I'm no automotive engineer. (These days I'm not really much of an engineer of any kind.) But I had a strange thought last night: how would an F1 car do if it was four-wheel-drive?

Right off the top, I came up with this:

-- It would be less reliable. Every component of a machine has a failure rate, and the more components, the greater the chance that something will fail. However, the increase in the failure rate might not be enough to matter.

-- It would make the car heavier, and thus it would not accelerate as well on straights.

-- It would corner better. If the front wheels are turned and are pulling the car, it's going to be possible to go faster through a turn. That's not so much a question of picking up time, it means the car would corner like softs when it was wearing intermediate tires. So you could get away with fewer pitstops because you spend most of your time on tires which last better.

-- And finally, there's probably a rule against it, or there soon would be. Every time anyone comes up with an interesting feature (like the six-wheel car and the vacuum cleaner car) the spoilsports at F1 outlaw it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:35 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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