What is good handling?

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nsxporschem3ferrariand atom?

"," < your best friend.


A good driver could make just about anything handle well. I for one know darn well that a 1960 Chevy Biscayne w/o power steering and with a tiny steering wheel is a ***** to turn.


Colin Chapman said something along the lines of " to make a good car, add lightness" or something like that. I believe balance and a good suspension are the keys to a well handling machine.
 
It's steering communication. I like what was said on pages one and two by neanderthal and some others. Good handling does NOT come from a stiff suspension and wide tires, it comes from the ability of the car to communicate its limits.

I had a choice, when buying, of going for the RS/MP3 or a 2.0 Civic. While the Civic would have been faster, no doubt, with better aftermarket options, the Mazda/Ford just felt so much better at the fingertips... more communicative, more direct. I've been thinking about the tires and whether to upgrade a size or not, as I don't want to make the steering too twitchy or too heavy. I like the balance fine the way it is.

The Miatas are often cited as some of the best handling cars ever, even with poor roll, low grip limits (as stock) and no power. But they communicate (at least the old ones did) much better than anything else on sale.

Frankly, I'm envious of those mother****ers every time I see them wringing the cars out on track. While Porsche and Evo owners are pussyfooting through the tighter turns, trying to keep their expensive machines in one piece, Miata owners are just throwing them in, damn-it-all-to-hell style.

As for the Z06 thread argument, it's silly. The car grips, okay, but it doesn't communicate, and that's a major consideration for buyers you're trying to steal from Porsche.
 
To me, good handling can be one of two things:

"Fun" good-handling car:
- Isn't particularly prone to understeer (tuned-in "safety understeer" is ok if the car doesn't suffer from it).
- Grips the road if you want it to. Oversteers if you want it to.
- Tells you everything that's going on at the wheels.
- Bodyroll is okay unless the car feels floaty, wallowy, and vague.

Best "fun" car I've driven: My car :) , but that isn't to say I've driven a lot of cars... :indiff:

"Fast" good-handling car:
- Can make it around a tight course faster than the next guy.
- As stiff as necessary to extract the car's cornering potential.
- As light as possible.
- A cornering threshold that can suddenly bite you if you cross it, in exchange for a faster cornering threshold.

Best "fast" car I've driven: Probably the 350Z I took for a test-drive once...not that I really had a chance to test its limits... :)
 
So I'm resurrecting this old thread back from the dead because of the raging debate from the Z06 vs. F430 vs. 911TT thread that I never felt was settled. Despite the fact that the thread was hopelessly off topic, I felt there were some very good posts in there that deserved some follow-up.

When I created this thread, I had a hard time putting to words exactly what made a good handling car. Well, it's a couple of years later, and I've finally put some of my thoughts together now that I have a moment.

Specifically, the issue of raw numbers (skidpad and slalom) vs. real world feel and communication. Someone in that thread remarked that 'feel' was something unquantifiable, and therefore his argument for a measurable approach to handling was superior.

As I stated in that thread: skidpad measures mechanical grip. This is only a small portion of the vehicle dynamics spectrum we call handling. Handling is behavior. After years of trying to figure it out, I think I can finally put some objective qualities to what behaviors 'feel' good. Here we go:

Steering. A good handling car has steering that effectively communicates two crucial bits of information about the front tires: which way they are pointing AND (when loaded) how much slip angle is on them. It needs to do this faithfully, accurately and transparently, regardless of which way the chassis is loaded.

It also needs to have a good noise to signal ratio. This means that while it should deliver information about the road texture (which affects grip), it should not overwhelm the driver with so much information that makes it difficult for him to concentrate on the task at hand.

Stability. Not only should the car remain stable before the limits are achieved, a good handling car should maintain its composer even after mechanical grip has been exceeded. Which brings us to...

Natural transition between grip and drift. When grip has been exceeded and the tires begin to slide, the breakaway point should not be abrupt. While this quality is largely dependant on the particular tire, it is also up to the chassis design and tuning to help facilitate this transition.

Response. A good handling car needs to respond quickly and accurately to drive inputs, while allowing for a healthy margin error for 'ham-fistedness'. The chassis should load up quickly in a sharp turn, without excessive body motion.

Steady-state balance. Under steady state conditions (i.e. after the chassis has loaded up in a turn), the car should not only remain stable enough as to not go off-line, but malleable enough so that the driver can tighten up or go wider if he needs to. In other words, even after committing to a turn, the chassis should allow the driver to make small changes to the attitude of the car with the steering, brakes or throttle.

Transitional balance. When moving from one steady state to another (i.e. transitioning load), a good handling car must quickly shift loads with a minimum of instability or unpredictability.

Feedback. Finally, a good handling car is constantly feeding quality information about how it performs all of the above tasks through not only the steering, but the seats as well. A good driver should be able to sense the load moving from one part of the car to the next, and consequently be able to make full use of each of the tires.

