Mechanically the same... Ti gives you some options as standard (heated seats for one) that you have to buy individually with base sport.. There are (2) things you can only get with Ti - the 5 hole wheels and the sport seats.. To me the seats were worth the difference in price - best seats I've ever had in 35 years..

 

^ yes, those sport seats are awesome and where one of my requirements.
Thank you for your reply.

 

BTW, the Ti Performance Package (Mechanical LSD and active dampers) which I incorrectly called “Sport Perf Pkg” in my signature, is actually a Ti only option.

If you stay with base Giulia, only the 18” sport appearance package is available, which on new builds doesn’t option the Sport Leather seats (see above post) which are terrific, and the same geometry as the QV standard seats. Optioning a Ti opens up the 19” wheel package, and avail of the Ti Perf Pkg for sub-Quad performance joy. A RWD is called a Q2 with the LSD/dampers, and badged accordingly.

Another cool option, if you go RWD, is the staggered 19” tire setup with 40 series up front and 35’s in the rear. This is a zero cost summer tire setup.

Hot perf add-ons are also: High perf BiXenon headlights, Leather Dash. I found the sunroof a no-go if I wanted the closest to QV, at the mere mortal pricetag.

Aftermarked exhaust, intake and ECU tunes (soon, we hope) will bring this beast into the estd. 350HP range, with close to 380 lb.ft. torques. Zero to 60 estimated 4.6 sec, topspeed probably 156+. Likely sub $3K for all that. A or N mode = Clark Kent, D mode = ???.

You are going to love this car! Good luck with your search,

 

...Another cool option, if you go RWD, is the staggered 19” tire setup with 40 series up front and 35’s in the rear. This is a zero cost summer tire setup.

...
Aftermarked exhaust, intake and ECU tunes (soon, we hope) will bring this beast into the estd. 350HP range, with close to 380 lb.ft. torques. Zero to 60 estimated 4.6 sec, topspeed probably 156+. Likely sub $3K for all that. A or N mode = Clark Kent, D mode = ???.

You are going to love this car! Good luck with your search,

Some comments:

Stock RWD zero to 60 MPH is 5.6 seconds.
Stock AWD zero to 60 MPH is 5.1 seconds even though the car is heavier.
The issue being that the car makes more power than 2 "normal" tires can handle from about 0 to 20 MPH. Track type tires should improve and equalize both figures, but then you have expensive tires that wear out very rapidly and that cannot cope with cool or cold temperatures.

Increasing 280HP to 350HP should improve the AWD zero to 60 MPH figure to about 4.4 Seconds.

Many people report that the car hesitates to start from 0. Turbo lag from a standing start is also an issue. The above 0 to 60 times are achieved by revving the engine with the brakes locked prior to starting.

AWD sits a little higher than RWD, so the handling is different. The optional LSD makes the non-disable-able traction control less aggressive. The same may be true for AWD versus RWD.

The transmission is rated for a maximum of 368 ft-lbs of torque. The tuner should not exceed this value.

 

thank you for the insight.
So unless it has the LSD/active dampers it is not a Q2

the car I am looking at only has 18" wheels but it does have yellow calipers.

 

There is likely no significant performance difference between 18" and 19" wheels, although I don't think anyone has done a side-by-side comparison. Many people feel the 19" wheels look better, including myself. The 18" wheels should handle rough roads better due to the taller sidewalls.

The Ti comes with a larger infotainment screen.
If you want to be able to drive aggressively be certain that the car has the shift paddles.

 

If you want to be able to drive aggressively be certain that the car has the shift paddles.

I am glad some one brought this up and I am unsure I should have started a new thread.
I have always have had manual cars. I have driven automatics here and there (borrowed a car) but not owned one.

With that said. I have a 6spd track car (STI) and currently my Fiat 500 abarth as a daily (5spd manual).
I am wondering if I am going to miss diving a manual (Fiat). maybe I just need to give up on manuals and learn how to drive a sport automatic. (?)

 

You are not going to miss it with the paddles. You will definitely miss it without the paddles.

 

my 2c is i've driven manuals my whole life (and on the track) and I don't miss it. I've accepted things have moved on I keep telling people - try and find a new Lambo without paddles

 

Well those are my thoughts. I still have my track car which is a 6spd. but I think for everyday the paddles will be great. Plus yes a lot of the new high performance cars care auto.

