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Thread: ND Miata Grip

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    Supporting Member John J's Avatar
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    ND Miata Grip

    The case against grip, as evidenced by the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata
    Super-sticky tires are ruining the real fun of driving, and one car really shows why.
    by Jim Resnick - Sep 22, 2015 8:00am EDT

    Today we are completely and continuously bombarded by numbers—from near and far, in our work and even in our games. But if you deconstruct one particular human-machine interface, numbers mean nothing.
    Supremely high levels of grip from tires on sports cars do no favors for your driving pleasure or the joyful mastery of a challenging, twisty road. In fact, they do quite the opposite. Super-high-grip tires mask mechanical communication. For the non-expert enthusiast driver without an Andretti level of skill, such rubber can often be unforgiving and unapproachable. Super grippy tires can make the ability to tickle the car's natural limit of adhesion out of reach.
    The real shame is that this is the exact point where enthused driving becomes a dance worthy of the effort. A sports car can be as rewarding a partner as Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers, but fit horrendously grippy sneakers, and grace falls flat on its ass. Put simply, tires and suspension engineered for maximum possible grip deliver what they're supposed to, but in inverse proportion to fun. And just to prove that this is not totally out of sync with today's expectations, the poster boy for this notion just underwent a complete redesign that's wholly devoted to improving human-machine communication and moderate grip: the 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata.
    Grip in the form of lateral acceleration and breakaway character is the prime offender in the modern crimes against driving fun, and it's typically measured by the force of gravity in a lateral plane. In this metric, a car that can most quickly negotiate a 100-, 200- or 300-foot (30/60/90m) diameter skidpad in steady-state cornering in the least amount of time against others posts the highest grip. Here's the formula: lateral g = (2.0 x pi)2 x (radius ÷ lap time).
    Of course, grip on a skidpad proves only one thing: that tires stick well and the suspension keeps them mostly upright. That's not where the joy or art of driving live, however. Better grip may mean negotiating a steady corner faster, but if you focus only on grip in the chassis engineering phase, the enjoyment of driving plummets. The breakaway character of the car's and tires' cornering ability at maximum adhesion becomes unforgiving and hard to read for many drivers.
    Many disparate forces act on car manufacturers as they develop new model lines and model variants. Principal among them are tangible differentiators against competition. Winning the hearts and minds of sporty car fans often relies on a game of numbers brewed in a cauldron of 0-60 mph times, quarter-mile figures, maximum grip numbers, lap times, and nutso horsepower. Living by those stats adds up to one-upmanship that eventually leads down a rabbit hole of irrelevance. Mix all those ingredients together and you get an automotive Dolph Lundgren—great on paper but lacking any real charm in person. To put it another way, when is the last time you drove a spec table? I've tested well over 1,000 cars, and I can honestly answer this question with "never."
    The Miata proves there's a better recipe. Mix in the touchy-feely feedback of communicative steering, light weight, equal fore-aft weight balance, and a low polar moment of inertia. Cook up a suspension absorbent enough to keep tires planted and talking to the driver as continuously as possible. Toss in seats that tell the pilot what's happening at the chassis level. Stir. You'll have the most pleasing automotive meal you've ever eaten rather than the numbers-driven bowl of twigs and bark served up by the max-power, max-grip, brick suspension car kitchen. And here’s the art part: you can’t simply wave a magic wand and have all these elements come to life in metal and rubber. It takes heady fortitude and philosophical strength of principles (human-machine communication) to find the sweet spot. This is where things usually fall down, but the new Miata is one car that stands tall in this equilibrium. (And for those keeping track, Mazda has done this for more than two decades.)
    It's worth noting there are a few other holdouts besides the Miata today. Mini Coopers offer driving fun without much homework. Ford's brilliant Fiesta ST and Focus ST and the Subaru/Scion BRZ/FR-S twins are all happy road puppies. And the brilliant new Ford Mustang redefines what a brawny muscle car can feel like. But inspired by classic British sports cars, the Miata's sole purpose since 1990 has been satisfying feedback, lightweight agility, and most of all, driving fun. This year's edition has deconstructed sports car philosophy to these most bare and best necessities, delivering what you want as well or better than every previous iteration. It qualifies as a minor miracle in today's car-building climate, where the push for autonomous driving capabilities rages at the periphery.
    The origin of grip lust
    To understand today's excessive fascination with grip, it helps to recall a time when the drivers were fat and the tires were skinny. Go back 60 years or so and British roadsters with modest power and meager tire grip awoke a sleeping American sports car market. Ultimate cornering grip was quite low, and this was as much a function of vehicle weight (where lighter meant grippier) as it was keeping tire treads in the same plane as the road surface (which was difficult due to downright aggro suspension technology and geometry).
    As the automotive world returned from war materiel to car production in the late 1940s, most cars on the American road used rudimentary chassis bits: drum brakes all around, live rear axles on leaf springs (which did double duty as both springing and locating devices), high-sidewall tires with highly flexible bias-ply construction, and suspension generally focused on delivering whipped cream ride quality. Steering and handling were things you simply endured. On a good day, the average car of the late 1940s could generate perhaps 0.4 or 0.5 gs of cornering force. Sports cars of the era weighed about half that of an American sedan and required proactive, repeated maintenance. Still, these old sports cars offered completely approachable dynamics and more driving fun and adventure than your own private pony, much like the modern Miata. (Today, sedans can achieve twice that amount of grip, return twice the fuel economy, release negligible emissions, and avoid ejecting you in a crash.)
    But time is nature's engineer. Technical developments and growth in grip and performance in general has become the game rather than a jaunty, kerchief-flowing ride through the countryside. Performance figures improved, grip escalated, and bench racing—car nerds arguing over rival models' speed—ascended. Nowadays we've somehow gone wrong and fallen in love with loveless numbers. We’ve strayed from what binds us—enjoying and perhaps conquering challenging roads—to worshipping at the altar of numbers that provide little automotive enlightenment.