There's probably a bit more to it, but that's the general gist of things. Feel free to comment; good, bad or indifferent.


M
 
I think I get your point, I do agree with you, and the following sum of things has come to my mind. It's not very scientific, but I think it's spot on:

A perfectly handling car gives you just the information about itself and the state of its surroundings you want, without giving you something you can't "compute". If you put it in a certain situation, it reacts like you're expecting it to do, without being boring, but also without scaring the **** out of you.

If you approach a corner, you zoom though it, the word "YES!" comes to your mind afterwards, and that happens over and over again in all kinds of situations, you're sitting in a perfectly handling car. That's for you anyway, cause other people might see that differently, which is absolutely acceptable in my book.

Regards
the Interceptor
 
Here's a quote from the June issue of Classic Cars that I thought summed up what handling means to me:

"It's a fallacy to say a solid car, heavily sprung, will handle well but a good-riding car will corner on its door handles. What you need is agility linked to calmness, which is good for driver confidence. None of the responses should be delayed or aggresive; they should build up in a linear way. Input equals output, so you get what you expect."

That was from Gavan Kershaw, a Lotus dynamics engineer from the Colin Chapman era.
 
A "good handling" car is imo, a car that gives you confidence in what it can do, and it delivers on that. It provides good communication for you to feel ho hard your pushing and how much harder you've got left to go. My opinion is that a car that can take a corner at 60 and makes you feel like you can take the corner at 60 is better than a car that can make the same corner at 70 but you only feel like it can at 50.
 
Well, out of all the cars I've driven, which consists primarily of a variety of Corolla's, an SVX, a WRX, several MR2's, my MR2 wins for cars I've driven. Its an 87 with Eibach groun control and tokico struts. It responds instantly, and while its not linear being an MR car, you can feel everything its doing and its steering is telepathic.

Compared to the WRX, the MR2 has more steering response and a much better turn in, and I drove the cars back to back. Down side on the MR2 is the snap oversteer, but you can avoid that if you train yourself with the gas pedal.

Best handling car I've ever rode in though, at an Auto-x, would be either a Miata or an MR2 Spyder, both on stock suspension. Just from riding, I feel how perfectly balanced the cars were, and how smooth they progressed through turns.

My take on good handling and what it requires is like so -

Steering feel has to be there, and it must tell you about the road and what the front tires are doing.

Weight is a big issue I've found too. Both the WRX and SVX were nimble cars, but their weight made transitions nervous feeling, and a little less predictable. The lighter weight Miata's and MR2's felt smoother in transition.

The weight also dictates "flingablity," which is how much you can just toss the car into a corner and have it actually work smoothly. It also relates to grip to drift transitions. The WRX would snap in and out I found, partially cause of AWD I believe, and that I have less time in high power AWD cars. The MR2, while famous for snap oversteer suddenly, is not that sudden. You generally have to screw something up to get it, espcially in how you work the gas and brake. In high speed corners, around 70MPH and such, the MR2 is brillent. Slightly back of the gas and the back slowly starts to come out nice and smooth. Get back on the gas and grip is restored. Makes controlling the car mid corner very nice.

Final note on roll and suspension stiffness I guess. The WRX has a fair amount of travel, and does show more roll than MR2, which almost stays flat in corners. This is good and bad. The roll in the WRX is not desired on a nice surface, but on a real world back road, with its changes in pavement and ripples, the MR2 can become extremely tricky as it will have a tire hop from time to time at the limits, which is bad bad. The WRX is a better car for everything handling, the MR2 has become a track/tarmac car more than a true street car.

M, you have got a good idea of what is good in handling there. Some people have personal taste that affects it as well though. One thing people miss though is the balance of suspension travel to stiffness and the likes. A car with a great balance is the WRX I will say. Its very sound and predictable, even on gravel. THis makes the driver feel much better about pushing it.
 
I saw an episode of top gear where they tried to make a C6 Z06 and a new viper slide through the corner , and what I remember is that the corvet was a better handling car becuase it gave you more info through teh steering and chasis but it was still hard ....the viper on the other hand was ahrd to keep in a slide through a corner because it didn't give them the feed back they needed to control teh car so it just kept spining , you can see in M BMW cars in allot of shows doing this and espicailly the M3 it just looks so easy to do this kind of thing in you can make it slid into a corner or you can just drive fast through it .... which means you can make the car do what ever you want it do , and thats why its conidered a one of the best handling cars ..... I hope you guys get my idea its pretty close to you guys said but I thought I would give my 2 hallals (equivlent of cent here in saudi ) :D
 
Actually, the Viper, some may argue, is more communicative on a race-track.

But then, that just brings us back to the stiff-vs-composed argument. I definitely agree with live4speed, that I want a car that'll tell me I can do 60 when I can do 60 rather than one that can do 70 and tell me I can only do 50... but then, either case is better than a car that can only do 50, and tells you it can do 100... :ouch:
 
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