 

Exactly! Btw my Q4 was excellent fun on the track, you might want to consider seeing what yours can really do where abouts are you? Can always join us in 2018 for some days if you’re close (or not)

 

How hard were you comfortable pushing your car? I want to enjoy track time but not at the expense of tires, brakes, sheet metal...

 

Good luck and let us know what you decide!

Thanks

 

There are some oddities regarding car tires and wheels that I hope someone can explain.

1) Aluminum has a much higher strength to weight ratio than rubber, so why does a wheel assembly with less aluminum and more rubber weigh less? Do not say the air is carrying the weight, because that is not true*.

2) Bicycle and motorcycle tire cross section forms a circle when inflated dictated by the physics of pneumatic inflation, but car tires do not seem to behave this way. Stiff parts in the car tire? Thick parts in the car tire? The profile of bicycle tires is fixed, for example.

3) What ever happened to wire wheels? They work really well for bicycles and save significant weight compared to any other type of wheel. Offsets too large? Cars transitioned to cast alloy wheels before Jobst Brandt published his treatise on how to make a reliable and light weight wire wheel, then never looked back?

4) In the Nascar tire picture above, the wheel offset looks so extreme that the brakes don't appear to be inside the wheel barrel. If smaller wheels are better, why isn't geometry like that used elsewhere?

* The sidewalls of the tire are preloaded by the air. When a load is added to the tire the tension in the tire sidewalls decreases, creating the force to carry weight. Thus, the tire can only carry as much weight as the pre-tension in the sidewalls of the tires and the limit of that pre-tension is largely a function of the strength of the rubber in the sidewall.

 

1) Automotive tires aren't just rubber, they're actually a cross mesh weave of high performance fabrics that are encased in rubber, which is what you see when the tire wears 'down to the threads'. The fabrics are generally lighter than rubber, and tires of course are hollowed out as opposed to metal wheels which are solid, so as a result tires for their size weigh less than metal wheels.

2) Automotive tires have to handle load weights of thousands of pounds, so they are designed with a completely different sidewall structure than bike tires. The sidewalls in fact serve somewhat like shock absorbers in helping to control the shifting weight while cornering, and also help smooth out vertical transitions.

3) My second car was a 1968 Triumph Spitfire with wire wheels, and while they looked great, they were a total PITA to clean and keep tuned. My guess is they fell out of fashion for those reasons, as well as it was considered a 'dated' look. During the 60's and after, everything was about being modern and futuristic; wire wheels weren't it.

4) Nascar wheels are very wide so even with the offset there's still a lot of wheel barrel in there. As in all the pro racing sports, the teams always go with as much wheel as the rules will allow. I know that inboard brakes have been used in Formula 1, but that may have issues with cooling, not to mention the space required if those were used on a production car. A production car has to carry all kinds of safety and emissions systems that racing cars don't, as well as sound-proofing and serviceability. I can't imagine what a PITA it would be to have to change the brakes and rotors on inboard brakes if they were on a production car. It would be great for performance, but the issues involved just make them too impractical.

As you'll note in automotive tire specs, they do have load ratings which is what the sidewalls can handle under proper inflation pressures. It's a combination of materials used, thickness and design profile. Tire rubber compound recipes are an arcane art which each company guards jealously. That determines grip and how the tire handles heat and wear, but the load strength is based on the tire profile and what's embedded inside the rubber.

I couldn't even begin to tell you how many hours I've spent researching tires and wheels over the years for the various cars I've owned. What I can tell you is the tires and wheels we have available today are better than anything we've ever had before.

 

1) Hmmm, somehow I got it in my head that only the tread is re-enforced, but I see from an online search that is incorrect.

One issue that can happen with high profile tires is rebound under-damping. In the extreme case, my backhoe has 4' tall tires with a 1' sidewall. These tires are the entire suspension of the vehicle, since I do not have the optional active suspension feature. The backhoe is unstable above about 15MPH because it bounces uncontrollably. I would not expect that kind of mis-behavior from a car (the backhoe also has CG and moment of inertia issues), but when you increase the profile of the tires of a car you are adding undamped springing.

