Nah. Weight is the ultimate enemy for fun handling. You can make up for the loss of speed via more power, you can make up for grip and traction via better rubbers, suspension, brakes and various modern electronics. All this plus the additional rigidity of modern cars (you can slap on hard as granite shocks, without snapping the car in half), and you can make a car go round the track faster, but thats not the problem. Modern cars are definitely faster. But going round the track faster is only ever important when you're racing and being serious.
You don't want to go for the fastest times everytime you drive in the same way you don't want to make babies everytime you have sex. Sometimes you just want to have fun.
Weight dents agility, tactility, feedback, the whole Colin Chapman philosophy of being one with the car and the road, basically the fun stuff of driving. It's just physics. When you have more weight to throw around, it just takes more to reign in. And when you build so many layers between the road and the driver you lose tactility. Its isolating the driver from the stuff that's going on.
Evo UK recently did a huge comparo of all the M cars (except the E92 M3 which will come in later) and the E30 M3 still ranks right up there, along with the legendary M1, the venerable E39 M5 and the awesome E46 M3 CSL (light, baby, light). It was rated higher than all the modern monsters like the E60 M5 and M6. The consensus is that you don't need 400bhp and more to have fun. The E30 M3 had 200+bhp. In the truly great driver's cars, you can have fun even when you're not going at breakneck speeds. In most of today's performance cars, you'll have to be way north of breaking the law speed to even feel fast.
You don't want to go for the fastest times everytime you drive in the same way you don't want to make babies everytime you have sex. Sometimes you just want to have fun.
Weight dents agility, tactility, feedback, the whole Colin Chapman philosophy of being one with the car and the road, basically the fun stuff of driving. It's just physics. When you have more weight to throw around, it just takes more to reign in. And when you build so many layers between the road and the driver you lose tactility. Its isolating the driver from the stuff that's going on.
Evo UK recently did a huge comparo of all the M cars (except the E92 M3 which will come in later) and the E30 M3 still ranks right up there, along with the legendary M1, the venerable E39 M5 and the awesome E46 M3 CSL (light, baby, light). It was rated higher than all the modern monsters like the E60 M5 and M6. The consensus is that you don't need 400bhp and more to have fun. The E30 M3 had 200+bhp. In the truly great driver's cars, you can have fun even when you're not going at breakneck speeds. In most of today's performance cars, you'll have to be way north of breaking the law speed to even feel fast.
