/The importance of weight in performance

The importance of weight in performance

There’s an old boy around the way where I live who has spent more money than anyone with half a brain would ever dream of spending on an old car zupping up his Vauxhall Nova. He’s put in a 2.0 XE and has spent a small fortune on head ports and the like. One this that always made me laugh was he spent all this money getting an extra 70 BHP, yet in the boot he has 2 very heavy subwoofers and amps, plus a lot of other audio bits and pieces.

Now if you like your music, fair enough, but for a person who constantly bangs on about car performance I have one simple question – why spend all that money getting extra power only to cancel it out throwing 100 kilos in the boot?bmw gina side at The importance of weight in performance

You see one thing very often overlooked by boy racer types (and car manufacturers for that matter) is just how critical weight is to performance. In fact it’s every bit as important as BHP. As Lotus founder Colin Chapman said “make a car more powerful it goes faster on the straights. Make it lighter it goes faster everywhere”. If you want to improve the performance, handling and fuel economy of your car you should seriously look at the weight issue.

Is the boot filled with steroes or junk? If so take it out! Do you have a roof rack on your car when you don’t always need it? Remove it. If you use your car often on the track and it isn’t worth that much seriously consider removing parts of the interior to lighten it up. Every kilo counts.

I do a lot of track days and ripping out the interior was the best modification I ever made and you’ll be amazed by the difference.

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(CEO / Editor / Journalist) – Bruno is the owner and CEO of Motorward.com; he’s responsible for the entire team, editorial guidelines and publishing. Bruno has many years of experience in the auto industry, both managing automotive websites and contributing to the press.