@quasar this

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note: that steering behaviour i described is called snap-oversteer and its fairly common in all mid and rear-engined cars and while something to be aware of and ideally practice recovering from, wasn’t that severe with the first generation

the second generation, on the other hand, was extremely notorious for it and is frequently used to demonstrate snap-oversteer because they were just that prone to it (though they did incrementally improved on that with just about every model-year and they were fairly safe by 1995)

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i think yall are overdue for this

this is the toyota mr2 (specifically the first generation) and it is my favorite car

basically, in the 70s someone at toyota went “well, a lot of our cars are pretty popular as light, efficient daily drivers, but not really something you drive for fun. i think we should fix that”

now, they quickly concluded that they didnt want a fuel guzzler so raw performance wasnt really in the cards, meaning they would have to focus on handling so they started pondering how to accomplish that and came to a few conclusions:

• the car should be rear-wheel-drive (not any more practical but much more fun)
• the engine should be between the wheels rather than out front to ensure the center of gravity is between them as well

now at first glance this sounds quite a bit different to their usual transverse (engine is facing sideways) front-mount and front-wheel-drive cars… until they realised “no its not we can do literally the same thing but behind the driver”

after a lot of prototypes and testing on race tracks including getting the personal input of former f1 driver dan gurney, they felt that it was mature enough to show off to the public and presented it as the SV-3 concept car at the 1983 tokyo motor show with a market date of “next year”, which they met

now history aside, what this means is its a light, compact rwd car with a great weight balance and handling that fully takes advantage of that

…just one problem, due to momentum, that weight balance shifts forward when breaking, and due to the car’s very small size the center of gravity can actually end up in front of the wheels on a hard break.

that is something a mid engined car is obviously not designed around meaning that center of gravity has now become your pivot point, good luck

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