Quote:
Originally Posted by Scion FR-S
Wonderful review, but of course the driving part of it doesn't really apply to the base car given the tire/spring/shock upgrades.
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Sure it does!! A lot of us plan on upgrading these parts anyways, especially the ones of us who would autocross it. Now the parts about driving it at 100% probably won't apply to the vast majority of people, but again, for the people who plan on truly driving the car... The most impressive part of the drive to me was the hunkered down/planted feel along with the utter neutrailty on a track.
I guess a big part for me was that it was never out of control or even unbalanced. Keep the power on through turns and it stays planted as it should. Lift the throttle in those turns and it starts thinking about which end you want facing in which direction. Drive hard into a turn while braking, it'll push some, but not so much that the Yokohamas can't make up for it. In a fast sweeper with consistent throttle, it's a completely controllable four wheel drift. No understeer or oversteer. Keep in mind that this is all done in an automatic car in normal mode with all traction control on. Very cool. This is very smart of them because the course was too narrow to let me drive a manual without any nannies on. I would've been punting the outside cones on almost every corner with the tail swinging out. The drive reminded me the most of my 85 Celica GTS on the autocross course. That car had the suspension goodies and some R1 race tires and weighed in just over 2200 lbs. The FR-S was tossable like that but with a lower CG and much higher limits through the corners.
A note on tire wear:
The cars were wearing new tires as of the morning and had probably run about 30 laps on the course. Front tire wear on the tread blocks was very even on both inside and out of the inner blocks. On the outside of the tires, the outside seemed to have a little more wear than the inside and since this was on both front tires, I doubt it was from the course layout. Overall though, most of the other drivers I saw were not pushing the cars too much.