Quote:
Originally Posted by Ximian
Without telemetry, this is just a a lot of assumptions, but it sounds like you're describing oversteer which is expected. You're entering a corner at a good speed, likely off the throttle or with a maintenance throttle. While cornering either off the throttle or maintenance throttle, the car is scrubbing off speed, load transferring to the front of the car, giving the front more grip. The result is that the car turns more with the same steering wheel input, increasing with each MPH lost. This is exactly the same for RWD, AWD/4WD, and FWD.
The differences are prominent when you're leaving a corner. With four wheel drive and to a much bigger extent with front wheel drive, you're giving the front wheels the extra thing to do of accelerating in addition to steering. You will have less grip overall for steering out of a corner. But with high HP cars, the benefit of all wheel drive outweighs that drawback because you can use more throttle out of a corner than the RWD car. If you're experiencing oversteer with xDrive while accelerating out of a corner, that's expected as well. A certain amount of throttle is used to "rotate" the car going into an corner but isn't really used coming out of one. You might be causing the car to rotate a bit with how you're applying throttle so more details are needed there.
You've probably heard the phrase "steering with the throttle" and it essentially means you can only give the car so much steering input so you purposefully induce oversteer and understeer at select moments by taking away or adding more throttle. More throttle means you would understeer and less throttle means you would oversteer. The typical example is when you feel like you're about to oversteer leaving a corner, just feed in a bit more power which will transfer the load (AKA weight transfer) to the rear, causing the front to lose a bit of grip and understeer. It won't help with oversteer skidding because that easily becomes unrecoverable caused by too much throttle out of the corner.
|
Thank you for taking the time to respond and with detail. All your assumptions are correct on this and it makes perfect sense. What I am learning is that my observations are a byproduct of having a car with such performance and handling that I have not experienced these weight shift dynamics before. For example in the 280ZX there was never enough torgue to shift the weight to an extent that the front axle would experience oversteer and in the Corvette I was always worried about loosing the backend that I did not push the car around corners very hard and in hindsight the suspension on the corvette was not that good.
So is it safe for me to conclude that in the situation descibed above, that I have not kept my speed up high enough to have a smoother weight shift?
Thanks again Ximian! Responses like this are why I love this forum and the M community in general, peoples desire to help each other. Safe travels!