Originally Posted by fredswain

I've been using Inventor for a few years. I use Solidworks at work. If you know one then the other is pretty intuitive to pick up since they are both pretty similar. Each has it's advantages and disadvantages over the other. Moving from one of these to something like Catia or Pro-E is a nightmare and vice versa. They are very difficult to learn by comparison.

Mid motor can work just fine on low bite tracks. The problem isn't that they don't work in America. The problem is that most Americans don't know how to tune. Can't turn? Just add weight up front. No forward traction? Add weight. What setup should I run? Sound familiar? Few people actually know what to do and there's no shortage of others that also don't know that will answer them. That is the wrong way to do things yet the most common. Until people learn to tune first, play with weight later, they'll never figure out mid motor anywhere but on high grip. Now saying that, does it mean you'd never want rear motor? Not at all. It certainly has it's advantages as well but every design is a tradeoff and either can work quite well.

Buggy design has stagnated over the last 20 years. They are all basically the same. Once you get the basic geometry of the A-arm setup out of the way, they are really all pretty similar in design. You can change shapes here and there to make it look a bit different from another or change materials to make things stronger but there's a reason why we haven't seen a new Associated vehicle in years or why the XXX was the Losi buggy for a very long time. The new cars may be stronger and have added features and updated looks but fundamentally they are all pretty similar to each other. If you want to design a new car, think differently. Do what the industry doesn't do. Keep in mind there have been so many things tried that it will be very difficult to think of something truly unique. Perhaps it's time to revisit some design elements from the past.