There should be a separate forum where flash can interact with his many fans.

almost any car with an RE71R or Rival S, or even the new kuhmo will sustain greater than 1g. with decent suspension upgrades, those tires can hold 1.2-1.3g pretty easily.

my turbo on stock springs, stock wheels, koni yellows and Z2 star specs holds 1.2 on course without issue. Z2 star specs arn't even close to the pointy end of street tires these days. my mr2 which is far more advanced, and has far better dampers and springs, will hold 1.3g all day on RE71Rs. on A7s, forget about it.

Fixed it for you

This is pretty accurate about Flash and spouting his stuff... ^^

roflmao - i call BS on the g figures spouted above.

Rocket Sleds: The Best Performers from 50 Years of Car and Driver Testing - Car Comparison - Feature Article - Page 3

I didn't mean to start a war here! But there are a couple points I would like clarified:
1) Where does it say the early 944 is front biased? Mine weighs in 20 pounds heavier on the rear with me sitting in it and a tank of gas. That's what counts, no? I have yet to see a car in a corner without a driver or gas!
2)This insistence that handling and cornering are two different things, clarify that please. Are you suggesting that a car can corner well but be unstable in the straights?

I am going to reluctantly agree with cockerpunk on his opinion of the 944 suspension. It is virtually identical to the suspension VW introduced in the '71 Super Beetle which by the way was the best handling Beetle ever produced. It worked very well indeed in spite of the car being quite rearward biased. Just ask a certain officer of the law who would likely rather forget a particular incident from back when I was a pup, horsepower is not everything! Oops I didn't just spill the beans on myself did I?

My apologies to the OP'er for getting this thread off track and into the rhubarb but I am learning here...

It's true that our suspension layout is primitive and if I had the chance, I'd convert to more modern twin arm / multilink like a few other 944/968 owners I know of. However it's not to say that we still can't make these cars handle / corner well enough to compete on the track against some modern machinery that has had metric tons of money poured into their development by comparison.

We go through one of the fastest turns possibly in the world with a higher min speed than Cup Cars and the Aussie Supercar V8's. We've seen over 2.5 G's and we're on R spec (soft compound) street legal tyres. The front suspension is standard layout and the rear has been modified to raise the pickup point a little but it's still trailing arm and we still get squat.

Given a blank sheet of paper & a blank cheque sure, there would definitely be some changes, but it's not all that bad just the same.

cornering is the ability to hold a speed in a corner. this is typically tested on a skidpad.

handling is the manner in which the car adjusts and reacts to weight transfers fore/aft and left/right. nimbleness would be another way to describe this, though that would not also include ride quality. this is typically tested in a slalom course.

when cars are weighed for balance advertisement, oddly, they are not weighed with the driver. yes, what is important is the weight as it is driven. that's when a car should be set up. when we corner balance and align a car, it is always with the car loaded as it is driven, a half tank of gas, and the weight of the driver in the seat.

the later 944 hardtop is slightly front biased. i believe the early one is slightly rear biased. the 968 hardtop is slightly rear biased. we are not talking about a lot of weight here in any case.

it's important to keep things apples and apples. things like tires are huge. all conversations should be with street tires, in the same sizes as stock, because that is what people use. it's not at all appropriate to compare one car on street tires to another on track tires. the cars in the link i posted are on street tires in stock sizes.

when talking about cornering capabilities, it MUST be on a skidpad. a single corner spec is irrelevant. almost any car can have a transient g load much higher than a sustained load. transient g loads are useless. i can make my X5 hit over 1g on stock tires for one corner. it won't hold it though on a skidpad.

your link is talking about a computed G load, using the equation a=v^2/r ie, you measure the velocity of the car around a corner, and you know the radius, so you can back compute the G load. or the even sloppier way to do it is time a car around a circle, you know the distance, you know the time, so you compute the speed, and then you plug the speed into the above equation to get the G load.

this is a poor way to measure cornering forces.

we have highly accurate accelerometers now to measure these sorts of things. any decent race data setup has one. it samples at 10+hz, and then can be low pass filtered to show sustained corning loads. you can pick out peak and sustained cornering loads very easily with such a setup.

and on such rigs, using modern high performance summer tires like the re71R, RS3v2, Z2SS, and Rival S, almost any car can pull 1g lateral, sustained.

in fact, a local guy running such tires on his stock Camry was able to exceed 1g lateral with it.

for example, here is a m3 lap time, overlayed with velocity, lap map, and G forces ... you can see he is exceeding 1g most of the time ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6CMOIqW1-c

such measurements are fairly common and far more accurate and easy than the old computational method that has many sources of error.

just measure G directly.

last we argued flash, you offered that if i paid you enough, you would come out and map out my car, and spec me a suspension after some extensive on-track testing with datalogging .... interesting that you are not be familiar with such a simple datalogged variable on pretty much any datalogging system ... something tells me i've made a wise choice deciding not to hire you.

oh, and you also claimed to have been a part of race team. collecting data like this, at the consumer level, is relatively recent devlopment, but has been done by race teams since the late 1980s.

i would think, given your claimed credentials, and after 150 grand on a 968, and a career in racing, knowing that a 600 dollar datalogger would debunk your claims, i mean, you would have to know about it.

