Actually...
On sportsbikes, you can manually adjust braking balance... you simply have two brakes... the handbrake for the front wheel, the footbrake for the rear. This allows you infinitely more control over corner entry than if you have a single brake. Cars have individual brake control for the rears, but these are much simpler, and on many road cars, aren't strong enough or accurate enough... drift cars have long-levered non-ratcheted (they won't lock in place) hand-brakes for finer control... but a motorcyclist already has better control over these things... with individual wheel braking... and yet they're talking about converting racing bikes to ABS, because, although ABS might make them slower over a hot lap, it'll make them safer.
(know what? I'd gladly trade my clutch pedal for a second brake pedal! Have one pedal for the left brakes, one for the right brakes, and have them close enough that you can press both with one foot if you so desire...
)
F1 cars have trim controls for fuel maps and ignition maps. And knowledge of the proper use of these controls is sometimes instrumental to winning a race. (more advance and leaner fuel, more speed... at the risk of blowing up...). In fact, McLaren found a ton of speed last year by mapping thesse controls to paddles under the gearshifters in their car. Thus, the driver could manually select a more conservative engine map while downshifting, thus limiting wheelspin in lower gears, and shift up to the "best" map as he went up into the higher gears.
I don't watch US racing, anymore, but I seem to remember that the turbocharged monsters in open wheel racing all had user-controllable boost-maps... useful for dialling in a bit of extra boost for overtaking. (you couldn't leave it on overboost all the time, it'd blow the engine).
And yet, these things are removed from your everyday car as "unnecessary"... because of the distraction and difficulty of managing all these subsystems while driving. Note that these systems would give a driver greater control over the vehicle and would arguably make the vehicle safer... except for the fact that most drivers would get confused handling all of this.
The guys arguing against tcs, ebd, esp, etcetera, are often the "purity of driving" guys. (again, I am a certified member of this cranky and irascible club)... but what they don't realize is that there is already a layer of sythetic interaction between them and the driving experience... no matter how hard they try to deny it. Which is where power brakes and power steering come in... they
do make a car go faster... and they
do brake and steer for you.
With power brakes, smaller motions of your foot equal greater braking force. Without power-assisted brakes, you'd need the legs of hercules to stop many of today's cars. There's a layer of slop as mechanical foot action is translated to hydraulic action, which is translated to mechanical action, again, at the wheels. Karts are an excellent example of a natural-feeling brake... because there is no assist involved, you can feel the condition of the brake. With power-assisted brakes, what you feel is the resistance of the fluid... It's fun to do a few laps and feel the brakes go to the floor because the fluid is boiling over...
...but power-assisted brakes helps give you more consistent stopping over race distance... and one wonders if any human is strong enough to work the brakes on a modern supercar without some kind of brake booster.
The difference between power steering and unassisted steering is enormous. Even the best power-racks pale in comparison to the direct linkage in a go-kart. Which is why McLaren didn't give the Macca F1 power steering. But it's a sacrifice some are willing to make. Some say it's a necessary sacrifice. In fact, most racecars have power steering. It makes things easier on the driver. Some roadtesters, in fact, have complained of a total lack of "feel" from some race-cars' steering.
And therein lies the crux of the argument... necessary sacrifice according to whom? The less work and clutter for a driver to deal with, the safer they'll be. The more tasks they have to do, the more fulfilled they'll feel about the driving experience, but what constitutes what tasks are actually
necessary in the eyes of the driver often depends on what they're used to, rather than what's best. Where these lists fail is in the author's personal biases. "Hurh hurh... I think you're a wimp for wanting power seats... but I do love my iPod controls..."
Me? I'm used to the good old meat and potatoes manual control, with an extra knob thrown in here or there for engine management on-the-fly, and, hopefully, in the future, suspension adjustment settings... but I'm not going to deny that a modern ride with the full complement of ABS, EBD, TCS, DSC/ESP, etcetera, with a DSG gearbox is better than my car... and possibly faster down the same road.
Doesn't mean I have to like it...
...but at least I won't claim that my arbitrary preference is the best there is and the best there'll ever be.
What am I even trying to say?
