[English] BBC TopGear - 207 Superleggera
刚刚好买了这一期的TopGear中文版本杂志，发现这篇文章不错。可惜网上没有中文版本，只有英文版本，大家先将就看。
后面我另外开一个帖子谈谈轻量化和配重的。
How fat is your car?
The Peugeot 207 GTI might be hot, but it's not hot enough. Why? Because it's a fatso. So we at TopGear decided to ‘add lightness'...
Words: Sam Philip
Photography: Jamie Lipman
This was meant to be a straightforward test. Take a notoriously chubby hot hatch for a lap of the TopGear test track, rip out all the unnecessary weight, lap it again, crow about how much quicker it went the second time and make a sweeping generalisation about how all modern cars are far too fat and wasn't it better when your Austin Allegro tipped the scales at seven kilos and...
Because this is TopGear, things didn’t quite work out like that. Firstly, just before we pitched up at the TG test track on a cold, grey winter morning, rain occurred. A lot of rain. We arrive at Dunsfold to find the track entirely under water, Beluga whales gambolling gracefully through Hammerhead, and a man with a wooden leg and a West Country accent claiming Gambon in the name of Kernow. In the parlance of the TG Lap Time Board it is VW. Very Wetness is our first problem.
Our second problem is the Stig. Or, rather, lack thereof. Our tame racing driver is nowhere to be found. Maybe our choice of car simply hasn't triggered his radar: yes, the Peugeot 207 GTI is, technically, a hot hatch, but it's not a very Stiggish hot hatch. Too wallowy, too soft, too... fat. Not that the 207 GTI is in any way unique for being a bit of a porker. It's indicative of a general trend towards portliness, but thanks to its nimble ancestor the 205 GTI, the weight gain here seems more heinous than it does in its many blubby rivals. According to official figures, the old 205 GTI tips the scales at 900kg with a power-to-weight ratio of 149bhp/tonne. The 207 GTI is just over 1,300kg with a power-to-weight ratio of 133bhp/tonne. Oh dear. This is why we've chosen the 207 as the guinea pig for our quickfire diet strategy.
In the absence of Dr Stiggian McKeith, and in order to best accentuate the merits of weight loss, we set about converting the TopGear Power Lap Test Track into the Patented TopGear Handling Circuit through the highly technical addition of a dozen cones scattered at strategic intervals.
As we drop the final cone into place, he appears, stalking out from behind a Nissen hut with a half a dozen stray cats in tow. If the Stig did expressions, this would be one of disdain. He eyes the 207, parked up on the start line, for a few seconds. Satisfied that it is, at least, a car, he slides into the driver's seat, guns the throttle and just... goes. Cats scatter. Blasting along the sopping track, he crunches the brakes into the first chicane and the hazard warnings flash on.
He exits the chicane on three wheels, the 207 scrabbling for grip as it splashes up the main straight. Using every inch of the track, and a little of the grass too, Stig is up for this one. His first lap is clocked at 1:47.8. The second is a 1:46.6. The third, fourth and fifth are all within a tenth of each other, culminating in an immaculate 1:46.4. Typically awesome consistency from Stig, and that's as fast as this car is going. Remember that these times can't be compared with those on the telly show's Power Laps board: Stig has an extra trio of chicanes to manoeuvre around. 1:46.4 looks like a mighty good marker, though.
Stiggie hauls the 207 to a slithering stop on the start line, steps from the car and stands there, arms folded. If poses could say ‘rip some of the heavy crap out of this lardy hot hatch', it'd be this one.
Before we set about the 207, we drop it onto our borrowed set of Highly Technical Race Scales. With no driver and half a tank of fuel, it clocks 1,273kg. What are we aiming to lose here? 100kg sounds like a decent target. A nice round number, the weight of a prop forward. We grab spanners and screwdrivers and several large hammers and get to work.
Forget actually racing the damn thing: ripping the innards from a hatchback may be the most fun you can have on a circuit. We are Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, vanquishing carefully created bits of Peugeot 207 with relish. With surprising ease, out comes the front passenger seat, wires trailing as the airbag sensors are torn from their moorings, and then the glass sunroof, replaced by, er, a piece of cardboard, good for weight if not weather-hardiness. Or aesthetics.
The rear seats are next to be dispatched, shortly followed by the piece de resistance, the entire carpet set, ripped in a single swathe from the 207 like a snake shedding its skin from within. Though, in the interests of simplicity, we've opted against lightweight brakes or plexiglass windows, we decide to fit a set of lighter alloys and fresh Pirelli P-Zero tyres: a sure-fire way to knock a few seconds off our lap time and prove our weight-saving point.
We proffer a spanner to the Stig, but he simply strides past us, straps himself into the driver's seat - the one remaining chair - and grips the steering wheel purposefully, leaving us to try to extricate the centre console from around him. As we rip out the door cards with a satisfying crack, Stig twists the key and revs the engine with menace. He is ready.
