oh yeah I meant weight; and I don't mean adding weight just for the sake of 50/50 balance; but if you WERE to add weight to make weight; how would you want it?
what's advantage of 50/50?
whats advantage of front heavy
and rear heavy? what difference does it make?
thank you !
If I were to add weight to my car, such as success ballast or in order to make minimum weight regulations (like I do on my Miata), I would place the weight as central and low in the car as possible. This has the least effect on the mass moment of inertia, which means that the car can still be rotated as easily as the situation allows. In the Miata that I race in real life, there is a 75 pound weight bolted to the floor where the passenger seat used to be.
A car with 50/50 weight distribution, such as the Miata, will handle pretty similarly both on the entry and exits of corners.
In a front heavy car, like a Mustang, with a large mass up front, the car will have trouble rotating on the entry of the corner in order to get down to the apex, and will tend to push wide. Very careful brake management would be required in order to rotate the car. The car will have a tendency to power-oversteer easily on the exits, if it is RWD, due to less weight pressing down on the rear wheels.
Something which is rear-weight biased, like a Porsche (with 63% on the rear), will get skittish on the entry of corners. A rear-biased car tends to get the most varied handling traits in my experience. A Porsche will try to spin if you enter a corner while off the throttle, with no brake or very light brake applied. However, the grip lost on entry is made up for in acceleration off the corner, because that weight pressing down on the rear wheels grows the more you accelerate. So Porsches are very good at getting acceleration off the corner if the throttle is used correctly to maintain cornering speed. But you have to be careful because they have a tendency to understeer on the exits.
But Porsches have a high mass moment of inertia due to the excessive overhang of the rear engine and bodywork. A Lotus Exige has the exact same weight distribution, but most of the weight is centralized (in addition of the fact there is much less of it overall), so it rotates quicker and minimizes those strange handling characteristics I was talking about.
TLDR, adding weight ballast is probably most effective in the very middle of the car in most cases, unless you're trying to solve a specific handling problem that just won't go away with normal suspension setup tweaks.