My experience is that lower profile tires give the vehicle a more "direct" feel. Keep in mind than handling and cornering performance, although strongly correlated, are not the same thing. Handling == how easy it is to navigate turns at speed. Cornering performance == how fast a turn can be navigated regardless of the effort involved.

2) I think a bicycle tire has more loading per amount of material than a car tire. My bicycle tires have to be able to handle 100lbs of loading with no suspension (i.e. shock loads are significant) and with most of the load able to shift fore-aft substantially. They weigh 1/2 pound. Giulia's tires handle 15 times the weight, but weigh 50 times as much. The bicycle tire is not fiber re-enforced rubber but instead rubber sealed fibers; they are almost all fiber-a mix of Kevlar and Aramid fibers. Bicycle tires made a huge jump in performance about 15 years ago. They are much more expensive than car tires for the amount of material you get.

3) If you needed to tune the wheels on your Triumph from time to time the wheels were clearly not designed using the principals put forth by Jobst Brandt. I believe he published the 1st edition in the early 1980s. Rumor has it that he once was an engineer at Ferrari, but I know him as an HP employee. At HP he was able to get access to the computing power needed to do finite element analysis on a spoked bicycle wheel (difficult, circa 1980) and found that "common knowledge" about how a wire wheel works was 100% wrong. The major points that I remember are:
A) The spokes must be as tight as possible to get the maximum strength from the wheel. Spoke tension only decreases when the wheel is in use. This is the single biggest problem with most older wire spoked wheels.
B) The spokes are springs, so that thicker spokes do not make a stronger wheel.
C) The spokes should be straight except for an elbow at one end. The elbow should be thicker than the rest of the spoke.
D) The spokes must not be allowed to rotate while the nipples are turned or they will appear to loosen in use as they "untwist". The nipple threads should be slathered in anti-seize or it will not be possible to achieve A) or D). A special hardening anti-seize compound is best.
E) The spokes should be overtightened and then relaxed slightly. Brandt's method for doing this without breaking anything when building a bicycle wheel would not work for a car wheel.

A spoked steel and aluminum bicycle wheel is about 2/3rds of the weight of a full carbon fiber bicycle wheel of similar strength. Although the front wheel of a bicycle has the rim centered over the hub, the rear wheel has a substantial offset in order to make room for the gears on the hub.

Building a wire wheel properly is labor intensive, so maybe they got too expensive? Racers migrated away from them in the late 1950s, long before information about how to design and build them properly became available.

4) I can't tell from the picture. The wheel looks like it is installed "inside out" in the picture.
My Etype had inboard rear brakes. Changing the pads was not difficult. Changing the rotors involved tearing the whole back of the car apart. Heaven help you if the seals in the differential start leaking (as purchased, I could see daylight around the differential seals, plus the calipers were badly rusted inside-what a mess!). The Etype has removable panels in the trunk to ease access to the rear pads, but I found I could get at the pads from underneath reasonably easily. Etype rear brakes are notorious for overheating on the track; Jag even produced a track kit for reducing the problem.

Both wheels and tires have pressure and load ratings. On my pickup the wheels are rated 95psi max and 3500 pounds max, while the tires are rated 115psi max and 4650 pounds max. One has to use the lower figure. Axle ratings also need to be considered.

For bicycle tires, wider lowers the rolling resistance as does higher pressure. However, wider generally means a lower maximum pressure and wide high pressure tires ride very rough making it not as straightforward to choose as it sounds. It is unclear what works to minimize rolling resistance for car tires.

Yes, car, bicycle and motorcycle tires have improved a lot in recent times. In comparison medium and heavy duty truck tires have gotten cheaper but not much better.

 

Interesting discussion.

 

The best option is to add the Centerline exhaust and V2 intake from Eurocompulsion. It vastly improved performance.

 

I was fortunate to find a base sport in the show room.. paddle shifters, dark 5 hole wheels, sport facias, red calipers. I was originally looking for a Ti but the base sport in stock had the individual options I wanted.

 

I got the Ti Sport mainly for the Gloss Black window surrounds and the sport seats.

 

2018 Option list and 2017 too (this is yesteryear.... ) ... I try to attach those 2 files but each 1.7ish MB not allowed. Drop me an email at henryyang@allstate.com I will send over. I own an insurance biz but I would rather drive this car all day long :--)