Here’s one for the techies…..
Saab’s have a tendency to understeer, which in most situations is safer than losing control in an oversteer situation.
Ted Y recently picked up on an article about understeer in an old version of Road and Track magazine that he purchased on Ebay.
I’ll let Ted tell you the rest as he understands this stuff much better than I do:
I was reading “Sports Car Design 44” in the May, 1958 issue which was discussing understeer/oversteer, applied power and a technical description of how to determine a car’s roll center, based on its suspension geometry.
Then I noticed a factory-provided graph showing the results of an understeer test, which I didn’t know any manufacturer actually performed. The part that caught my eye though was that it was provided by Saab. It showed that they were careful to make sure that the Saab 93 would maintain its understeer even when fully loaded, for safety reasons, unlike the comparison DKW which went to oversteer when fully loaded.
Here is the image, which should be fairly self explanatory.
Click to enlarge
Now all you technophiles can feel free to clue us in as to the benefits of Saab setting the car up this way.
Thanks again to TedY for the scan.
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