or it could as engine orientation shouldn't affect the tuners ability what so ever...but that's yet another "what if"
They dislike the ideas of turbo's yet their historically best cars were primarily turbocharged.....AWD i can of course do without, and even turbo not being part of the car completely is a perfectly understandable situation, as it's much easier and much more sensible to add a turbo than to remove one and tune properly.
The problem is they didn't produce a blank canvas open to the tuners...
The AE86 fell into this category yes as did pretty much every "True to the core sports car" to roll out of a japanese factort to date...the 4AG engine did an amazing job at making itself available to anyone who could envision what they wanted their engine to do..
Other engines that did the same thing?
The L24, still a widely used and tuned engine for grassroots events, still capable and still competitive, same goes for L26's and L28s..
Then you have Volvo B18's amd B20 engines, AMC small blocks and big blocks and all the other engines that made their hay day in some way shape or form under the hood of some old stamped steel behemoth with white walls and chrome 5mph bumpers...
But those all shared things in common that this new engine has jack to do with, and no matter WHAT they try and do to the car or the engine it will never have that ability or feature.
When they stuck a direct injection system onto the car they ruined ANY chance of this car being a "working mans engine" or an "engine for the tuners"..Like it or not, they did..
To be the best experience philosophically they would have to do away with every aspect of this car that throws it into the category of new age "technologically advanced" Atari game.
They include a piston design....
vvv
(not saying this is the piston but the style fits)
A design in which does not allow for the minute incremental changes of internal dimensions such as bore/stroke rod/stroke ratio...hell even the inclusion of a larger head gasket to try and drop compression a half a point is completely thrown out of wack by this piece of metal..
The changing of the compression and the change in the actual location of the piston dome at time of fuel injection changes the entire atomization of the fuel....Potentially causing either crap fuel economy, detonation, horrible efficiency in the combustion cycle...any number of power robbing possibilities..
They add this...
A fueling system designed to work with diesel fuel injection due to the combustion rate and in cylinder temps..
NOW instead of that being applied in such, we are adding a subsequent/secondary closed loop system than pressurizes gasoline to thousands and thousands of psi..
And these are just the tips of the iceberg in a car that is sure to be such a latent "futuristic" automobile..
They produced a car that off the car lot will feel good in the avg drivers hands, it will feel like you're a smart gentleman who knows how to flip a paddle switch and gas it around a corner....A car that to the naked eye seems like a perfect homage to all the late "sports cars" that have served our crowd so well..
However they also produced a car that uses 2 forms of injection and a compression ratio that is so high you'll worry about detonation using regular unleaded JUST for the blatantly foolish reason of appealing to the EPA on a couple more tests with reason.
They produce a cramped engine bay in a FR layout car simply because they want to 1-up the competition in a silly pen15 measuring game about "center of gravity" when they could have just worked with other aspects of the car and resulted in an engine bay in which "ALL tuners" could easily fit their hands, wrenches and parts under the hood..
What they did with this car is basically what Michael Bay did to the transformers..
YES..every young kid under 14 or whatever is going to say "wow this is the best movie i've seen using robots omg this is phenomenal"
but the tuner crowd (the people with experience...The people who liked the original transformers) will get into the car and get into the movie saying..
"This seems familiar, i understand what they were TRYING to do..but all they succeeded in doing is ruining what made the original sports cars AWESOME, did a spin on what THEY felt was important but it turned out to be completely unimportant, and succeeded in making me miss my old show/old car 100x more than i would ever miss this"