There is more that we could do, but Stig waits for no man. We decide to forego removing the door speakers, dash switches and grab handles because, well, that way madness lies: where do you stop? Saving two grams by removing a two gram screw from the seatbelt catch? Stig is impatient, and time is of the essence. With a plate of jam-slathered offal, we coax him, and the 207, onto the scales. Factoring out the weight of the white-suited one - like Bruce Forsyth's real age and the Queen's bra size, the kerbweight of our racing driver is subject to the International Secrets Act - the 207 tips the scales at 1,149kg. We've saved 124kg, almost exactly 10 per cent of the 207's kerbweight. That's a significant amount. Were it not for the sport's stringent weight regulations, F1 teams would kill - actually, physically kill human beings - for a 10 per cent weight reduction.
We finish by liberally applying gaffer tape to the 207's shut lines, because... well, we're not sure quite why, but it feels like a suitably DIY and motorsporty thing to do, and shepherd Stig to the start line again. Before he sets off for a lightweight lap of the TGPHC, we take a second to admire our mighty efforts.
We are masters of engineering. We have created a 207 touring car, an uncompromised, raw monster deserving of a place in TG's Lightweights Edition. It is snappily christened the 207 TG GTI Superleggera Sport RS, and we ready the stopwatch for Stig's timed lap and the subsequent celebrations of our modifying genius. Before you start complaining that conditions might have changed, they haven't: the track is still sopping wet and strewn with deep puddles.
He is off. Piling round our handling circuit, the 207 Superleggera looks far livelier now, twitchier under braking and much looser at the back. On the approach to Bacharach, Stig hangs the tail out in a languid slide, a plume of spray roostering from the back as he goes. This looks fast. He crosses the line and...
Er, right. This is a bit difficult to admit. It's a 1:46.4. Exactly the same time. Convinced that something must have gone askew in Stiggie's programming, we send him out for another lap. 1:46.5 this time. Then another 1:46.5 and two 1:46.4s on the spin, the second of which sees the cardboard sunroof detach itself unceremoniously from the 207 as Stig wrestles through Gambon. No blame attached to Stig: he is driving that car as fast as it will possibly go, and it is going no faster than before. Bugger. We have removed many Fairly Important Bits from Peugeot's nice 207 and made it exactly no more fast.
After Stig slams the 207's lightweight door shut and stomps off in the direction of Chiddingfold, seemingly disgusted by our failed attempts to prove Colin Chapman's principles, I set off for a couple of laps in our 207 Superleggera. It feels quite different, sharper on turn-in, more prone to oversteer, less stable. It is also monstrously loud, every cough and parp from the exhaust buzzing viciously through the cabin. In my inexpert hands, as in the expert paws of the Stig, it is absolutely no faster. Ah.
So what have we proved here? It has been bemoaned a million times before that all the stuff in cars is too heavy and we should just get rid of most of it, but seats are useful for sitting on, airbags are useful for stopping you dying horribly, and parcel shelves are useful for shelving parcels (actually, has anyone ever actually put a parcel on a parcel shelf?). TG's 207 Superleggera is, essentially, useless as an everyday car, and not any quicker around a track. No question that many components could, and should, be made lighter - seats, particularly, are reaching a worrying level of heft - but that's a job for manufacturers, for suppliers, for people with computers and qualifications. Not idiots with hammers.
Stig's analysis suggested the problem was two-fold: first, that by tearing so much weight out of the back, we unbalanced the 207, losing a bit of grip, a problem exacerbated by the slippery conditions. Second, and more importantly, he didn't rate the wet performance of the tyres on our lightweight wheels - P-Zeroes, remember, which should have been better, grippier. Properly set-up, Stig reckoned, our 207 Superleggera could have saved three seconds a lap. But it wasn't set up properly. It wasn't set up at all. Just as power is nothing without control, so lightweightness is nothing without finesse. Motorsport is an exact science and we are amateurs. Crash diets don't work, kids. 本帖最后由 maxfree_gz 于 2010-4-29 12:14 编辑
简单的说，就是通过拆除座椅和内饰等等，让207轻了100Kg，但是测试圈速确实没有改变。
为什么呢？
最后一段Stig做了分析：
1）配重完全改变，而且没有重新设定车身，使得车尾侧滑更加严重。
2）轮胎不合适湿滑路面，而车身后面更轻，使得轮胎更加不抓地。
后面我再另外开一个帖子，讨论轻量化和车身配重。 TOP GEAR ~~~ 我也想买TOP GEAR的杂志。
但是国内好像没有英文版的卖。跑了很多专卖进口杂志的都没有。 意识到这个问题~~所以现在车头的减重是关键。。。车尾减重好容易的~车头就难！ 这个抓地的问题~除了大家首先先到的轮胎以外~~其实合理的风动能够大力改善这个问题~~
所以早早做了一个尾部的扩散器~就是出于这个考虑！ F1的空气动力学就是为了解决这类问题的 还是平衡的作品才是合理的啊 都是有知识的人。我一个都不认识· 207GTI真漂亮gochinway14；）
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