Corvair Attributes Re: <VV> Vega

[Padgett]

>>E.g., current cars are NOW bragging about having fully independent 
>>suspensions in the rear.  What took them so long?
>>        Frank "the more things change....." Burkhard

Cost. Unless the engine is at the drive end, a live rear axle is cheap. 
Ever notice that FWD cars usually have beam axle rears ? Now my 88 Reatta 
has 4 wheel disks and IRS but no-one cares. Is another marketting ploy,

For racing it is important to have IRS because it is hard to decamber a 
live axle (actually Herb Adams did but had to cut and weld the axle to do it).

  Engineering wise it makes a lot of sense for a street car to have disks 
in the front and drums in the rear, the parking brake is much easier to 
engineer for one. But what the marketeers demand, they get. In the 60s and 
70s the games they played with HP ratings is absurd and sometimes they even 
played them with displacements (e.g. the increase in displacement from 140 
cid to 145 cid in 1961. Why ? Well the Falcon had a 144. Make sense now ?).

Padgett

Padgett