    Car talk: The language behind the metal
    Despite the obsession with numbers, cars remain devices of analog communication. For the purpose of perceiving and communicating cornering force to the driver, any vehicle continues to deliver information today in several ways, and Miatas have always excelled in these areas:
    · Body roll: A primary, fundamental way to inform the driver about cornering and therefore a progressive indicator of grip. However, on low-friction surfaces (water or wet leaves, sand, pebbles, etc.), tires lose grip with far less body roll than the driver might anticipate if conditions were dry.
    · Yaw: The car's rotation or rate of change in rotation relative to the change in actual direction. An oversteering car generates yaw, but at any one moment during that slide, not necessarily a change in direction.
    · Steering effort and weight: As cornering forces build, steering should gain weight and require more effort. As the limits of adhesion approach and begin to fall off, steering should lighten, giving the first and primary indication to the driver that grip is diminishing and a change in driving approach should be considered.
    · Tire noise: A singing tire is a happy tire. A screeching tire is not. Make your tires sing.
    · The seat (and therefore, your butt): Great drivers develop very sensitive gluteus maximi. Great-driving cars speak to those glutei before stuff gets ugly.
    · Vision: This actually comes last in this list. When driving aggressively, vision must feed your planning for the immediate future, not your present tense. Once a skid begins, you obviously see it, but by that time, it's likely too late to prevent it.
    These characters are what create the pleasure, directness, and responsiveness that a proper sports car provides its driver. The joy comes in the mother tongue of feel, tactility, and pure communication. A car speaks to you through steering feedback and in the way it moves about on the road—the anti-numbers.
    While genuine numbers absolutely play the central role in real racing, how many enthusiasts who participate in open track days actually compete via lap times? It's a minority. If you've ever done a lap with a pro, you certainly remember speed, but memory is relative. You keep coming back when you master it, not when you crash because of it.
    In fact, an obsession with numbers and grip has occasionally resulted in a serious affront to the joy and pleasure of driving. The religion of grip gave us the 1984 Z51 Corvette, a car that could achieve a remarkable, world-beating 0.90 g cornering force on a skidpad. This figure was widely accepted as a first by a street car. But actually living with that Corvette on anything but glass-smooth tarmac was a teeth-gnashing, kidney-punching, experience similar to nine rounds with Roberto Duran. Chevrolet quickly rethought the car's suspension tuning.
    Do not worship the Number Gods
    Vintage sports cars and the Miata both pay no worship to the grip Gods. They rely solely on feeling, balance, sensitivity, and faithfully reporting all of the above to the driver—all the elements that make up the touchy-feely stuff of psychiatry. This is sports car driving as road therapy, and the greatest accomplishment is a sporty car oozing this intangible stuff from its pores. As humans, we fundamentally require more than the clinical presentation of facts and figures. That's why Shakespeare, Mozart, The Clash, and Gabriel García Márquez were put on Earth—we crave art. Within the sports car world, art is participatory. It’s in the driving, and we all have varying levels of artistry in us. But if we can't master the tools, little art or pleasure ensues.
    "Everybody's missing the point on what a performance car is supposed to be," Mazda's Dave Coleman, an engineer helping to refine Miata's sports car ethic, told Ars. "This all goes back decades to when car magazines began looking for ways in the mid-'60s to evaluate cars on a more objective level rather than the fairly common flowery pablum that car companies passed off in their communications with journalists of the time."
    Objective performance benchmarks became—and remain—more important tools to use when dissecting a car in print. After the 0-60 mph test was born, lateral acceleration figures emerged, expressed in g-force, with 1 g being the force of gravity. The first cheater cars—cars built off line by the manufacturers or by subcontractors to excel in performance tests—were sent to magazines. Specially built engines with larger camshaft profiles and higher compression, higher spring rates, stiffer shocks, big anti-roll bars where slim ones or none should have resided, and beefy tires that were not routinely available on a showroom-stock car all improved those cars' performance numbers. It quickly became a joke. Today, cheater cars don't really exist anymore because the workable latitude a manufacturer might have to markedly improve performance and keep it street-legal is so slim.
    Yet the numbers and grip still rule in many ways, and that's ironic. If most people witnessed from the passenger seat what it takes to launch a car hard to post the fastest possible 0-60 mph time, especially from powerful all-wheel-drive cars, they'd cringe at the abuse.
    "Still, the whole industry contorts itself around the numbers," Coleman told Ars. "The pressure to get great numbers comes from sales, from marketing, from many areas of [the OEMs]. The unignorable fact is that with sports cars, performance numbers are still the high-value currency. Good numbers equals better."
    The Miata boasts a long history of approaching things in a different way, Coleman said. For 25 years, Mazda has adhered to the guiding principle of keeping its car approachable at the limit of grip and, more importantly, beyond it. "In engineering the Miata, we've never had an objective performance target," he said. "We never measure skidpad performance or lap times. All our parameters are subjective: How does it feel? Are the prevailing handling and breakaway characteristics approachable and smooth for the driver? Is the steering linear?"
    In fact, one important bogey for Coleman and the other chassis engineers was to make the car feel like all its body movements are centered on the driver. The car's yaw center—an imaginary pole stuck through the car as viewed from above, around which it turns when steered—is located right on the driver. The car dives (or pitches) under hard braking at a central point right around the driver. The same is true of the car's body roll center. All of these dynamic pivot points are very close to—or go through—the driver to impart the greatest sense of control and confidence in these transitional moments of enthused driving.
    Since the Miata's beginning, it has exhibited no shortage of body roll during hard cornering, and this is a conscious effort, Coleman said. By tuning a car for extremely high-roll stiffness—where it's difficult to notice cornering speed due to lack of body roll—you mask one channel of communication to the driver. Nobody wants to fly blind by masking roll; you're cutting off tangible communication. Instead, it comes down to understanding and predicting what's going to happen as cornering forces build to their breaking point and beyond.

