If you've followed this blog, you'd know I started racing last year. I was fortunate enough to be involved with one of the best race team in the region - Vantage Motorsports (link: The Ram's Eye Goes Racing! ). This year, my good friend John Drysdale, also fulfilled his dream of wheel to wheel to racing. That said, his start was much more dramatic than mine in the (excellent) IT-B '95 GTI race car. In his words: " How does one become a race car driver? Maybe more importantly, what makes someone a good race car driver? Maybe I have the odds stacked against me in this game called racing. I started on track with true tarmac and rubber when I was 32. To my benefit, I was imprinted, like a duckling, with cars from a very young age. My dads stacks of Road and Track, and Car and Driver, made an early impression. When I was seven years old I was drawing air cooled Porsche 911's (and in 2014, I got one). In the early 90's I was playing "Need for Speed...
I'm finishing up a comparison post (link to introduction: Intro: Focus RS vs Golf R vs WRX STI vs Evo X ) and, throughout the post, I realized that I have to go off topic a lot to talk about how each type of differential changes the way the car drives. As a result, I thought I'd write a separate post to go into more detail before I post the comparison to keep it more focused on the cars and avoid veering off topic too much. By saying "Limited Slip Differentials" in the title, I am including torque vectoring diffs because, although current conventional terminology treats them differently, a torque vectoring differential is, in essence, a very sophisticated limited slip diff (LSD) that can be manipulated to actively help the car handle better. And while none of the cars in the comparison use open (without help from the brakes) or non-gear mechanical LSD’s, I’ll briefly discuss them so that the post is more inclusive. I’ll only focus on using power to help the...