Quickest point to point car

Quickest point to point car

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ZX10R NIN

27,494 posts

124 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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I agree they won't be quicker but you get more IMO immersed in the experience with a manual (this coming from someone who's only experience with manual gearboxes these days are on my motorbikes) which while not being quicker could be more fun.

I wonder how much longer it would take you to cover a 40 mile A Road blast in a manual compared to an auto.

SlimJim16v

5,617 posts

142 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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DoubleD said:
DanielSan said:
A WRC car. No road car will even get close.
Hardly a 'real' world point to point car though.
Nor one he's driven.

Alias218

1,485 posts

161 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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I have to say my 350z is a superb cruiser, although it is a GT car I suppose. Several cars I have owned before have all given me backache on long journeys. My 350 got me from Chelmsford to Leeds in a smidge over three hours and I was feeling fresh as a daisy on the other side.

Very comfortable, effortless cruising, quick enough to hold off 95% of other road users. Gets my vote.

rb5er

11,657 posts

171 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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I'm surprised people think any sort of SUV or Range Rover would know which way a proper car went when it comes to corners. Too heavy and unwieldy compared to an evo fq360. The evo would piss all over them.

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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jmcc500 said:
On the DCT vs Manual point, I think until you experience how very fast things happen in a car like a 911 turbo or McLaren (my reference point), you can't appreciate why a manual is a limitation. My Boxster Spyder is fast, but not so fast that I can't cope with changing gear myself. The McLaren 12Cs I drove were so fast when unleashed that there was simply no way I'd have kept up if I'd had to shift gear myself. Anyone saying they could is either deluded or currently competing in top level motorsport.

Of course, even if you can keep up with the rate at which you had to change gear, the very act of taking one hand off the wheel adds some complexity, and, unless you employ 'road tester' clutchless, full bore shifts, will take longer.

So, in summary, people who say they would be quicker in a manual when we are talking very fast cars are talking bks. IMO, of course.

Edited by jmcc500 on Thursday 29th September 20:00
This true but raises the question that if you are travelling so fast that you can't change gears manually then shouldn't you be on a circuit rather than a public road?

clarki

1,312 posts

218 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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rb5er said:
I'm surprised people think any sort of SUV or Range Rover would know which way a proper car went when it comes to corners. Too heavy and unwieldy compared to an evo fq360. The evo would piss all over them.
You need to try one of these new super SUVs - SVR, Macan Turbo, etc. They're quite impressive. I think you're right a (good) evo would be the better choice, but not sure about the piss all over them bit.

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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rb5er said:
I'm surprised people think any sort of SUV or Range Rover would know which way a proper car went when it comes to corners. Too heavy and unwieldy compared to an evo fq360. The evo would piss all over them.
Not on public roads though. The level of risk taken to use the handling advantages of the lower car would be too high to be remotely appropriate. On public roads it is whoever can see the clearest and furthest who has the advantage by some margin. And modern performance SUVs can quite happily negotiate corners at the same pace in those conditions and as you can see further and more clearly you can travel faster for the same risk.

vikingaero

10,256 posts

168 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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Quickest in what situation? I drive from Sittingbourne to Hollingbourne in my 1.0 Daihatsu Shed and have left Porsche Cayennes, Range Rovers, Leon Cupras for dead. Why? Narrow country lanes means I never stop in the super slim Daihatsu every time there is an oncoming vehicle. Drive the Clubman or 520 and I'm no faster than the fattest car ahead.

anonymous-user

53 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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james_gt3rs said:
Does anyone know why light cars suffer in the wet more than heavier ones? Can't get my head around the physics.
The issue is Mμ !!! (pronounced mew)


1) A tyre is NOT a simple frictional device, in fact, it's more like velcro, in that the rubber "locks and deforms" into the sharp edged gaps in the tarmac surface, and in that the softer the rubber the more the interlocking adds to the overall frictional co-efficient. Once a tyre starts to slide, there is less and less time for the rubber to interlock with the road and the mechanical interlocking grip so grip falls off with slip.

