That simpler cars are better cars is an age-old assertion, but why is it that less so often ends up seeming like more?
I want to talk about simplicity in cars. Earlier this month I spent a day tooling around the verdant and soggy South Downs in the new Audi R8 RWS, as well as the Porsche 911 GT3 we were comparing it to. The in-depth results of that will be published soon, though you probably won't need to gaze too intently at the tea leaves in the bottom of your cup to predict the outcome.
Whether or not it came out on top of the GT3, however, the RWS certainly did enough to convince me it's the highlight of the R8 range. Why? Because without a clever four-wheel drive system that shunts torque here and there, and without dynamic steering that changes its weight and ratio depending on, I dunno, the phases of the moon or whatever, and without adaptive dampers and the baffling second-tier Performance driving mode that you find on certain R8s, Audi's mid-engined supercar becomes a sweeter and more enjoyable machine. It's the model I would choose if it were my money, which, I can assure you, it's very unlikely to be any time soon.
For much the same reason I could see myself choosing the new
Alpine A110 over a
Porsche 718 Cayman. I adore the Alpine's simplicity and, perhaps more pertinently, its inherent rightness. Its engine is in the right place, it drives the right wheels, it's the right size and weight and in its double wishbone chassis it has the right suspension layout. With all of that working for it, the A110 just doesn't need any of those extremely trick but spectacularly tedious new technologies that we're seeing throughout the performance car world these days. The little French sports car is better for being simple.
Those new gadgets - active anti-roll bars, adaptive dampers, three-chamber air springs, active torque vectoring and heaven knows what else - have all been developed in order to address inherent wrongnesses. I can see their benefit on very tall and heavy cars, because they're absolutely necessary. The new Porsche Cayenne Turbo, for instance, is a better car for having a toolkit so stuffed full of technology that Tony Stark could use it to bodge-engineer a respectable moonshot.
But on a car that's low to the ground, well-balanced and not particularly heavy? It's all unnecessary complication. I have no doubt that, say, the
Honda NSX is faster and more agile for being as heavily laden with computing power as it is. It isn't raw speed down a road or even the ability to turn on a sixpence that makes a car exciting to drive, though. It's the tactility of the steering, it's the power delivery and the soundtrack, it's that wonderful sense of being suspended perfectly between the two axles just as you pass the apex and - how about this for a throwback? - it's having to change gear yourself that really counts. Here's a handy litmus test: if you can only illustrate the advantage of some whizzy gizmo on a bar chart and not with a heart rate monitor, get rid.
I would like to see sports car manufacturers switch their focus to simplicity and inherent rightness, rather than belligerently ploughing ahead with those corrupting new technologies, just as Audi and Alpine have done (manual transmissions notwithstanding). Get the basics right and keep it simple, stupid.
