10 sec FWD Eclipse

[low_civic]

street legal or not its FWD and 7 seconds

[Turbo AWD]

Notice the wheelie bar behind the car in the video. Such vehicle would not run such time's with out it. Besides all the common negative effects of FWD such as under steer, torque steer, wheel spin, wheel hop.....Ect....... There are also the weight transfer side effects. The weight transfer is very visible up-on heavy ecceleration, as the front of the car lift's and the rear end push's down.

Although FWD vehicles have most of its wight on its drive wheels. Upon heavy ecceleration most for the down-force is lost due to weight transfer. Because of this, when we accelerate, we take weight off the front wheels and put it on the back wheels. But this is a FWD! Those front wheels are what are driving the car.

So what happens??? The harder we accelerate, the more we unload from the fronts. The more the fronts are unloaded, the less grip they provide. Eventually, so much weight is transferred rearward that the amount of power we're trying to put down exceeds the amount of grip we can provide, and the wheels starts spinning.

Once that happens, the amount of grip plummets (a spinning wheel has much less grip than a non-spinning wheel) and the rate of acceleration drops. When that happens, weight transfers forward, the grip level rises, and eventually the tire bites again - and acceleration increases, weight goes rearward, the tires unload, and away we go again.

Weight transfer off the drive wheels inherently limits the performance potential of a FWD car - and the harder you accelerate, the worse it gets. There is NO performance argument for using a FWD, not if you can use a RWD or AWD driveline and get down to the same (or close enough) weight.

The FWD drive-train was introduced by the auto makers for two reason and two reason only - packaging and, cuting cost. With a FWD driveline, all the drive parts are forward of the firewall. You don't need to accomodate a transmission or driveshaft hump in the c0ckpit, so you can make more interior room for the same external dimentions. Also less drive-train equals less cost. Performance was definitely not a factor and now people are doing what they can with what the factory offers as "performance" cars.

There are very good reasons why makers of true performance car's such as Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Ect, have never utilized the FWD drive-train. A FWD car is its own worst enemy from an engineering perspective. A FWD drive-train is inferior in every aspect when it comes to performance, no matter how you argue it.

Also notice the very few poeple who are running 7's in FWD vehicles all have a wheelie bar on the back, amongst many other drive-train modifications. By utilizing a wheelie bar thus helps minimize the weight transfer to the rear wheels but, does not remedy it completely.

It's not my intent to turn this thread in to a pissing match. Thus being confrontational (FWD suck's) doesn’t lend to intelligent discussion, but will rather result in a flame war.

[Vendetta]

thats a long ass post there

[97talon]

Are we supposed to read that whole thing or can someone paraphrase it?

[low_civic]

basically what he is saying is

FWD sucks and if it wasn't for the wheelie bar he wouldn't do the same times that he did..

[dsmtim]

^^ thanks low, i really almost wanted to read it then i got bored.

[robevo]

Show me a streel legal 7 sec any sort of car?????

[RB26powered]

Almost anything can be accomplished when purpose building a race car for it.

Regardless of the fact that that is a race car and not a stock bodied car, it is still impressive.

But the bottom line is, A FWD car with the same power as a RWD car will always lose (all other constants being the same) since the FWD is working against gravity.

[quick4dr]

I know the guy that owned that eclipse him and his brother have a performance shop. His brothers street trim Honda CRX runs mid 9's @ 150+!