2) A tyre can support a given shear loading (lateral + longitudinal) for any given normal (ie vertical) load. The ratio between those loadings is called the tyres Frictional co-efficient, which we allocate to the Greek letter Mμ. For a Mμ of 1, 1kg of vertical force can support 1kg of shear force. And for a modern tyre Mμ of between 0.95 and 1.25 are typical.


For a heavy vehicle, as most of the time we aren't driving at the limits of grip, there is plenty of "force left over" to accelerate with, and as the tyres loadings are fairly high (because the tyre is flexed by the large loads due to the high mass) the tyre heats up easily (which softens the rubber compound, increasing the mechanical interlocking).

Our light vehicle, which probably has softer compound tyres, that are, relative to it's mass, wider, is relying more the physical interlocking friction. Our lighter vehicle also probably has a higher power to weight ratio, meaning it can overload it's tyres more easily that the heavier one.

So, when things are wet and slippy, the light vehicle cannot load it's tyres enough to heat them up, and because they are sliding more, they don't have time to leverage the interlocking friction.

In reality, the light vehicle probably still can out perform the heavier one (except in very low frictional conditons (ie snow/ice) or when fitted with extreme tyres (ie trackday soft compound, still sidewall ones) but it looses more of it's original performance capability (ie the drop in the grip is larger than for the heavier vehicle)

rb5er

11,657 posts

171 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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DonkeyApple said:
Not on public roads though. The level of risk taken to use the handling advantages of the lower car would be too high to be remotely appropriate. On public roads it is whoever can see the clearest and furthest who has the advantage by some margin. And modern performance SUVs can quite happily negotiate corners at the same pace in those conditions and as you can see further and more clearly you can travel faster for the same risk.
Yes on public roads. Not at legal speeds but we are not talking about legal speeds. An evolution is a hell of a lot quicker round bends than a Range Rover etc as well as much quicker to brake and accelerate. I can tell you haven't been or driven in an fq360.

generationx

6,645 posts

104 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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Matt UK said:
Not to derail this thread, but having had my fair share of b-road blasts, the fastest car always tends to be the one driven by the driver willing to take the most risks / sees red and loses all perspective.

IMHO.
This is actually quite wise. I'm sure a 17-year-old me was quicker through Dorset country lanes than a 47-year-old me. Those thirty years have added quite a lot of self-preservation!

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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rb5er said:
DonkeyApple said:
Not on public roads though. The level of risk taken to use the handling advantages of the lower car would be too high to be remotely appropriate. On public roads it is whoever can see the clearest and furthest who has the advantage by some margin. And modern performance SUVs can quite happily negotiate corners at the same pace in those conditions and as you can see further and more clearly you can travel faster for the same risk.
Yes on public roads. Not at legal speeds but we are not talking about legal speeds. An evolution is a hell of a lot quicker round bends than a Range Rover etc as well as much quicker to brake and accelerate. I can tell you haven't been or driven in an fq360.
You'll need to be able to brake and accelerate better because you'll be needing to slow for more obstacles. Fast road travel really isn't about ultimate handling, braking or acceleration. It's about maintaining the most speed for the least risk and that makes visibility key. Slapping a car round a blind bend at 80 is somewhat different to slapping a van round the same bend but being able to see all the way round. Less visibility means taking more risks or having to slow for more and bigger obstacles.

