<private>
God, will someone take the slide rules away from these guys before they hurt
themselves?
KeS
> Eric,
>
> You made some good points. It will require more energy to "spin up" the
> non drive wheels than the drive wheels due to inefficiencies. As you
> said, the flexing of the body won't be significant unless your driving a
> Mustang without subframe connectors.
>
> Additional inefficiencies will come from the deformation of the tires.
> For the sake of this discussion lets consider the drive axle the source
> of the energy, and all 4 tires/wheels are the same weight and size.
> Consider only the portion of energy needed spin the tires/wheels from 0
> to 60 mph, the simple analysis says energy to "spin up" 4 tires/wheels
> will be 4 times the energy to spin up one tire/wheel. I'm sure someone
> can look up an equation for stored energy in a flywheel (tire/wheel).
> The drive wheels are driven directly from the axle so there won't be any
> inefficiencies for the drive wheels. The other wheels will get their
> energy from the drive wheels, thru the inefficiencies of the drive
> tires, and thru the inefficiencies of the non drive tires. The
> associated rolling resistances will manifest itself as heat (lost
> energy) in the tires.
>
> I would now conclude that the lighter wheels should be put on the non
> drive end if all you're interested in is acceleration.
>
> Bob Mosso
>
>
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