Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Too much is never enough!

Or is it just too much?

Where can you use a car at a speed of more than 150 kph or 100 mph?
When is the ability to accelerate 0 to 100 in around 4 seconds actually useful?
When do you actually use more than 250 hp? What the heck does one do with over 1,000 hp?

On most public roads in the known world even speeds of 150 kph are not legal. There are a few exceptions but these are rare. Except on a drag strip or a race track 0 to 100 acceleration times of sub 5 seconds would probably be considered dangerous driving and without all sorts of computerised driver aids would certainly be dangerous for most mere mortals. Turn off the driver aids and hardly anyone could keep control of the car.

Sure, such performance is exciting, exhilarating, and gets the adrenalin pumping, but do we really need it. Surely the real essence of a sports car is the ability to handle well and safely on nice twisty roads rather than rocket speeds at the traffic light GP or on the Motorway/Autobahn /Autostrada? There are plenty of photos and films on the net to show just what happens when the thrill exceeds the skill.

Sports and super car manufacturers seem to be locked in to some sort of willy wagging contest like a bunch of schoolboys trying to demonstrate who has the biggest.

I have a limited budget and limited garage space so another toy is out of the question for me anyway however much I might like the look of some of the recent offerings from some of the noted super sports car manufacturers. Having said that I really can't see the sense of the outright power, speed, and acceleration race which moves such offerings even further out of the reach of many (most?) enthusiasts.

Totally agree. Lots of issues washing around here.

Most people are incapable of driving anything fast because, well, 50% of drivers are below average anyway, and the 50% above are not Lewis Hamilton.

Wealth does not equal skill. One might argue the opposite. Watch Nurburgring crashes on You Tube for confirmation.

Manufacturers do like the numbers though, and there are enough small egos around to make it profitable.

The most fun is with something that can be ragged safely, and the MG Midget, and Classic Mini are two examples of this. In fact a Duratec engined Midget might well be almost perfect in that respect.

It is a very valid point and interesting to see the MX5 score so highly in EVOs car of the year 2024 (joint second), with the Morgan Plus Four also being included and coming ninth out of the ten vehicles present.

I haven't had the chance to drive a 911 S/T, the winner, but the fact that it is a normally aspirated, manual only, 911 - pretty much 'the best of various elements of the breed' distilled into one exceptionally capable vehicle - means I am not surprised it won. That it has 518bhp from a NA, high revving, Flat-Six 4.0 means that whilst not a low bhp, it isn't a supercharged, turbocharged, additional EV engined monster and I'd bet it is enjoyable to drive at non-license losing speeds as a result.

More importantly, that the Morgan Plus Four, Mazda MX5 and Toyota Yaris GR were included in the test was great to see. None are huge bhp vehicles and what the vehicles provide at lower speeds was considered.

I'm in agreement that outright power and crazy bhp is bordering on pointless - I'll take cars that are fun to drive at non-license losing speeds, that provide feedback via the steering wheel, have an analogue approach, corner like they are on rails and put a smile on your face with overall experience rather than simply delivering ludicrous speed.

I made a similar point recently after my pal took me out in his Tesla SUV ... block of flats with a sub 3 second 0-60 time in hooligan mode .... that's racecar fast and I can only assume it's all the electronic nannying keeping them from ending up upside down in a field near you.

The Japanese hit that numbers game right on the head while destroying the British Bike industry ... fostering an obsession with the numbers ..... making 2 stroke 250s as fast as 500 Triumphs (and advertising them that way to gullible teenagers).... kids fell for it hook, line and sinker ... unable to compare bike to bike ... same sort of size and weight, same sort of performance ... but the brits handled better and didn't need to be revved the nuts off to do it ... all that counted were the numbers.

I have wondered if building expensive banzai EVs was also just a marketing ploy .... by rights the ancestral home of the EV is urban/suburban ... only needing modest speed and acceleration to be wonderfully practical in that role .... but with zero charisma, luke warm performance as well would have made them easy prey for ridicule ... and the associated sales difficulty ... by making them Ferrari-killers they made people sit up and take notice ... by the time their excessive performance is legislated away the ice will be broken. (Pun intended).

K

K, I remember race meetings in the seventies when I helped a pal remove the Velo Thruxston 500 single engine from it`s lovely Metisse frame and replace it with the 750 Norton Atlas engine from the road bike he had written off.... All in a bid to get higher up the results table.. The next event we attended at East fortune, was the first time I knew he was wasting his time, as an ex pat American IBM employee, had managed to import a TZ 750....and blew everyone away on the straighter sections, and accelerated out of the bends such that he left some really skilled racers in his exhaust fumes...!

