repocop said:
The torque steer in my car is virtually undetectable...
the only thing that it does that could be in the least bit classified as torque steer would be when cornering with large throttle openings... which basically none of you normal folk would (or should) be doing anyway.
(Used to race FWD cars so trust me, this car's torque steer is negligable.)
Now mine has VSC/TRAC but i doubt that comes in to play.
It's just a well-thought-out (in terms of geometry, all reliability/flare issues aside) drivetrain that minimizes torque steer.
Any FWD (or even AWD under the right conditions) car that has un-equal-length half shafts (drive shafts, propeller shafts, the tube thingies that turn the wheels, whatever you wanna call them) is going to have torque steer to the side with the shortest shaft.
This car's shafts are equal length... viola, no torque steer.
Some info..
"Even equal-length driveshafts aren't perfect. The linkages and bearings in the intermediate shaft, and the shaft itself, still have torque-output delays.
Other causes of torque steer can't be helped, which is why torque steer can never be totally cured. It goes back to the problem of having the front wheels do all the work. Any time the tire contact patches are unequal, you'll get torque steer. Under cornering, for instance, one wheel has more weight transferred to it and—depending on suspension and steering geometry—might have a differently shaped contact patch. Another time this happens is when each tire has varying grip, as in wet or wintry conditions." <<<--- Back to my statement, if it'll spin, it'll steer.
What causes it???
"In a front-wheel-drive car, engine power is applied to wheels that also want to turn, unlike in a rear-wheeldrive car in which these two tasks are separate. When you turn the steering wheel, the wheels pivot about the appropriately named steering axis. Power is applied pretty much equally over the tire's contact patch (the part that's touching the road), which we'll approximate to a single force at the center of the patch. Now, if you extend the steering axis to the ground, it will be offset from the center of the contact patch. In case you were wondering, yes, this is called the steering offset.
The fundamental reason for torque steer is that the power applied at the contact patch wants to turn the wheel around the steering axis, which, you'll remember from the last sentence, is offset. If you compare it to a door, the steering axis is the hinge, and the center of the contact patch is where you push to swing the door open, hence the offset.
Most cars, of course, have two front wheels, so the forces on each wheel should counteract each other. But if the forces on each wheel are different, or if a tire's contact patch changes, that imbalance will cause one tire to twist more than the other, and that's when you get torque steer."