    The MX-5 Miata has experienced plenty of sales success (over one million served and delivered for street use), but it also happens to be the most popular car to race on a road course. More Miatas dice it up on racetracks on any given weekend than any other car because their directness, responsiveness, and simplicity make for the basis of a great race car. So to really appreciate this car's defiance in the face of grip obsession, we went to California’s Willow Springs Raceway to drive all four generations of Miata racecars.
    Each generation of Miata racer (known to Miata fanboys as “NA” through “ND” from oldest to 2016) shows a family resemblance in on-track behavior, despite all being in different stages of freshness. Possibly because the new 2016 is simply new, it feels the fittest, even though its spring rates are not finalized. Also surprisingly, this is the first Miata developed as a turn-key package rather than having racing parts sold as a kit fitted by a professional shop or an amateur club racer.
    Out on the track, the 2016 car is also the quietest, which masks its immediate throttle response and power versus the others with louder racing exhaust systems. And even though the 2016 car wears stickier racing tires, it retains the chuckability on corner entry and mid-corner corrections without much protest. Does it lose anything in approachability or communication during the translation to racetrack use? In our experience, no—nothing a good, perceptive driver can’t compensate for.
    Going back chronologically, the NC-generation Miata racer on hand has been ridden hardest and put away wettest; it boasts more race miles than any of the others. And yet it feels almost as fresh as the new car. Despite it being the biggest among all four generations, it is even more tossable than the new 2016 ND car. If you trail-brake the NC car into corners with stupid abandon, inducing oversteer on corner entry, it swallows the stupidity like a patient parent of a misbehaving child. With what feels like the least-restrictive roll cage, it also yields the most room for comfort, requiring the least amount of contortioning.
    The second-generation NB Miata is owned and still raced by Ken Saward of Mazda Design. Far less powerful and not as grippy as the newer generations, this NB Miata provides good communication through steering, brakes, throttle, and seat and is also the loudest little bee in the group.
    Lastly, Mazda PR chief Jeremy Barnes brought his own first-generation NA car to Willow fresh from the paint shop. As the lightest, smallest, and least powerful, the NA car also proves the most tolerant of horrendous abuse mid-corner, dancing predictably at will on a trailing brake, a stabbed throttle, a missed apex, or spots of gravel. I get the sense that it has some sort of spiritual stability control; I tried to induce lurid slides but none came. In addition, its phenomenal brakes can be modulated to miniscule increments of pedal pressure.
    The afternoon only enforces what seemed evident all along: simple is sometimes better. Am I a Luddite for feeling this way? No. I embrace all the engineering and technology that allows cars to go without traditional service for 20,000 or 30,000 miles and to achieve 40+ miles per gallon while also delivering acceleration that would thoroughly embarrass a Jaguar of the '50s. (And after all, "Technica" is the surname of the site you're reading.) We've progressed, and thank goodness for that.
    But we've also undoubtedly lost something in the deal. The true pleasure of driving a communicative, approachable sports car can suffer from the endless march of technology, science, and most of all, high grip. Granted, during a race, the only priorities are fast lap times and how to improve them by mere tenths or hundredths of a second. But on the regal back road where most sports car drivers get their jollies, the tactile always trumps the technical. And today, sadly, sky-high grip always gets in the way.
    http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/...da-mx-5-miata/

