Nobody has yet managed to find conclusive proof of the Abominable Snowman’s existence, but that hasn’t stopped people swearing they’ve seen it, albeit via a very fleeting glimpse, in a raging blizzard.
Similarly, nobody has ever experienced the Snowman’s automotive equivalent, the bizarre thing known as steering feel. Every driving enthusiast who wants to be taken seriously, however, will claim to have experienced it.
Ah, this fella knows his stuff, you might say. He’s talking about how Car X’s shift from hydraulic to electric assistance for the steering rack has stripped away all semblance of steering feel.
As with those debating the existence of the Snowman (or the Loch Ness Monster), there are some on the other side of the fence, with sceptical enthusiasts insisting that steering feel doesn’t exist in the first place. For them, it’s a mythical creature that those “in the know” (or those who want to seem knowledgeable) about cars have cooked up in order to sound like they know what they’re on about.
In all fairness, their cynicism isn’t completely unfounded. Ask someone (even the most rabid enthusiast) to describe what steering feel is and you’ll likely be met with a rather broad spectrum of responses, none of them especially helpful to the topic in question. These range from slightly furtive, evasive replies (“steering feel… er… steering feel is like that one, lor) all the way up to aggressive bluster (“huh, you talk so much about cars, but you don’t know what is steering feel, meh?”), the surest fallback when one has completely no idea .
So just what is this steering feel stuff about, then? Up until very recently, it’s not something I would’ve been very comfortable answering myself. That is, until I drove the Lotus Exige S with its unassisted steering setup.
I’m still not sure mere words can do it justice, but before your hogwash alarms start going off, let me just say it’s like asking me to describe the colour blue. The best I can do is to say that the Exige S’ steering isn’t unlike a go-kart’s.
The wheel almost seems alive, bucking and kicking in your hands, and there’s so much tactile feedback coming through the rim that if you ran over a small creature (not deliberately, of course), there’s a good chance you could tell what it had for breakfast.
Then I went back to my own car, which is no slouch in the feel department either (or so I’m told), but coming from the Exige, my little hatchback’s steering suddenly felt curiously devoid of… something. Now that “something” might be this mysterious steering feel everyone is so fond of talking about.
All right, I know that isn’t exactly what anyone might call conclusive evidence, but since I was perfectly sober at the time and had adequate amounts of water and rest, I couldn’t have been hallucinating.
Or, could it be that I was addled by the multi-sensory assault that is the Exige? Could that have been the “blizzard” that clouded my judgment? Does steering feel not exist at all?
Well, I don’t care. I know what I felt. And to quote the immortal words of Fox Mulder from The X-Files: “I want to believe”.
