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- Beeblebrox_237
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CodeRedR51
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Same here.
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- motortrend
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Has sort of a RUF vibe to it.
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- CPReece98
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The only thing wrong about this car is the gear lever. Everything else is amazing.
Carlos
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Keef
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Actually the gear lever looks to be about perfect. Up high and right next to the steering wheel is right where it belongs. In a tense racing situation, having to reach way down there and fumble for a shifter wastes precious time. It should be easily reachable and within your peripheral vision.
The only changes I would make to the car would be to get rid of those damn 22s or whatever they are. Gigantic wheels. .The wheels are too big, the tires are too low profile, and the car sits too high. A wheel/tire package 2 inches shorter, which could probably be accomplished with some 17s and appropriately sized tires, would lower the ground clearance by an inch thereby enhancing aerodynamics, and would also increase the tire clearance inside the fender by an inch, reducing the likelihood of rubbing.
From there you could lower the car some, install the appropriate steering geometry correction parts, and assuming it's running stiff coilovers the suspension won't compress much and therefore correct geometry in the rear doesn't matter as much since you'll be running static camber to make up for the lack of travel, and this all has the effect of improving aerodynamics and lowering the C of G even further.
So basically that car is a great idea ruined by some strange wheel/tire/suspension philosophy.
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Awesome.
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I quite like it, though maybe an inch smaller in the wheels (I'm guessing 19s, 18 would be better) and a few inches lower would make for a more touring car-style vibe.
Always been my favourite look. Edge of the wheel just sitting below the arch. Far better than the "cool" stance thing of the lip sitting proud of the arch. Touring cars: "stance" before it was cool. And they handle.
In fairness to the orange M3 I posted, it won't have the massive amounts of inner-arch work that the touring cars had. They were usually significantly extended to allow the wheels to sit that deep in the arches.
Keef
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A stock E36 will get the wheels under there just fine, though probably without the plastic liners. The race cars surely didn't have plastic liners either. Plus their suspension was very stiff and rubbing up inside isn't a big deal with that small amount of travel.
Always been my favourite look. Edge of the wheel just sitting below the arch. Far better than the "cool" stance thing of the lip sitting proud of the arch. Touring cars: "stance" before it was cool. And they handle.
In fairness to the orange M3 I posted, it won't have the massive amounts of inner-arch work that the touring cars had. They were usually significantly extended to allow the wheels to sit that deep in the arches.
Did touring cars from that era allow geometry modifications? I know today all of the cars use heavily modified geometry. Without modified geometry, an E26 lowered that much would probably require some steering correction parts up front.
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Have you ever driven a car with a T-56? The throw is long enough as is. That shift lever is a very odd choice. Besides, racing drivers don't "fumble for a shifter," so I'd counter your time-saving argument with the fact that the shift throw at the height of that handle is probably an additional 3 inches in both directions.
Also, ruined by strange suspension philosophy? Did you even bother reading the article?
speedhunters
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Keef
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A short-throw lever plus an extension I machined for my Civic resulted in a shorter throw than the stock shifter despite the added 6 inches in height. The same could easily be done for any other car.
Don't care. It looks ridiculous because the damn thing is 6 inches off the ground. If they wanted custom suspension they didn't even have to do anything, as the engineering had already been done for E36 touring cars from back in the day. Except those cars have much less lift- and drag-inducing underbody airflow and a lower center of gravity.
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Hm..
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I know that with relatively recent regulations in btcc/wtcc they were allowed to move suspension link points up to a 50mm in any direction. Not sure about jtcc cars though. They certainly weren't slammed cars on stock suspension though lol. Also the purpose for the larger diameter wheels on the touring cars was to fit the larger brakes.
But yeah that BM...I'll have to agree with Keef.
But yeah that BM...I'll have to agree with Keef.
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The only shot I can find under the hood of the BMW from that era of BTCC:
Matt Neal BMW 318i BTCC. 1993 British Touring Car Championship Silverstone. by Antsphoto, on Flickr
Looks like fairly standard mounting points to me but strangely it doesn't look like the inner arches are much different either, which is probably a result of it having RWD and a longitudinally-mounted engine. As you say, you can tuck those wheels up under in an E36 anyway so maybe it didn't need as much modification as the FWD cars did back then.
That said, later ST cars did get a bit more extreme (even larger front arches, 19" wheels, more aerodynamic aids) but by that time BMW was no longer in the series so I don't know how they'd have developed the car.
Super Touring regs are here, but no mention of suspension mounting points. I suspect they had to be standard in Super Touring but modern rules are a bit more lenient in that respect (while being tighter in others - I think until the NGTC rules came into the BTCC engine mounting points had to be as-standard, whereas in Super Touring people mounted the engine as low down and far back as possible).
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This is pretty cool:
- 1,522
Definitely not the regs. More like a simplified summery of them. Compared to Super Touring cars, the regulations for BTCC are much more restricted (as I mentioned earlier with the suspension link mounting points.)
Here's some photos I found at the RAETECH website. RAETECH was an American engineering corporation who ran a few motorsports programs around the world. One of them was their Super Touring Car program.
"RAETECH was tasked with designing a new World Touring car based on the European Chrysler Neon. The debut of the race car was scheduled to coincide with the introduction of the redesigned 2000 Neon. Unfortunately the program was abandoned by Chrysler during reorganization for the Daimler-Chrysler merger. Project highlights are shown below."
And yes that is a Neon
As you can see the uprights were fully custom fabricated pieces and the strut mounts were nowhere near their factory location which can also be seen in these shot of the JTCC Castrol Mugen and JACCS Mooncraft Accords (which were under the same regulations as STCs)...
Notice the extended wheel wells.
Also, found that Mugen actually manufactured a lip for the accord that represented its JTCC counterpart...
And some photos of the older, more restricted, JTCC EG9.
And to go a bit off topic...
Rear trailing arm setup.
Sound clips...
http://www.honda.co.jp/hondafan/SoundofHonda/engine/4MS02/accord.html
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The most amazing thing about those Accords was the engine. They used a de-stroked H22, most commonly out of the Prelude, with the head installed backwards so the intake manifold (or individual throttle bodies in this case) was pointing the front of the car and not the firewall, yet the rest of the engine wasn't. The transmission is still where it's located on the road going H-Series. Very interesting.
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^Yeah I knew the heads were turned around but I hadn't realized that it wasn't the whole engine (the transmission being on the same side.) So I wonder what they did with matching up the coolant and oil passages (assuming they don't actually match up in the road-going version.)
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but yeah it's very hard to find any information on these cars. Knowing Japanese sure would help though.
