Miatas again

[Will Owen <nashwill912@domain.elided>]

Michael Smith said -

"The Miata is extremely civilized and delicate by comparison. It has a sort
of unit body with a very clever aluminum bracing structure that ties the
engine and tranny end of the body/firewall to the rear end. This
substantially reduces the torsional weakness of a standard open top car,
but is definitely no relation to Chapman's original and brilliant backbone
design."

One more time: the Lotus Elan had a "sort of a unit body with a very clever STEEL
bracing structure that tied the engine and tranny end to the rear end." The backbone
that we're going on about here, in other words, was emphatically NOT an "original and
brilliant" piece of work by Colin Chapman, but rather a bracing substructure developed
by one of his engineers to make viable the otherwise inadequate plastic unit body that
Chapman mulishly insisted on developing for his open-top Elite replacement. The
Miata's designers took very careful note of how this worked, and brought what had
begun  (at Lotus) as a sequence of improvisations up to the level of a carefully
thought-out design.

Sorry about the lack of Alfa content, but I get more than a little touchy when people
attack perfectly good designs or defend badly compromised ones apparently on the sole
basis of who did'em. "If it's the truth, what does it matter who said it?" -
Anonymous.

Will Owen
Pasadena, CA
--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided