The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever
The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever
The Ford RS200 story is widely known among enthusiasts, so I'll sum it up briefly. Ford wanted to enter the World Rally Championship's popular and ultra-fast Group B category in the mid eighties and developed a car specifically for the task. The RS200 bore essentially no resemblance to any Ford sold at the time (or since). It could've been a serious contender for WRC titles were it not introduced in 1986, the year Group B was abolished following some deadly accidents. The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever
Like all Group B title contenders (except the Audi Sport Quattro), the RS200 had a mid-mounted engine providing power for all four wheels. But unlike any of its competitors, or any other car ever produced, the RS200 used a front transasxle. The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever
There is, perhaps, no such thing as a conventional mid-engine four/all-wheel-drive car. The number of different drivetrain layouts is almost as large as the number of mid-engine four/all-wheel-drive cars. But the RS200's is easily the most bizarre. The engine—a 1.8-liter turbocharged Cosworth BDT four-cylinder—is mounted longitudinally right up against the rear bulkhead and beneath the rear window. A driveshaft takes power forward to a unit that houses the transfer case, center and front limited-slip differentials, and a five-speed gearbox. A parallel shaft takes power back to another viscous differential and on to the rear wheels. The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever
If this seems like a circuitous way of doing things, that’s because it is. But, there was method to this madness. As we wrote in a May 1986 test of Group B cars the layout "helps provide the 50/50 weight distribution. It also helps reduce the distance between the car's center of mass and that imaginary point between the front wheels about which a car pivots when the rear end is hanging out."
Speaking to Petrolicious in 2018, John Wheeler, one of the RS 200’s designers and head of Ford Motorsport during its creation, expounded on the thinking.
"If you think about it, when you throw the car at high speed into a corner you’re controlling the balance with the steering so that the moment of inertia is centered on the front end," Wheeler said."
A classic mid-engined race car design with low polar moment of inertia and 65 percent of the weight on the rear axle actually has a very high moment of inertia, and a pendulum-effect about the steered front axle. This disadvantage of too much rear mass also makes itself evident in the vertical plane, leading to several well-documented end-over-end accidents over high speed bumps.
So The Ford RS200 Had One of the Strangest Drivetrain Layouts Ever.
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