Upping the ante

Control is nothing without power. No, not a gratuitous antimetabole (yes, I had to look that up too) but my piping hot take on an age old aphorism. Much like the salt you add to your Friday night chips, how do you know what enough looks like? What is the optimum quantity (and flavour) of power for any given chassis? And what happens if you exceed it?

Of course there are many different appropriate answers, all depending entirely on the machine in question. You may remember the recent Our Cars story about my final generation Lotus Evora, and that I felt it needed more power (bear with me, because I’ll come to the ins and outs of that shortly). It all boils down to a factor that I shall call ‘headroom’.

Simply put, I would define this as an excess of control over the available power. Too much rubber on the road, an overly tied down body, or a chassis that never feels challenged. In a daily, headroom could be considered a very good thing. In a sports car? Less so. I suggest that our goal in tuning our fancy motors should be to find the perfect balance of control and power, by pulling on whichever levers we have available to us.