The Cal-look Lounge

Have we had this rant yet? Do people really think it looks good when your front end is narrowed so much your car looks like a trike? I mean really, it looks like crap and I am sure it handles like crap. Turning radius anyone? Now I like the tires tucked in so they are not sticking out the wheel wells. (Remember that fad?) But narrowing a beam six inches or more and then running 135s, usually on 4.5s, just looks like stupid.

Edit: Hey look, it is my 666th post.  :P

--louis

AMEN DUDE  ;D ;D ;D you are a man after my own heart - I just don't get it ??? ??? ??? - these cars must UNDERSTEER like a bitch  :D

Narrowing front suspension for tire clearance when utilizing disc brakes and/or a tire and wheel setup that would otherwise foul the fender is ok, to me. As long as the tire and wheel end up in the same place as the stock tire and wheel did before the mods. The fad of tucking the wheel and tire 4,5, 6" inside the front fender looks absurd. I don't get it, and I am positive the cars handle poorly. Consider any old race car that was successful....every effort was made to wide the track, within areodynamic limits. It's a stupid fad that's popular with the hoodtrash segment of the hobby. From a mechanically advantageous point of view there is NO reason to do it. From an asthetic point of view I am sure most people with good taste find it ridiculous as well.
It personally bugs me when I see a car slammed in the weeds all around, with every gadget hung on it, and a nice set of Fuchs hidden way inside the front fender wells, or even worse, repop BRMs. God, how horrible.

Here's an experiment:

Go post this over on theSamba.com and see what happens!   ::)

Seriously.  When I was doing the front end on my '67 I arbitrarily chose to narrow my beam 3".  I figured it was a safe amount with drop spindles, discs, and the ability to go low.  Once the car was together, I almost instantly knew it was too much for my taste.  I now have some 1/4" spacers which help a little, as a temporary fix.

The long-term plan is to get one of CB's 2" jobs.  I mainly did my own at first just to get my hands on a beam and say I did it.

I narrowed the front end on my '66 two inches.  With the dropped spindles and the Flat-4 BRMs it puts the tires in just about the stock location.  I know that there is a club and they do extremely narrow front ends.  They think it is cool.  They don't run front shocks either.  This is their taste.  I personally think it is stupid and remember Mark Herbert ranting about it.  He said the only reason to narrow a front end was to get the tires under the fenders! 

(http://pages.zoom.co.uk/elvis/Robin65.jpg)

ok this should make you laugh - A guy was looking under the front of my Manx at a show one weekend and he turned to me and said and I quote "Cor there is loads of room under there - you could get an 8inch narrowed beam in there"  :D :D :D

I think this about sums it up - people these days are just trying to go Narrower than the last guy  ::)

It won't be long before we see two shock tower welded together :D :D :D

I agree with Jim 8)

that is what makes a 70's or 80's callook different from later ones in most cases. the tires stick out that little further. and i like it. like Jim said there is no need to narrow a beam, only to get the stock with back it is ok. look at Sarge's car, it has a narrowed beam, but the wheels sit just nice in the wells. the more i look at that car, the better it really looks. except for some lucas turnsignals maybe...

but the narrowed beam has been done on dragcars for a long time, so maybe it was always there...

i have a narrowed beam and I like the looks of it, that's why I narrowed it.  I don't know exactly how much but I also run disc brakes.  I agree that the hoodsh*t cars and resto cal-cars sometimes go to far (to small  :P) 
If the frontwheels are just that little bit more tucked in the arches then the wheels in the back it looks realy sportive and bad ass i think... 

Okay don't hit me...  ;D

Dem

It's fine for pro-street and resto-cals. On the right car(s) it looks the nuts.

A while back I had an e-mail exchange with a guy that had driven a few cars over the years and he commented that a car in Ultra (I think it was a cover car) looked great until you saw the front which he wrote made it look like a "frikin dork mobile". The mail finished with a comment along the lines of "quaife test? more like a frikin roof test" whcih still makes me laugh some 4 or so years later.

That said we're building a car with a narrowed beam right now but in our defense it is to clear spindles and disc brakes, the aim will be to leave the wheels where they would normally be or thereabouts. I think the technical description of tucking the wheels inside of the wing is to "retard the track" meaning that it is technically correct to say on seeing a narrowed beam "look at that, it's retarded".

 :P

yeah, finally someone brings up this subject!! the look of any vw with an extremely narrowed front end is absolutely ridiculous. some of those rides really look like trikes! of course, on a perfect stance, the front track has to be a little bit narrower than the rear track. thus, a little narrowing is ok to fit disc brakes, dropped spindles, bad-ET-wheels without increasing track width. but that's it.

Haha, none of those cars even run shocks!!!

I did see a beam that had the shock towers about 6" apart last weekend, but the guy built it just to advertise his business.

Who needs a beam, really?  :D Who is gonna be the first guy to set up a Beetle like the Robin I posted up there... weld together the two outside halves of a 4.5" fuch and you're halfway there!!