I guess I must be an even older SCCA racer then! :) Admittedly it is rare that wheel spin in autocross makes you go faster, but there are cases where that is true. Folks in my club would often do short burnouts in line to clean and warm their tires for a better launch. The other case is with a very tight turn, you can turn tighter, and potentially have a better time, by spinning the rear wheels. I can remember one race in particular where I was the only car doing that. Most courses didn't merit it, but this particular course had two turns to the finish. Everyone else took the first one as tight as their steering allowed, which then forced them to overshoot the next turn by doing a 270 degree turn right, and then a 90 degree turn left, and then they were poorly set up for the short straight to the finish. I spun my rear wheels to flip the rear of the car about for the first turn, and then had enough of a head start on the second turn I could do it with only 180 degrees of turning, rather than the 270 degrees and then 90 degrees of everyone else. This also gave me a much larger initial velocity into the final straight. BTW I took fast time of the day, which included beating 25 Porsches, with an F-stock Camaro. Wheel spin also gives you another tool for car control. My car is not powerful enough to do wheel spin at any time, but a buddy occasionally lets me drive his 500 hp car. Sometimes even the best autocrossers get the car into a plow, where only the front wheels are trying to do all the work of turning. With the 500 hp car, I can flick the gas, spin the rear tires for a moment, and get all four wheels providing sideways force for the turn, rather than just the front tires. Admittedly, this is generally mistake recovery, but is a nice tool to have in the toolbox! So I'd say we agree 100% that few are interested in pointless wheel spin, but that wasn't my point, thanks for the chance to put a different spin on it. ----- Original Message ----- From: Willie McKemie Sent: 03/07/13 04:48 PM To: Electric Vehicle Discussion List Subject: Re: [EVDL] Excellent ROAD & TRACK article on the TESLA-S
On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 04:47:53PM -0500, J Smithy wrote: ... > The SCCA (a U.S. grass roots racing organization) did a survey of their demographics. The racers are wealthier and better educated than average. Yes, they'd be interested in whether the car is able to spin the wheels. Being an old SCCA racer, I can report that few to none are interested in wheelspin. Getting maximum power to the pavement, yes. Pointless wheelspin, no. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20130308/267fd8a9/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
