"Peter Grey" wrote in message
nk.net...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

'Should say, "the original as raced dangerously in 1965." As a friend of
mine said, it was the only car he could drive at 90 mph and feel as
close
to
dying as he did in a Formula Atlantic at 175. g

Quarter-elliptic springs and roll oversteer keep life very interesting.


I've a Bugeye and have had a bunch of them over the years. I don't find
them that much of a handful.

It was a very common low-buck racer when I was involved ('67 - '72), and the
consensus was that you gritted your teeth and opened your eyes a little
wider in a Bugeye when you got up around 100...much like racing a Porsche
Speedster.

Roll oversteer occurs when you're in a turn and the outside rear wheel moves
backward, or the inside rear wheel moves forward, effectively steering the
back of the car to the outside of the turn. It's most common on cars with
solid axles and quarter-elliptic springs, such as Bugeye Sprites. They went
to semi-elliptics in later models because the cars were so squirrelly at
high speeds.

One can get a Sprite to oversteer, but what
I'd call roll oversteer was typified by the Spitfire with its swing axles.
The Spit was famous for this. Sure you're not thinking of a Spitfire?

That's a different kind of oversteer. Porsche 356s, VW bugs, early Corvairs,
and swing-axle Spitfires all did about the same thing, for the same reason.

With stock suspension, all of them tucked their rear wheels under in a turn
when you got above a certain threshhold of cornering speed. The outside
wheel would climb up on the sidewall and you'd go into drastic oversteer,
usually spinning out.

There were several fixes for it, and you had to use one of them to race most
of those cars. Decambering the rear end with shorter springs was one. Using
a stiff anti-roll bar would cure the tuck, but it would introduce an
oversteer problem of its own. There also was a strange sort of anti-roll bar
called a "Z-bar" that was used some on Formula Vs. I think it had a
short-lived popularity, but maybe they're still around.

The first car I raced was a John Fitch Corvair GT. It was a swing-axle car
('63) and it had the Fitch rear-suspension treatment, which was 2 deg. of
negative camber and adjustable Koni shocks. It worked pretty well but it
produced a strange phenomenon: when you started to turn right, the car would
make a slight dart to the left, and vice versa. It felt a little like
steering a motorcycle by steering slightly away from the turn to start your
entry.

Anyway, it prevented the tuck, and with radial tires, it made handling
fairly predictable. After a year of driving that I took a Porsche Speedster
around the track and I felt right at home.

BTW, old Spitfires usually were given a *lot* of negative camber, 2-1/2
degrees or so, for road racing.

--
Ed Huntress