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Originally Posted by nikitopo
You are close with the engine's center of mass, but this doesn't make every front-engine car a front-mid-engine car.
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That's why I specified front-engine/rear-drive.
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If the entire engine is in front of the front axle how in heck its center of mass goes behind?
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FF, front-engine/front-drive is a different category, and of course they have to hang the engine out front in order to maintain some semblance of weight on the drive wheels under hard acceleration. With FR front-engine/rear-drive configuration you already know that for any decent sporty car the engine will be largely behind the front axle. Similarly with FF configuration you already know that the engine will usually be in front of front axle.
Very different configurations, but you still open up the hood at the front of the car to get to the engine! Both are front-engine but there's no ambiguity as to engine placement. FF = forward of front axle, FR = mostly or entirely behind front axle. Of course there are exceptions but those are mostly "weird" older cars (Citreon DS, Saab Sonnet, etc.)
Creating an "FMR" category based on the location of an arbitrary part of the engine relative to front axle is IMO completely unnecessary and misleading. S2000 architecture is not fundamentally different from Miata, Z3/Z4, etc. It *is* fundamentally different from Lotus Elise, Porsche Boxster/Cayman, etc. Yet now we have misguided people thinking that the S2000 and other FR sports cars are a variation of "mid-engined". They are not.
Please note that I am a HUGE fan of FR sports cars and have owned and tracked quite a few! But there is a fundamental difference between FR and MR, with S2000 and the like being most definitely in the FR category despite engines being mounted well aft, a feature which I am most definitely a big fan of!
Two critical differences:
1. in an FR car, even with the engine set way aft, the major masses of the car are inherently going to be set further apart, so it will have a greater yaw polar moment of inertia vs. an MR design where driver/engine/trans/diff masses are much closer together.
2. In a classic 2-seat FR sports car, the engine is situated as far aft as possible while still being in front of the driver, and the driver sits just in front of the rear wheels, way aft of c.g.. This gives a very different feel when driving the car (particularly near/at/beyond the limits) vs. MR sports car where the driver sits practically right in the middle of the wheelbase, very near the c.g.