Perfect Driving Position
-
https://www.motortrend.com/news/what-is-perfect-driving-position/
If you sit lower, you lower the center of gravity of the car, rendering "more sporty," is the claim. However, you also reduce forward visibility. A lot:
As a for-instance, let's compare the center of gravity improvement from sitting lower versus its cost in compromised outward vision. To sample this, I placed that same 5-foot-9 male mannequin in our long-term Mazda 3, which I happen to be driving. After positioning him, the driver's seat could be vertically adjusted by 2.5 inches.
Our Mazda 3—a front-drive, six-speed manual version—weighs 3,027 pounds. The weight of our average guy is 180 pounds, or 5.6 percent of the car-plus-driver total. So in this case, dropping the seat from its highest position to its lowest lowers the Mazda 3's CG by 0.14 inch—a little more than one-eighth of an inch. Separate your thumb and forefinger by the thickness of two SD cards (actually, less than that). This is irrelevant for a road car; your effort's much better spent adjusting your tire pressures. For a racing car, though, nothing's irrelevant. In 1986, Gordon Murray took supine-ness to a new low with his Brabham BT55 Formula 1 car, which, for mainly aerodynamic reasons, laid its drivers as close as they've even been to a luge driver blurring down the St. Moritz ice. The drivers complained of sore necks.
Now how about the flip side—the loss of outward vision from lowering the Mazda 3's seat by that 2.5 inches? Doing so pushes away the closest thing you can see on the ground by 5.2 feet (from 11.9 to 17.1 feet). Said another way, it lengthens your forward blind spot by 44 percent. For a road car, lowering your seat might be justifiable for nebulous "sensing the car" reasons, but not for lowering CG.
-
https://www.motortrend.com/news/what-is-perfect-driving-position/
If you sit lower, you lower the center of gravity of the car, rendering "more sporty," is the claim. However, you also reduce forward visibility. A lot:
As a for-instance, let's compare the center of gravity improvement from sitting lower versus its cost in compromised outward vision. To sample this, I placed that same 5-foot-9 male mannequin in our long-term Mazda 3, which I happen to be driving. After positioning him, the driver's seat could be vertically adjusted by 2.5 inches.
Our Mazda 3—a front-drive, six-speed manual version—weighs 3,027 pounds. The weight of our average guy is 180 pounds, or 5.6 percent of the car-plus-driver total. So in this case, dropping the seat from its highest position to its lowest lowers the Mazda 3's CG by 0.14 inch—a little more than one-eighth of an inch. Separate your thumb and forefinger by the thickness of two SD cards (actually, less than that). This is irrelevant for a road car; your effort's much better spent adjusting your tire pressures. For a racing car, though, nothing's irrelevant. In 1986, Gordon Murray took supine-ness to a new low with his Brabham BT55 Formula 1 car, which, for mainly aerodynamic reasons, laid its drivers as close as they've even been to a luge driver blurring down the St. Moritz ice. The drivers complained of sore necks.
Now how about the flip side—the loss of outward vision from lowering the Mazda 3's seat by that 2.5 inches? Doing so pushes away the closest thing you can see on the ground by 5.2 feet (from 11.9 to 17.1 feet). Said another way, it lengthens your forward blind spot by 44 percent. For a road car, lowering your seat might be justifiable for nebulous "sensing the car" reasons, but not for lowering CG.
-
@george-k said in Perfect Driving Position:
If you sit lower, you lower the center of gravity of the car, rendering "more sporty," is the claim.
I would have said that claim is absurd on its face.
@jon-nyc said in Perfect Driving Position:
I would have said that claim is absurd on its face.
Yeah, in the article they do the math. 2nd paragraph above. Lowering the seat by about 2 inches lowers the CG of the car by about ⅛ of an inch.
-
If people are willing to believe that spoilers on the back of their car will make a difference at 50mph, they'll believe anything.
At 200mph, with a Formula 1 car weighing 1600 lbs, small changes are a lot more important. Typically, you see the laptimes increase each lap as they burn off fuel. Visibility in an F1 car is pretty awful.
