And I asked (without success) that we knock it off? This isn't an FWD vs RWD thread... it's just a lamentation for one of the best FWD sports cars ever.
Drivetrain Preference has nothing to do with it. The RSX is dead.
The Mustang has nothing to do with it. The Celica was pulled before the Mustang started making much of an impact. The RSX's downward spiral began before then.
And yes, RWD is king, all hail RWD... oh... I forgot... RWDs are inherently more expensive to make (the cheapest RWD I know has 0.3 liters less than other cars in the price range, an anorexic engine... no ABS, no airbags, and is on a ladder frame... oh, and it isn't even a car.) which means, of course, that most people just
learning to drive and learning to drive hard are learning on FWD, whether we like it or not.
And it's a good way to learn. FWDs as stock, "push" harder than RWDs, forcing you to back off the throttle early and guide the car into the turn. On no-throttle or trailing brake, an FWD car will behave much like any RWD car. Go in too fast and you understeer, give it too much brake or brake too abruptly and it'll oversteer, get it right and you get through the corner
fast and with less drama.
Once you've mastered car control and have learned to steer with your car's weight and brakes, go on to cars with the "correct" drivetrain layout, and you add another layer on top of that, learning how to balance the throttle in turns. Many people who
start with RWD on track rely too much on the throttle to get them around turns (I've seen this). It's entertaining, but smooth and steady is always fastest, whatever you're driving.
There's a good reason Skip Barber uses Dodge Neons as entry level cars. They're sharp-handling, nimble, and forgiving. Oh, yeah, and they're cheap.
But you'll notice, everything else is RWD.
The point of FWD performance and tuning is not to prove that it's any better, but merely as an exercise in showing that
it can be done. Just because it's not the optimum drivetrain layout, doesn't mean that FWD cars
can't be fun, or
can't perform well... it just means that it takes that little bit more for them to do so. (EDIT: Okay, a LOT more...)
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C'mon guys... if we really need to argue this point, we can do it (and we have done it) in a zillion other threads.
Now can we all get with it and knock it off... this argument should be budded into another thread. A lot of people will wander in here and see all the hot posts and just wander back out without having their say on the death of the RSX.