Ok I get the difference now. So the 944 actually corners well but suffers a bit in the handling department due to a high polar moment of inertia. This is caused, if I'm getting it correct, by the fact that although it's weight distribution is very close to 50/50 that weight is at the extreme ends of the car. The 914 on the other hand is light on both ends and can therefore change direction more quickly.
Yes that explains why my 944 feels better suited to enthusiastic high speed highway driving than parking lot slalom work.
My very limited racing experience in the past was the "pylons in the parking lot" type where small light cars ruled and power was of little consequence. Handling and tires were where it was at. The interesting thing was that the Mini Coopers that had virtually no suspension at all were the ones to try and beat!

roflmao - it is amazing to see somebody, who has absolutely no idea with what i am or am not familiar, continue to try to disprove data, making unsupported claims of unrealistic figures, in spite of all evidence proving they are wrong.

for the record, in addition to the standard methods, i use a g-tech, dynolicious, and data loggers in my skidpad tests. however, i use a skidpad, as it is the ONLY way to determine what a car can actually maintain in a corner. you have to have a dead flat surface for starters. you CANNOT say a car corners at a figure, unless you maintain that figure, and then find the breakaway point. ANY car will show much higher numbers in a transient turn, like on a track, than they will on a skidpad. track datalogging is NOT an accurate reading of cornering capability. that is why magazines and car manufacturers use a skidpad.

apples to apples, the 968 will outcorner and outhandle the 944. that was my point, and it still stands as proven fact. no blathering or redirection can change that.

i'm done playing with internet geniuses that don't actually do this stuff for real. reactivating my ignore list.

it absolutely is a better measurement to measure how the car is actually performing, in the situation you want it perform in, with a direct measurement, rather than with a computed, error-ridden one. i don't really care what the car does on a skid pad, last i checked, i race the car, like on the track. so i care about what kind of G it pulls .... ON THE TRACK. you know, the place where the racing actually happens?

in fact, its harder for a car to pull G on a track than on on a skid pad. you have real world effects, load transfers, bumps etc etc. the reason for your low skid pad numbers, is that OEM style summer tires, have nothing on a modern extreme performance summer tires like re71r. they are far closer the R-comps of 10 years ago than to OEM summer tires.

buy better tires: pull higher G

its that simple.

the difference between the 968s handling and the 944, or even 924s handling, is dwarfed by things like tire choice. and at this point, arguing stock for stock is a pathetically weak argument, because none of these cars are stock anymore, esp if you care about handling. the OEM tires tested in the old magazines, arn't even made anymore, so the numbers cited are useless.

in a world where i can bolt on a set of extreme summer performance tires onto a camry and pull 1g, arguing about what magazine tests from the 80's and 90's measured for lateral G is just ridiculous.

i see yet another response, but i'm not reading it. i am sure it would be a waste of time, and further evidence of a complete lack of understanding of engineering and physics, what makes a car go fast, and how to test it (like removing the driver and the road surface from the equation for starters).

i've run into this kind of mentality for over 30 years. but that's ok. somebody has to come in last. lol - thinking about it, most of my customers were people like that, who thought they knew everything, did all the crazy stuff they read about somewhere, and then were bummed when it didn't work. then they would bring me their car, i would set it up, and suddenly they were going faster.

it's really too bad, because the OP just wanted to know what to do to their car, and it got way-layed by inane drivel about unrealistic things and misinformation.

i'm going to take the high road and just step away from this thread now.

Also due to poor geometry at both ends (particularly the rear) compared to a modern, unequal length a-arm setup, which handles camber changes much better.

that engineering degree i have, yeah, clearly, i know nothing about engineering or physics. :rolleyes: lol

tell me flash, what race team were you a part of? you've claimed a racing career, and a race engineering business ... what was the name of these things?

Hence the stiffer the suspension the better it works because there is less camber change. So stiffer shocks and sway bars will help the transitional handling whereas you need stiffer spring rates to help steady state cornering.

I suspect.

Lets not forget that the basic platform was released on public sale back in '76. Compare it to other sportscars of that era, not whats on the market in the 21st century.

'67 911.

Did Chevy copy it for the late Corvette's?