How Engine Placement Affects Handling

If you look at the sports cars made by exotic brands like Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren, you’ll see that a vast majority of their models have their engines behind the driver. However, sports car manufacturers don’t just do this to make their vehicles more exotic or unique. Changing the engine’s location affects the car’s weight distribution, which can have a drastic effect on the car’s handling and driving characteristics.

How Does Engine Placement Affect Vehicle Handling?

Engine placement profoundly impacts a vehicle’s handling characteristics such as balance, traction, cornering performance, acceleration, and braking. This is because a vehicle tends to have the best handling performance when the vehicle’s weight is spread evenly across its four wheels.

Engines typically weigh around 400 to 700 lbs, while large engines found in sports cars can weigh even more. Changing an engine’s location places more or less weight on a wheel, which can significantly change the vehicle’s weight distribution and ultimately how it handles and performs. 

The location of the engine also affects how a car rotates on a corner. To understand how this works, think of a car as a lever. In a front-engine vehicle, there’s more weight at the front. When the vehicle is cornering, the front wheels impart a rotational force that’s also at the front. Since both forces are at the front, front-engine vehicles tend to feel less responsive since they have a harder time turning into a corner. Meanwhile, rear-engine or mid-engine vehicles tend to feel more nimble since they can change direction more easily.

Why Some Manufacturers Prefer Certain Engine Layouts

Generally, many if not most manufacturers believe that a mid-engine layout gives sports cars better performance. A car has a mid-engine layout when the engine is placed between the front and rear axles. Mid-engine cars distribute the weight evenly across the car’s four tires. However, some manufacturers like Porsche believe that the best place for an engine is at the rear.

Generally, manufacturers choose a vehicle’s engine layout for an array of various benefits, so let’s break them down.

Even Weight Distribution

Positioning the engine between the front and rear axles distributes weight evenly between the front and rear. This even weight distribution leads to a wide range of performance benefits in various scenarios.

Less Understeer and Oversteer

A vehicle’s weight tends to shift to one side of the vehicle during a corner. When the weight shifts, the wheels on one side will have less grip than the other side because of the lack of weight. This is why many vehicles designed to be fast especially around corners have mid-engine layouts.

Excess weight in either the front or the back of the car can lead to understeer, which is what happens when the car’s front wheels don’t have enough grip to effectively turn the vehicle into the desired direction. It can also lead to oversteer, which is what happens when the car’s front wheels turn in too sharply and cause the rear to spin out because of a lack of grip on the rear wheels.

The near 50/50 weight distribution makes both understeering and oversteering less likely, which is important if you want to set quick lap times and have more stable handling characteristics.

Better Acceleration

The even weight distribution also leads to increased tire grip when the vehicle is accelerating. During this process, the vehicle’s center of gravity and weight shifts to the rear suspension and pushes the rear tires onto the road, resulting in better traction. This setup lowers the chances of the rear tires spinning out so that all of the engine’s energy is directed to moving the car forward.

Generally, a car with a mid-engine design has an advantage over one with a front-engine layout when it comes to performance. That said, a car’s behavior when cornering, braking, and accelerating is influenced by many other factors. Tire choice, tire pressure, spring rates, and shock absorber settings all have a significant impact on how well a car handles and behaves. However, no tire upgrade or suspension tuning can match the benefits of good engine placement and even weight distribution.

At the end of the day, manufacturers play around with the engine’s location in the hopes of creating a vehicle that’s faster and feels more confident to drive.