Motorcycle thesis project

iirc, the Minis seldom had all four wheels on the ground during spirited
conering, anyway. Didn't stop them from driving around the 'Vettes in the
esses at Lime Rock.

 

spirited conering, anyway. Didn't stop them from driving around the
'Vettes in the esses at Lime Rock.

I've never been to Lime Rock, but I saw a video about the early days of
SCCA club racing there, when rich guys with Ferraris and movie stars
like Paul Newman would go out and play with their toys on weekends. The
video showed Newman in a Triumph TR-5 or TR-6 taking a runoff when he
approached a corner too fast in one of his earliest races...

I remember when the front wheel drive Minis first came to Santa
Barbara, to run on the airport course which was actually in Goleta. The
announcer made a statement about how the Minis would take radically
different lines through the corners than the rear wheel drive cars...

Back in those days, the front-engined Corvettes and Cobras with a lot
of weight up front would just plow through the tight corners, trying to
go straight, they understeered badly....

So far as not having all four wheels on the ground at any given time is
concerned, that's par for the course with cars. All four wheeled
vehicles will try to turn turtle when too much weight is transferred to
the outside wheels in a corner. Four-wheeled cars become three wheeled
vehicles in tight corners...

I was surprised to see that was even happening to Mazda's RX-7 at
Willow Springs, and that car had a complicated five link suspension
with special rubber bushings to make the outside rear wheel steer in
hard corners to tighten the cornering radius...

I thought I'd created a pretty radical road racing car when I swapped
a Jaguar engine into my TR-4 in the mid-1960's, but I didn't know
diddly-squat about weight transfer in corners...

I took the beast to a slalom race held in the parking lot of Marineland
of the Pacific in Palos Verdes and was badly beaten by a guy who had an
almost stock TR-4A. He had sway bars, though, and I didn't even know
what a sway bar was, or how the passive bar affected front/rear
traction balance...

Whenever I would get the inside rear wheel off the ground in a tight
corner, the other wheel would stop driving, and I would lose part of a
second...

When I got my 280Z, all sorts of suspension goodies, sway bars, Delrin
bushings, lowering kits, etc., were available. I was surprised to see
how an overly-large diameter slalom sway bar would affect the steering
in a corner on the highway...

Anything that affects suspension frequency is also going to affect
traction...

Passive devices like sway bars just don't get it over a wide range of
road conditions. What the 280Z needed was a smart active suspension,
controlled by a computer...

If there had been enough engineering interest and Datsun could have
sold cars to a public willing to pay for such a system, an active
suspension system might have had hydraulic or air jacks on all four
corners, linked to a digital encoder on the steering column, with
accelerometers on each wheel telling the computer that it was time to
add pressure or blow pressure off at each corner of the car...

Nowadays there are Japanese all wheel drive sedans like the Nissan
Skylark or Skylane (whatever) running around with computer-controlled
traction systems that can handle 800 horsepower or so on surfaces with
varying traction...

It won't be long before Japanese motorcycles with active suspensions
show up on the show room floor...

But, I seriously doubt they will have gyroscopes to act as "invisible
training wheels"...

 

*Boggle*

 

I missed the movie stars. I was in the pit crew with a bunch of college kids
running a Lotus Super 7. It was a strange place. One guy would show up with
a XK150 roadster and sedately motor around, trying not to get the thing
bent. The Wankels would quietly sneak around the course.

My college lab partner introduced me to SCCA club racing. I grew up with 1/4
mile dirt track and didn't really appreciate the subtleties of rich wankers
and their toys, but the poor boys with the Minis and Lotuses were just like
home.. If I didn't have more vehicles than I need, I'd probably have a
bunch of crates from Caterham on the lawn, though, and when the curent car
expires, one of the new Minis is definitely on the short list of
replacements.

 

Crossed my mind, too. The Jag engine was utterly impossible to work on under
the bonnet of a 150; can't imagine it in a TR-4. But, Shelby proved that if
there's a will...

I recall a surplus Allison being, er, swapped into a Fiat 600, but it wasn't
exactly road worthy.

 

on under the bonnet of a 150; can't imagine it in a TR-4. But, Shelby
proved that if there's a will...

There was actually *more* open room under the TR-4's hood than there
was on the XK-150, but the tach drive on the end of the intake camshaft
had to protrude through the firewall and one of the inner fenders had
to be notched for clearance on one carburetor and the passenger side
footbox had to be notched to clear the rear carb...

So there were holes through the firewall into the passenger
compartment. I was demonstrating my pride and joy to my dad, and when I
started the engine, the rear carb backfired right by his feet, scaring
him...

I saw a TR-4 once with a Ford 302, the V-8 was really shoehorned in
there...

wasn't exactly road worthy.

Once I found a Gogomobil (a little Dutch car that was powered by a
motorcycle engine) in a junkyard and I considered running it with a
chain drive off the torque converter of an Oldsmobile V-8 I happened to
have. But I concluded erroneously that the Gogomobil lacked all of its
suspension parts and didn't buy it...

That was about 4 or 5 years before the original Minis were offered to
the public...