90 years of the Autocar road test: how ride and handling has evolved

But even if by the 1970s manufacturers had (largely) sorted out suspension and construction, cars were still being prevented from realising their true potential in the most fundamental way: simply put, those four little patches of rubber that connected them to the road simply weren’t fit for purpose. True, tyre technology hadn’t stood still since the 1920s and Michelin’s successful introduction of the radial tyre as standard equipment on, of all things, the 1948 Citroën 2CV was a huge step forward, providing as it did a more stable footprint while actually improving ride quality.

But even by the mid-1970s, Ferraris still sat on tyres whose dimensions would look wholly inadequate on the most modest hot hatch today. The 308GTB, for instance, was fitted as standard with a 205/70-section tyre. But then Pirelli introduced its new P7 and almost overnight everything changed. First made available on the Porsche 911 Turbo with a 225/50 rear boot, soon Lamborghinis and others were parading around wearing 345/35 section rubber. These ultra-wide, ultra-low-profile tyres were the key to unlocking the performance of the world’s fastest cars, because not only did they transform apex speed but their effect on traction and braking was also no less remarkable.

True landmarks in chassis development have been rarer since, although we should namecheck the 1980 Audi Quattro as the first car to use four-wheel drive for sporting purposes: not only did it halve the workload of each tyre when accelerating but it also allowed hitherto front-wheel-drive platforms to transmit monster amounts of torque without the trademark tugging at the steering wheel.

Carbonfibre tubs still aren’t commonplace but they have been around since the 1994 McLaren F1 (or the 1990 Jaguar XJR-15, if you choose to count that road-going racing car). Such tubs not only keep weight down and massively improve crash performance (the F1 reputedly drove away from its own crash test) but, crucially, they also provide a level of torsional stiffness that cannot be achieved by conventional means.

Probably the single biggest growth area in recent years for more mainstream cars has been the influence of electronics, from the fitment of simple adaptive damping, past active roll control to an entire suite of stability systems whose acronyms and initialisms when spelled out are often longer than the car’s name. These systems enable chassis engineers to set up cars to be far more responsive than would ever be prudent were supercars still reliant on the driver alone to keep them pointing in the right direction.

As for the future, it’s interesting to note that tyres are still advancing at an incredible rate and represent a sizeable chunk of the reason that standard road cars now possess the lap speed of the much-vaunted hypercars of five years ago. But the real growth area, particularly among sporting cars, will be downforce. So long as it can be achieved without an enormous drag penalty, downforce is the gift that keeps on giving.

It requires few moving parts and the faster you go the easier it makes the car to drive. So do I think we’ll see conventional sports cars sprouting enormous wings? I do not, but more downforce can be achieved under the car than over it, and it is from there I expect the bulk of progress to come. 

’ring records: a case study 

Although power comes into it, perhaps the best guide to how chassis performance has evolved remains the Nürburgring lap time. So let’s see how the Porsche 911, the world’s most enduring sports car, has evolved this century – bearing in mind that different drivers, conditions and timing methods make this a very approximate science from which only a general trend can be extrapolated.

As the new millennium broke, the quickest 911 was the then new 996 GT3, which clocked an 8min 3sec lap in 1999 – but, five years later, the standard Carrera S was lapping in 7min 59sec. In 2007, the 997-series GT3 had brought the mark down to 7min 33sec, which was further lowered to 7min 18sec in 2010 by the ballistic GT2 RS.