Today my Tesla would e the last car to go, despite my fondness for my old Morgan and all the memories it has created over the years... I need a vehicle to carry out all the mundane day to day aspects of life these days, though having one that can squirt into a space at junctions and roundabouts to merge with traffic comes in very handy at times, as does the occasional squirt out of a tight corner or roundabout on a traffic free road...(-:

I guess I pay a price for the performance of my EV in terms of insurance costs, given it costs more to insure than a 400HP Porsche 991....!!!!

Yeah my Tesla with all it`s toys, trickery and most of all convenience factor for the old man I have become, is no sports car....BUT...?

George ... glad you're getting good use out of your Tesla ... though I would say that a 0-60 of 6 secs and a top end of 120 would do just as well in the 'slip-road GP' 🙂 .... without the environmental impact of 2 tons of batteries . Sooner or later we'll see legislation to curb 1000 bhp cars and 200mph motorcycles ... we need to make sure it's not the old zealots of Just Stop Oil that drive it or it'll be blanket 30 mph limiters and bus for journeys over 2 miles! 🙂

My point with the bikes was that we stopped looking at the bikes themselves, and just looked at the numbers ("my Jap 250 is as fast as your Brit 500! ) ..... when if you looked at a "mid weight bike doing about 100 mph" then the 500 was the much better riding experience.

K

Yep, complete agreement. Modern cars have to be driven on modern roads, and that means either highly-monitored highways where illegal speeds are quickly spotted and dealt with, crowded A roads where high speeds are simply not possible due to the weight of traffic, or quiet B roads where high speeds are equally impossible due to the scenery.

Any car feels the best and challenges the driver most when being driven near its dynamic limit, so to have any fun these days you need a lower-powered smaller car like Dave's Duratec-engined Midget and you need to be taking out on deserted B roads or quieter A, of which there are fortunately plenty in the UK as everyone else seems to be obsessed with getting from A to B on the most direct route possible, clogging up the motorways and trunk roads.

Light, good handling, lower-powered cars are where it's at for me, because that's where the fun can be found in normal everyday driving. Not only are they a good deal more accessible than 300bhp exotica, the huge advantage is that if you get it all wrong you're heading backwards into the hedge at 50mph rather than 90.

When I visit a pal down in Sussex I have a choice: M4/M25/M23 for 2h40min at 70mph, or A346/A272 for 3h30min at 50/60mph. There's no question in my mind which gives the most enjoyment.

The introduction of the Plus Six in 2019 was a perfect demonstration of far too much power in a light car for the amateur "fast" driver. MMC lost a lot so offered some form of driver experience after a lot of them got munched.

The 190horses in my Plus 8 and Heathers Polo GTI are more than enough for road use.

I think it can be more rewarding and challenging, to drive a slower car (with safety in mind) fast taking it to the extremes of its performance and handling envelope than driving a fast car quickly. Where I do find a performance car to be a better option is not the pure 0 to 60 or whatever speeds, but its in gear performance for overtaking, which can just as easily get you into more trouble than it gets you out of.

Its becoming an increasing big willy wiggling contest, but it does have the benefits of bringing the same technology improvement eg brakes and tyres to be distilled to the masses.

True, but this too is a bit of a double-edged sword. Take brakes for example. Very high performance cars needed better brakes, so disc diameters increased so as to dissipate the heat. This needed bigger wheels of course to accommodate them, but they still needed to keep the cars low to the ground so tyre profiles got smaller and smaller. This fashion then got into the mainstream as people thought it made their car look sporty.

Absolutely fine on billiard-smooth racetracks, but out in the real world we have now got cars with 20 inch wheels and stupidly low profile tyres, giving not only a harsh uncomfortable ride on the road but also a greater propensity for puncturing and a lower chance of being able to repair. All for the sake of being able to fit large diameter brake discs which are entirely unnecessary on a road car that rarely exceeds 70mph.

There's no doubt in my mind that an experienced highly skilled driver would be able to get far more out of a high-performance sports car than I ever could, and for them such a car makes much more sense than it would for me. I am concerned, however, that a great many lesser drivers who happen to have a bank account that outweighs their skill end up buying stuff thinking somehow by association that other people will also think that they are a driving god.

The results sadly are all too obvious: as Dave says, watch some YouTube videos from the Nurburgring for evidence.