Recently on the V-8 Supercars the always excellent Neil Crompton was giving the Holden Racing Team VF Commodore the once over, and one of the things was that the wiper motor was moved from the bulkhead where it is high up, to the front passenger floor, with what appears to be a cable going up to the bulkhead to run the single wiper mechanism.
Also various pumps and tanks were moved from higher up in the car to a lower point, to bring the weight down low, he demonstrated this by picking up a hammer and holding the hammer head down low with the heaviest part down low, then put the heaviest part of the hammer up high, and held the hammer by the handle and demonstrated how unstable the hammer was with all that weight up high.
About a million years ago the also excellent Marl Larkham, the V-8 Touring Car commentator drove an Mitre 10, EL Falcon that had all the pumps for gearbox, diff, motor and power steering underneath the car, the pumps ran off the tailshaft, with belts and pulleys, to get all the weight down low, to improve the centre of gravity, put all the weight down low and the car will corner faster.
In 1971 Alfasud designer DR. Rudolph Hruska designed the mighty Alfasud with a boxer motor that put all the weight down low, his experience at Porsche with boxer motors conviced him, that was the way to go.
The boxer motor continued to the Sprint and 33 right up to 1994 with the final version of the boxer motor having 1700cc's, fuel injection and a 16 valve setup.
This motor continued into the 33 replacement, the 145 and 146 series cars which we didn't see here, the series 2 version of the 145 and 146 series cars had the boxer motor replaced, by the twin cam Fiat based motors, refered to as 'Twin Sparks', the Fiat based motors were cheaper to produce, as they were an inline motor, and could be machined in the one setup and they only needed one cylinder head, cam belt, etc, so they were cheaper to produce.
So boys and girls, uncle col concludes, thats why nothing comes close to the handling of a Sud or 33 of that era, put all that weight down low, smile and outcorner the opposition!, Colin.
QuoteSo boys and girls, uncle col concludes, thats why nothing comes close to the handling of a Sud or 33
I knew that great little read / history lesson was going somewhere.
I was waiting for the sales pitch ;)