You cannot put power down and corner all at the same time. Tires can only do so much, and with a given amount of power to put down, a RWD car will always be able to exit faster than an equivalent FWD car, which will simply run out of traction earlier. If a tire has 100% to give, it can do 100% cornering in a RWD car, but in a FWD car it will have to use some percentage of that traction to accelerate, meaning it cannot coerner as hard.
What because the front wheels are the only ones involved in cornering??? :?
The rear wheels also have to produce forces that keep the car going round the corner. The reason why fwd cars have problems putting the power down is because under acceleration the weight goes to the back, thereby reducing the vertical load on the front wheels. Try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_forces
Go to a racetrack where you can really drop the hammer and you will always find yourself running slower in the FWD machine. If you are getting power on oversteer, you just have a poorly set up car. There's no excuse for a FWD car to oversteer on the exit of a corner if it is properly set up and not pitched in hard (which will be slower, btw).
I was at a trackday on the Salzburgring 2 weeks ago, and there were two bmw E30s that were slightly more powerful than my mini, but so much slower in and out of the corners that they kept getting in my way in a really annoying manner... this had nothing to do with me being a better or more experienced driver, but with the fact that the handling of my car was much less critical in the two key areas of the track, because properly set up fwd cars are simply a lot easier to drive. A fwd car won?t suddenly kick out the back when you screw up downshifting/rev-matching in the braking zone, it also won?t kick out the back if you?re timing of putting the power back on was too optimistic, and when it does decide to oversteer you just press the gas all the way and steer to regain control.
Proper, maybe, but certainly not "excellent." No car that's FWD can be termed excellent since you cannot throttle steer it if need be. If you want to call that "excellent" then you need another term that's better than excellent for RWD cars.
are you kidding me? driving properly fast around a racetrack isn?t about throttle steering and driving round corners sideways, it?s about reaching the limits of the amount of grip that each of your tires can produce, in order to carry as much speed as possible around the corner. If the back is sliding and the front isn?t, then you?re only using half of the available maximum grip.
RWD doesn?t really become superior to FWD until you?ve reached somewhere between 200 and 300 horsepower, depending on conditions, tires, etc.... Have you ever watched a wtcc race? These cars are just around that borderline of power output, yet strangely the only place where the RWD cars are significantly superior to their FWD rivals is the standing start (think axle load transfers, and the circle of forces mentioned above)
Of course RWD is the better option if you have a professional driver and you?re building a purebred racecar, and don?t take this personal, but saying that FWD cars are useless for performance driving is just plain ignorant.
Seeing as how Ford Prefect's avatar is a picture of him driving his Mini on the N?rburgring
that?s the Salzburgring
there are no decent pictures of my car on the Nordschleife, but I?m hoping that some people with proper cameras will be present on the 20th of May @ the ring