wheelieing

Ralphh85 · Post by **Ralphh85** » Sat May 24, 2008 6:50 pm

may sound really dum but what will make a car wheelie?

obviously your goign to need enough power and enough grip not to lose traction and spin, but it still dont make total sense because how come cars wheelie but when you apply the brakes no car will lift the rear wheels off?

also tryign to work out if there will be any chance of my car lifting front wheels off once has V8 fitted.

Ralph

edit, the closest people have done to em is probly V8 mini's, do the rear engine ones lift the front wheels off?

Alley Kat · Post by **Alley Kat** » Sat May 24, 2008 7:14 pm

When you say lift the rears, you mean pop the rear boots into the air? Called a "stoppie" on bikes. Prob won't do it because of length, length vs where the weight is vertically and weight spread over a longer distance, making it too long and weight too low for for much weight transfer to happen etc. On a bike you start applying the front brakes only, then bring them in much harder but smoothly, so you force a quick weight transference.

Post by **katanaman** » Sat May 24, 2008 7:45 pm

Because of the geometry of a car the braking force goes pretty much straight forward. They don't dive under braking like most bikes do. Bikes only have one main suspension member up front which is the forks so any force has to collapse the forks. If it didnt they would bend or snap. A car has other members that take the forces though, either a track control arm and ARV or better wishbones. Because of that they inherently don't dive that much and because they don't dive the tail doesn't lift. Also because of the lack of weight transfer the tyres aren't forced into the road so eventually they loose grip and skid.The back is different though in that depending on geometry the back suspension can compress under power, this leads to weight transferring to the back and if you have enough grip and power the front lifts. Drag cars tend to have their geometry set to actually lift the back under power. Pushes the tyres into the road and gives better traction. If you have enough power though they can still lift but generally not much unless its rear engined (top fuel and the likes with no weight on the front) or very short. Turbo or fast Beatles can lift a fair bit as well for example.
Any engineers out there or peeps who did engineering science will recognise this.... take moment about rear wheel force = mass times distance yada yada