Porsche thinks that fitting a family of 4 into a high-end sports car makes it worth it. As a result, they've made a contribution to motoring that has become iconic, and arguably got the WV group through some tough times.
Yes, the profitability of a sports car company may have helped Volkswagen stay afloat while they tried to sell volume econo-boxes. Pretty amazing. But nowadays that's not as much of a focus, because they make four-door sedans and giant shopping trolleys like the Macan to feed the family market.
Porsche can make a 40/60 (38/62) car handle well, has any made the opposite happen? 60/40 or at least 55/45?
I'd imagine that's most FR cars!
Back when I was the engineer for the World Challenge series we had Volvo S60s running competitively in GT, they were around 60/40. Also all wheel drive, with equally sized front and rear tires. Raced against Vipers and Corvettes around 50/50, and Porsches that were at 42/58, all with wider rears than fronts. If you want to really balance cars you need to run full course lap simulations. It turns out you can also get pretty close to the right answer by just calculating (front axle weight/front tire width) and (rear axle weight/rear tire width) and keeping those ratios the same for all the cars, at least if you are just comparing a field of all rear drive or all front drive cars.
On the street car front, I think the Nissan GT-R is right around 55/45.
In short, I would say yes, 50/50 weight distribution being described as 'ideal' is just a marketing thing, it sounds like a nice number and it's probably pretty good for a front engine, rear drive production sports car for street use.
In reality there is no ideal weight distribution, it's one variable of many that contribute to a car's overall performance. Even if you are in a situation where you are pretty much only changing weight distribution, like you have a car, you are road racing it, and you are required to add some ballast (by, say, the series engineer!) and have to decide where to put it, the ideal spot will depend even on what track you are racing on. In the World Challenge series we went to one course with several unusually tight corners and the Porsches ended up being faster there because the track favored a rear weight bias.
Last edited by retsmah; July 13th, 2017 at 08:42 PM.
In that case it might be more realistic to say that the ideal grip bias is 50/50. But then again it probably isn't, but it would be more important than just weight dist.
Grip bias would then be the sum of:
Weight
Tyre size
Engine location
Aero and downforce
Suspension geometry
Suspension stiffness
Chassis flex
...across both ends of the car.
Etcetera, etcetera.
I didn't know that either. Retsmah sure has had a super interesting career!