RobM77

35,349 posts

233 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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DonkeyApple said:
rb5er said:
DonkeyApple said:
Not on public roads though. The level of risk taken to use the handling advantages of the lower car would be too high to be remotely appropriate. On public roads it is whoever can see the clearest and furthest who has the advantage by some margin. And modern performance SUVs can quite happily negotiate corners at the same pace in those conditions and as you can see further and more clearly you can travel faster for the same risk.
Yes on public roads. Not at legal speeds but we are not talking about legal speeds. An evolution is a hell of a lot quicker round bends than a Range Rover etc as well as much quicker to brake and accelerate. I can tell you haven't been or driven in an fq360.
You'll need to be able to brake and accelerate better because you'll be needing to slow for more obstacles. Fast road travel really isn't about ultimate handling, braking or acceleration. It's about maintaining the most speed for the least risk and that makes visibility key. Slapping a car round a blind bend at 80 is somewhat different to slapping a van round the same bend but being able to see all the way round. Less visibility means taking more risks or having to slow for more and bigger obstacles.
I was thinking about this earlier today. For being in an SUV or a van to make a noticeable difference over a car in terms of visiblity, the hedge would roughly speaking need to be of a height between the eyeline height of the car driver and the eyeline height of the Range Rover driver. How many hedges lie in that relatively small height range? In most parts of the country I've driven in, and certainly where I live, the hedges tower above this, and it's only really in something like a large lorry or a tractor that you can actually start to see over them. You may find the odd corner where a garden or estate wall is in this height range and you do get an advantage, but enough to lift the A to B pace of an SUV or Range Rover to that of a Caterham R500? possibly not!! wink

clarki

1,312 posts

218 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
quotequote all
rb5er said:
Yes on public roads. Not at legal speeds but we are not talking about legal speeds. An evolution is a hell of a lot quicker round bends than a Range Rover etc as well as much quicker to brake and accelerate. I can tell you haven't been or driven in an fq360.
Touché - I can tell you haven't been in or driven an SVR or Macan/Cayenne Turbo.

DoubleD

22,154 posts

107 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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RobM77 said:
I was thinking about this earlier today. For being in an SUV or a van to make a noticeable difference over a car in terms of visiblity, the hedge would roughly speaking need to be of a height between the eyeline height of the car driver and the eyeline height of the Range Rover driver. How many hedges lie in that relatively small height range? In most parts of the country I've driven in, and certainly where I live, the hedges tower above this, and it's only really in something like a large lorry or a tractor that you can actually start to see over them. You may find the odd corner where a garden or estate wall is in this height range and you do get an advantage, but enough to lift the A to B pace of an SUV or Range Rover to that of a Caterham R500? possibly not!! wink
I agree with this.

DonkeyApple

54,934 posts

168 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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RobM77 said:
DonkeyApple said:
rb5er said:
DonkeyApple said:
Not on public roads though. The level of risk taken to use the handling advantages of the lower car would be too high to be remotely appropriate. On public roads it is whoever can see the clearest and furthest who has the advantage by some margin. And modern performance SUVs can quite happily negotiate corners at the same pace in those conditions and as you can see further and more clearly you can travel faster for the same risk.
Yes on public roads. Not at legal speeds but we are not talking about legal speeds. An evolution is a hell of a lot quicker round bends than a Range Rover etc as well as much quicker to brake and accelerate. I can tell you haven't been or driven in an fq360.
You'll need to be able to brake and accelerate better because you'll be needing to slow for more obstacles. Fast road travel really isn't about ultimate handling, braking or acceleration. It's about maintaining the most speed for the least risk and that makes visibility key. Slapping a car round a blind bend at 80 is somewhat different to slapping a van round the same bend but being able to see all the way round. Less visibility means taking more risks or having to slow for more and bigger obstacles.
I was thinking about this earlier today. For being in an SUV or a van to make a noticeable difference over a car in terms of visiblity, the hedge would roughly speaking need to be of a height between the eyeline height of the car driver and the eyeline height of the Range Rover driver. How many hedges lie in that relatively small height range? In most parts of the country I've driven in, and certainly where I live, the hedges tower above this, and it's only really in something like a large lorry or a tractor that you can actually start to see over them. You may find the odd corner where a garden or estate wall is in this height range and you do get an advantage, but enough to lift the A to B pace of an SUV or Range Rover to that of a Caterham R500? possibly not!! wink
So that's a very particular type of hedge covered then. wink

Besides, if you're talking about the typical kind of narrow Berkshire lane where no road vehicle has any visibility advantage then neither vehicle will be faster than the other as the speed you will be travelling at will be defined by the risk of oncoming obstacles and as that risk is uniform and wholly independent of the vehicle type then they are going to travel at the same speed for the same risk being taken. Again, it's a public road not a race track.

