If you look in the windscreens you can see he's clearly turning the steering wheel less on the elan and the XM - probably due to higher geared steering. When the rear on the other one started sliding he wasn't able to turn the wheel fast enough to compensate and started to lose control.Kowalski wrote:The impression I got from watching the video was that the driver seemed to be throwing the Granada about a lot more than he was the XM, some of that was because the car was sliding.
I doubt if traction control would have done any good, I don't think any of the 3 cars were reaching their power-on over/understeer limits, I think the middle car was losing control due to poor damping control of the rear suspension which was allowing the rear end to flick over each time the car reversed direction, provoking a fish tale reaction.The XM behaved like a front wheel drive car should, it was docile and understeered but the Granada was a bit more tail happy, being rear wheel drive it slid but could be caught and corrected and the driver didn't manage to spin it. If the Granada had traction control, it may have passed the test at the higher speed but since it didn't its an academic question.
Both the XM in Hydractive Hard mode and the Elan would have had MUCH stiffer damping than the other car. Also notice that when the XM corners the side going down goes down more than the opposite side comes up - the highly asymetric damping rates in the hard mode cause an overall drop in average height during cornering...(on purpose, to stop the rising edge from flicking up too high)
Regards,
Simon