'Car enthusiasts are obsessed with weight, but I’m not sure I care'
As the weight of performance cars balloons, so too does the technical appointment they carry to manage it. Truthfully, many do so remarkably well
As I write I contemplate the prospect of prosecution for high treason in the Court of evo, judges Meaden, Barker, Gallagher presiding, but I’m going to carry on anyway. Let me play devil’s advocate for a just moment. What is it exactly that we hate so much about weight in a car? Is it intrinsically awful, or is our ire actually more for the dynamic symptoms that can manifest as a result of it, without the right management?
I found myself contemplating exactly how much of an irritant I find excessively bloated kerb weights in a car's spec sheet to be following driving a few fairly heavy cars and enjoying them, morbid obesity be damned, quite a bit. The BMW M2 (1705kg), the new BMW M5 Touring (2475kg), the Aston Martin Vantage Roadster (1730kg), the Bentley Continental GTC (2639kg). All are quite spectacularly heavier than one might traditionally hope and yet, what actually matters, is that they all drive to a very high standard.
Other evo favourites are relative heavyweights too. The Nissan GT-R (c/1740kg) and BMW M5 CS (1825kg) are hardly slender, nor the Maserati MC20 (c1700kg, as measured by us), yet all have eCoty titles to their name. Nor is the most recent AMG GT (1895kg) much of a racing snake. Coming in from the other direction are cars whose predecessors simply would not deserve a mention in the same breath as any bonafide performance cars only a decade ago – the Range Rover Sport SV (2485kg) and Defender Octa (2510kg). All offer the thrill of driving in spite of their mass, leveraging extraordinary engineering solutions in the name of its management.
And that's all we should care about, right? Okay, there are other reasons to find excess weight irksome, other symptoms it presents that are all but impossible to engineer around: increased wear on consumables like brakes and tyres, reduced efficiency and the toll it takes on performance. I can confirm the butt dyno does not contradict bhp/ton figures: the new M5 feels slower than the old M5 CS.
But honestly, the excess mass of the cars mentioned far from compromises the driving experience to a commensurate extent. Maybe the M5's ride is a bit choppy, owing to the fact that M just hasn’t quite nailed the effective spring rates relative to its mass. But otherwise, it's controlled, agile, collected, its rear-steering, adaptive damping, xDrive AWD and active M differential working in concert to shrink that kerb weight in your mind’s eye.
If anything, knowing exactly how astonishingly dense it is only has you grinning with childish fascination as you're swept along for the ride, as it does the seemingly impossible things it can do and executes your bidding with baffling rapidity and response. Like the viral video of the rotund chap on the skateboard, doing a flip and informing us on the other side of the camera that 'this is what peak male performance looks like,’ there's value in and fascination to be enjoyed with the capabilities of Munich's porkiest protagonist, relative to its paunch.
The Range Rover Sport hasn’t been turned into a 911 GT3 in drag, simply by virtue of the SV's amazing 6D dynamics hydraulically cross-linked suspension system. But it really is very very good. And such is the deftness with which Aston Martin has prepared the latest Vantage and Vantage Roadster that I can’t imagine anything more than a 3 per cent improvement in its road manners coming from a 15 per cent (240-255kg) loss in weight.
Snapping out of our thought experiment, what can we conclude? Weight surely matters, enormously. The less of it there is, the less the big brains have to birth fascinating engineering solutions to manage it. It matters even more if you want to take your car on track, where the forces of inertia will make every extra kilogram feel like four. The meaty machines aforementioned will surely immolate their tyres and brakes when subjected to such abuse at an increased rate relative to lighter alternatives and predecessors.
But just as judging every car by its 0-62 time is inexcusably boring and one-dimensional, so too do we risk dismissing some truly great cars on account of our judging their weight to be in excess. I got in the M5 ready to slate it and got out a smiling convert. Fat cars can be good too.