The further you can see the longer you can hold your speed. On public roads that's what makes for pace.


Edited by DonkeyApple on Thursday 29th September 23:12

RobM77

35,349 posts

233 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
quotequote all
DonkeyApple said:
So that's a very particular type of hedge covered then. wink
Yes, very specific! hehe If there was a road lined with this specific type of hedge (a hedge that a 911 Turbo driver couldn't see over but a Range Rover could), then your point would be true yes. The fact is, most roads aren't like that because most hedges are clipped at about the cab height of a tractor, probably just because tractors cut them and that's the easiest height to do it at. Sure, you're going to find from time to time that objects are at just the right height for a Range Rover to make better progress than a normal car (for example, the sort of wall typically found around an old country estate), but I really don't think it happens anywhere near often enough to make such a leviathan faster than a normal car on a typical British country lane, let alone a proper performance car. You correctly go on to state that visibility is key to progress, but for anyone other than the driver of an arctic, this statement is mainly concerning visibility around bends, not over the hedges that line them.

S10GTA

12,645 posts

166 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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Judging by my drive home tonight from a friends, I'd vote a volvo V70R..smile

In all seriousness, I'm in the fast SUV camp. That slightly higher seating position will give you more of an advantage.

anonymous-user

53 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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ime, performance SUVs are rather slow cross country for the following reasons:

1) The brakes take an absolute hammering (even with carbon ceramics, stopping 2.5 tonnes from 100mph is hard!)
2) Fuel economy is dire - last time i went fast, XC in a proto 575 RRS, it did 9 mpg.
3) Other drivers think your the devil, and treat you like him (a SVR RRS at 100mph on a B road feels, sounds, and looks like you're on your way to murder some children. It's as subtle, and appropriate as polishing your assault rifle at the "Remember Columbine" memorial service.
4) Way, way, WAY too big and wide. I don't care how far you can see round a corner siting up there in the clouds, i'm forever having to stop for and behind massive,bloated SUVS that can't fit down normal width country roads. Should have gone to Fat Fighters, sorry.


So, i'm going to suggest the Tesla P90D as the fastest XC road car, because it's

1) fast at relatively normal speeds (ie up to around say 100mph)
2) 4wd total traction
3) very, very quiet
4) very very subtle looking.

As such, i bet i can maintain a higher average speed XC in a Tesla before i get arrested than you can in your noisy, show offy super tankers ;-)

Edited by anonymous-user on Thursday 29th September 23:27

anonymous-user

53 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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RobM77 said:
DonkeyApple said:
So that's a very particular type of hedge covered then. wink
Yes, very specific! hehe If there was a road lined with this specific type of hedge (a hedge that a 911 Turbo driver couldn't see over but a Range Rover could), then your point would be true yes. The fact is, most roads aren't like that because most hedges are clipped at about the cab height of a tractor, probably just because tractors cut them and that's the easiest height to do it at. Sure, you're going to find from time to time that objects are at just the right height for a Range Rover to make better progress than a normal car (for example, the sort of wall typically found around an old country estate), but I really don't think it happens anywhere near often enough to make such a leviathan faster than a normal car on a typical British country lane, let alone a proper performance car. You correctly go on to state that visibility is key to progress, but for anyone other than the driver of an arctic, this statement is mainly concerning visibility around bends, not over the hedges that line them.
I agree, it's except for a few specific circumstances b*ll*eux. The "always stop in the distance you can see" mantra means that if we are talking "safe" XC driving, even a 1.4 basic hatchback can no longer be maxed round any significant the bend. So really all that matters, as we are all limited to the same corner speed is acceleration an braking, meaning it's advantage back to the high power to weight cars.

People talk about scoobies and evos, but compared to say a 918 they are glacial. Imagine a XC race between say a FQ400 and a 918. YOu can let the FQ lead you, just trundle round the bends after them, squirt down the straights to catch up, and on the last straight before the finish line, floor it, breeze past and take the win. Nothing the FQ could do about it, and you'd have had a much safer driver without having to push at all round the corners!