Agreed; the motor and tires (tyres to you, Elvo
) play the primary roles in the rotational-inertia game, and driveline can be practically discounted. We can even conclude that the tires play a larger role than the motor; if the armature's effect was larger than a "normal" motor-direction car would react oppositely to throttle changes in the air to what they do now - braking would lift the nose, and acceleration would drop it.
Anyways, I guess being a typical physicist I was singling out only the change in motor direction, and theoretically considering everything else on the car to be exactly the same. Further, I was only looking at the magnitude and direction of the torque generated in the chassis. In that case, the effect of flipping the motor would be the same no matter where it was located. The more practical things you guys are talking about - weight distribution, suspension settings, we could get into chassis flex if you wanted - I agree, those will affect how this "chassis torque" is realized as weight transfer, and thus how it is felt by the driver. Testing whether motor placement made a difference could be difficult, I think; you'd have to have two different cars (different motor placements) each with two different transmissions to reverse directions; however the cars couldn't vary much in terms of stiffness, weight distribution, suspension, etc, so that the motor position was the primary variable.
Fun Discussion!
