Cars are made to travel on roads, not tracks

With the possible exception of the track-orientated Porsche 911 GT3 RS and a couple of wild Mitsubishis and Subarus, cars are made to travel on roads, not tracks.
So, what’s the point of melting brake pads and rubber in an irrelevant environment? Other than having loads of fun at someone else’s expense and eventually announcing an utterly meaningless winner, there’s no point at all.
Two to tango
I often think about Leon Joubert who once penned this column before jumping ship to a rival title and then taking the ship to Tasmania.  He was unashamedly a BMW buff and I always recall how he pooh poohed the use of turbochargers, probably because the Bayerische Motoren Werke eschewed the use of such devices when Porsche and Audi in particular were employing them left, right and centre.
Today, things have changed in Munich such that you’ll now struggle to find a Beemer range that isn’t dominated by turbo-powered engines. The truth is that the use of turbos has become more and more common and the reason isn’t hard to find.
It all boils down to fuel consumption and emissions, two related issues which governments all over the world have jumped upon because they’re easy cash cows. Put simply, big engines use more fuel and they produce more pollutants in return for providing lazy motive power.
The idea is that forced induction, particularly at altitude, compensates for size but unfortunately, things aren’t as simple as that. At low revs, the speed and volume of the burned gases is such that the turbine wheel can be slow to get to work which results in lag or hesitation at low revs.
Partly in the desire to minimise the aforementioned lag and partly to simplify plumbing in V or flat engines, you will hear more and more about “twin turbos”.  A parallel installation would normally consist of two smaller but identical turbos mounted on a common manifold or on separate manifolds as the need may be.
The idea behind two smaller turbos is mostly to reduce lag by reducing inertia. The low pressure design is therefore more usable but sacrifices some top end power in the interests of improved drivability.
The alternative dual installation, known as sequential, commonly (but not universally) employs two different turbo chargers. The smaller version is brought into action at lower engine speeds to help overcome lag and once the motor is spinning and producing a higher gas flow, a switch is made to the bigger turbo which helps produce ultimate power.
The Porsche 911 Turbo is the best-known exponent of this technology but these days you can add variable vane technology to the equation through which the blades of the compressor are altered to maximise efficiency across a wide rev range.
In simplistic terms, the variable design offers the best of both worlds and is being increasingly  employed in modern engines which are becoming smaller, but more powerful and more fuel efficient while emitting fewer pollutants.
On top of the world
I read that VW has overtaken Toyota as the world’s biggest car producer. The German maker, which targeted 2018 to achieve this milestone, is keeping a low profile on the subject save to confirm that the published figures are correct. Global Insight reports that in the first nine months of the year, VW produced 4,4 million cars to Toyota’s 4,0 million. Maybe this explains rather succinctly why Toyota withdrew so suddenly (sadly) from F1 racing. Hopefully, Renault won’t follow suit.