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Comment by tomatotomato37 | Hacker News Reader

Did you read the article? F1 racers only use that design of steering wheel because they have ultra tight steering ratios that allow you to lock the wheels in a direction without multiple turns of the wheel; whereas anything used by civilians will have a much less twitchy ratio that needs an actual wheel.

Note this is also why big rigs usually have an additinal rotating handle attached to their wheels, since their ratios are very loose due to their weight and thus may need to turn their wheel 10+ times.

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As your speed increases you make smaller adjustments to turn because your traction limited. The kind of hand over hand steering people are concerned about is simply irrelevant at highway speeds let alone F1 speeds. It’s the same reason they need to slow down to corner.

Anyway, big rigs have loose steering because they need precision at highway speeds. The point is to minimize accident risks due to physics rather than any purely mechanical limitation.

>> Anyway, big rigs have loose steering because they need precision at highway speeds.

The opposite is actually true. Big rigs have loose steering so that the driver will Not jack knife the truck in a panic situation.

A tighter steering rack is Much more precise. Street tires, and especially racing tires, work best (have the most grip) at very narrow slip angles.

Here's a Wikipedia about the "friction circle" as racers call it. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_forces#:~:text=From%..."

Here's a Great video shot at the Nürburgring showing an astonishing lap record of the Porsche 919 Hybrid race car, precision personified... Enjoy!

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmSUHhP3ug"

You’ve missed my point.

Semi’s air suspension seats bounce around quite a bit which prevents them from keeping their hands steady. So, they need to dampen the input from such motions at highway speeds as race car style steering with would be counter productive in terms of precision. Which is why they have to turn the wheel so much.

It’s also useful for mechanical leverage should power steering go out.

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