which was a full-size family sedan with a 377 horsepower twin-turbo inline six and a ZR-1 gearbox that could do 177 miles an hour flat-out - which caused such a publicity scandal that production ended up being capped well below expected demand.
But I’ve saved the best (or depending on how you look at it, the worst) for last: the car everyone loves to hate, the Porsche Cayenne. Some say it’s diluted the brand identity beyond repair, some say it’s a cheap money-grab on Porsche’s part, but you just can’t argue with the statistics. The newest version of the Cayenne, the Turbo S, has a direct-injected twin-turbocharged 4.8L V8 that turns dead dinosaurs into 550 horsepower and 553 lb-ft at a most alarming rate. Thanks to all the useless off-road equipment (who takes a Cayenne off-road? Are you really going to run the Rubicon in a $150,000 luxury SUV?) the Cayenne overwhelms the scales at 5,192 lbs. But bury your foot in that plush overpriced German carpet and the Cayenne will eat sixty miles an hour in 4.7 seconds on it’s way to a “are you serious?” top speed of 174 miles an hour. While getting twelve miles a gallon.
Then again, if you want performance, a Lotus Exige S costs about $50k and will hit sixty in 4.2 seconds. And top out somewhere in the 160 range. And be more fun to drive in almost any given circumstance. So while Chapman was certainly correct, he was missing out on quite a bit of fun.