Help Adding Ballast

[Glyn84]

I need to add around 25 Kg of ballast to my MR2 race car to bring it up to weight after a winter or removing it front the front and rear, and after reading a number of articles on the net I've ended up more confused than when I started if I'm honest. When I put the ballast back, should I be aiming to balance the car 50/50 left/right as much as possible by putting ballast where the passenger seat would be, or I am better off aiming for 50/50 front/rear weight as best I can?

Or is it a bit more complicated than that

[Sam_68]

You'll never achieve a 50/50 front/rear split with a mid-engined car, nor should you want to... the front-rear roll stiffnesses (ie. spring rates and ARB stiffnesses) will have been carefully chosen by Toyota's engineers to work with the front-rear weight distribution of the standard car. Even if you increase your spring/ARB rates for racing, as a general rule I'd suggest you stick to the same proportional front-rear stiffnesses, unless you want to get into major development/tuning of the handling, so you'll want to maintain roughly the same front-rear weight distribution in order to maintain the same basic balance.

Unless you have a definite handling problem to fix, therefore (and in the absence of better advice from people racers who know the MR2's specific wrinkles), I'd concentrate on maintaining roughly the same front-rear % weight distribution as the standard car (which effectively means fitting it as close as possible to the longitudinal centre of gravity/balance point), but to equalise the side-side balance as far as possible, with the ballast fitted as low down as possible to reduce the height of the centre of gravity.

These basic rules can be over-ridden if you're actually trying to change the handling characteristics in a particular direction, mind you, but they're the best advice I can give if you're simply trying to optimise a set-up that is otherwise fundamentally OK.

[garagewidow]

get some of these inside you and put the weight where it works best,..in the middle of the car.

http://www.pastymuncher.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uplo...

[Glyn84]

Mmmmmm pies.... they sound the tastiest ballast, but there isn't much room to move in an MR2 when you're twig thin like me. A few extra spare tyres and I probably wouldn't fit in!

Cheers for the advice Sam. I know I wasn't going to get near 50/50 front/rear with a mid engined car, but it's a good point about keeping the weight distribution similar to Toyota's setting for a good balance.