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that manufacturers just know that it's not a place to spend money in car design/production. An LSD does cost quite a bit more to produce than a conventional open diff, and it is totally lost on most (90 something %) of the buying population... if you want a competitive FWD (or indeed RWD) car on the track, and LSD is a must. Nissan has been including them on Sentra SE-R's for aeons, but the Europeans have generally excluded them. The make a huge difference at the limit. I believe most BMWs come with a mild (25% locked) diff, which people like Korman frequently rebuild to 40% locking for aggressive drivers/mild track use. Full racing will go even further. The more locked your diff is, the more difficult steering becomes, but getting the power down through and out of corners is easier, and overall faster. Very often, LSDs add an unpleasantness (related to steering bahavior) to driving, as Abbott note on their site, but this is generally with higher proportions of 'lock'. A 100% locked diff will not allow you to change direction. Anybody who has experience of driving tractors (probably not too many out here!), will be aware of using the differential lock to get out of sticky situations. This feature temporarily converts the diff to a 100% locked setup, and will amaze you at what it can get you out of, as long as you have space to travel in a straight line. Several years ago (about 10) when Timo Salonen and Kenneth Eriksson drove for Mitsubishi Ralliart, in the days of the Galant VR-4's factory rally career, they developed a plate type diff, which was more locked than the open type diff they had used earlier. Salonen had real difficulty in adapting to the plate type diff, because he found it very unpleasant. Eventually, he found it faster in back to back tests, and accepted one on his car, but he never liked it as much to drive as the earlier type, even though it was faster. Before somebody thinks he was a woosie, this was somebody who won the World Championship in a 500 bhp Peugeot in the crazy Group B days. He did this while being a good 50 lbs overweight and chain-smoking. He was even known to light up on some of the longer (20+ miles) that were part of rallying in those days. I presume you could order a 205 T16 with a smoking or non-smoking package... I don't exactly know where I'm going with this, but I guess my point is that even great drivers can find LSDs unpleasant, and a milder (say 25% locked) diff, such as Abbott's is probably better for most of us.
For more check out Korman's site http://www.korman.com or Quaife, http://www.quaife.co.uk the leading producer of aftermarket LSD's worldwide. There was an article about them in some british magazine recently, I can't remember which one. The article was more about the business than the engineering, but still interesting. SAAB is one of the manufacturer's whose cars Quaife makes diffs for, though they are hardly cheap.
posted by 209.227.178...
, Mon, 11 Mar 2002 10:50:31
, Mon, 11 Mar 2002 00:18:08
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