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    tsingson (09-23-2015)

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    5,000 rpm - there be torque here! Greasemonkey2000's Avatar
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    I read this on another forum and I honestly don't get the anti grip/less is more crowd.

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    tsingson (09-23-2015)

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    4,000 rpm - entering the fun zone wannafbody's Avatar
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    Well, chasing that last amount of grip on the track is an expensive proposition which can lead to hacking up a clean car, at least for NA's. The NB can fit wider offset wheels. And Hoosiers are like crack for the grip crowd. That's an expensive high.

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    tsingson (09-23-2015)

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    5,000 rpm - there be torque here! Greasemonkey2000's Avatar
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    There are always pros and cons but that's why each individual needs to figure out their budget/goals/needs/wants and to properly research and get feedback on parts to see what they are getting into.

    Investing in my Fat Cat Motorsports 2040 coilovers(it was almost xidas but Shaikh's pre sale customer service won me over and he still continues to impress me) was definitely one of the best decisions i made but of course sway bars (RB 1.125"F, stock rear) and tires (225 RS3'S) factored into the equation. Still love and on my second set of Hankook Ventus RS-3's. I love grip....guess im weird and not a purist.

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    HarryB (09-23-2015)

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    Supporting Member fwdtamiya's Avatar
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    I do prefer my DZ101s for pleasure and NT01s for lap times. It's just easier to kick out the rear around town (not even sure I could spin the NT01s) and enter corners right on the limit, they're much slower but much pleasurable to drive on. I wouldn't say one is better than the other for everyone, drive on what makes you happy.

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    Grip Driver (09-23-2015)

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    Supporting Member Grip Driver's Avatar
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    agreed, I prefer my small 14' Azenis for everyday use. I can slide the car around with relative ease which makes for a more entertaining drive. I save the 225's for the auto-x course.

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