Popular Mods and Where They Came From #BlogPost
We all know that trends come and go. There have been countless car mod trends that have become popular over the years, but where did the ideas come from?
We all know that trends come and go. There have been countless car mod trends that have become popular over the years, but where did the ideas come from?
Yellow Lights
Yellow headlights (usually achieved either by tint or by yellow HIDs) come from racing origins. The concept originally came from France, and was used for GT racing. The idea behind is that yellow lights create less glare and allows faster classes to identify the GT cars at night.
Negative Camber
Running negative camber on street cars is arguably the most popular current trend. While this tends to hurt performance due to a decreased contact patch size, its roots are performance oriented. Slight negative camber is used in racing, and the theory behind this tactic is based on increasing the contact patch through corners. As weight shifts to one side or the other, the tire is actually forced into having optimum grip.
Taped Headlights
The taped X’s across headlights are another trend that originates from racing. Taping headlights is often required as a safety measure in case the car is in a collision. Taping the headlights reduces the likelihood that glass or plastic shards will scatter across the racetrack which could cause tire punctures for other racers.
Fat Tires
Fat rubber has been something that has been popular for both performance and aesthetic benefits for decades. This trend became especially popular in America in the 70s with muscle cars trying to mimic the drag racers running enormous slicks. Obviously, there are performance benefits from running a wider tire as well.
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Comments
Racing seats, which came from the style seat used in racing cars?
What about stretched tyres, should have been in here
you’ll never see a stretched tyre on a racecar. racecars like sidewalls, low profile and ‘stretched’ tyres are definitely a road car phenomenon.
Detachable steering wheels!
Wide body kits like liberty Walk and rocket bunny is i suppose from racing because more traction from a widther car.
Stance from racing because lower center of the car.
Are you sure about yellow lights? I thought they are designed to improve vision in bad conditions (fog, rain etc.)
Yes, that’s true (don’t know about that racing origin though). It was used mostly on french cars as normal lights and anywhere else as foglights.
Actually, your reason given for race-cars using camber isn’t correct. It has nothing to do with the contact patch, it’s actually the lateral camber thrust they’re after which is a result of hysteresis in the tyre sidewall, not so much the contact patch size.
The reason this doesn’t do bugger all on road cars is twofold.
1) the ‘sporty’ road cars you see with ridiculous (more than 2 or 3%) camber generally also run low profile (or even the dreaded ‘stretched’) tyres. your camber doesn’t translate into camber thrust if you don’t have enough sidewall in which to induce hysteresis.
2) If you combine high amounts of camber on low profile tyres, you actually reduce the contact patch. SO you’re removing mechanical grip you already had, without gaining additional lateral thrust from the sidewalls. -it’s really the worst of both worlds.
There is a very good reason you don’t normally see racecars with sidewall ratios of less than around 30% - there is a lot less performance to be gained.
I don’t realy understand what are you saying, is there an article that explains it more in depth (with pictures and stuff)?
Seriously awesome stuff there is so much more then what we see with racing.
Youre wrong. France used yellow headlights because they wanted to help french manufacturers. There was too much import so they changed the rules and made headlights yellow. This prevented import for a bit.
The guy who owns the Charger in the last pic is Masahiko Aida, here’s another shot of him and the car.
Looks like he used left foot braking too much ^^
Turboooos
Have to disagree on the yellow headlights. Yellow lights were compulsory in France until the 90’s. It had nothing to do with racing. As such, you would see British cars throughout the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s & 90’s with yellow painted headlights and direction modifiers to comply with French law when they visited.
Yellow lights were adopted by the modified scene
Were you born in it?
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