Based on modern automotive design philosophy and design imperatives, the answer to this question is somewhat similar to asking whether red paint is better than blue or green. Paint colors, however; the preferences of today’s consumers, legally mandated safety features, clever marketing strategies and the sometimes biased interpretation of some automotive journalists have blurred the lines between many everyday drivers and vehicles that can be called sports cars.
At the risk of clouding the already murky distinctions between sports cars and other high-performance vehicles, it should be said that while supercars and hypercars are usually easy to define and characterize, the differences between modern sports cars and most everyday drivers are not always so easy to define. It is difficult because many, if not most, sports cars can be (and often are) used as daily drivers.
Therefore, if we want to answer the question “what makes a car sporty?” with any degree of objectivity, we have to remove modern considerations from the question and take a short detour to a time when there was no doubt about how sports cars differed from ordinary cars.
The British experience
The British can perhaps be given credit as the originators of the idea that with some design changes, cars could be made more fun to drive than the usual offerings of the day. Thus, starting in the 1920s, several manufacturers such as Austin, Morris, Alvis, MG and others such as Triumph Motor Company began to produce cars that accommodated two people as a particular design imperative. Typically, these cars were also soft-top or convertible and had improved handling and performance characteristics over more conventional offerings from the same manufacturers.
The list of technical innovations and improvements aimed at increasing performance and improving handling of sports cars produced in the 1920s is too long to reproduce in this article. However, some items deserve special mention because modern interpretations of these ideas still form much of the basis of modern automotive design philosophy. Here is what the manufacturers of the time changed, developed or adjusted:
They lowered the center of gravity of their products to increase stability during cornering.
They began experimenting with special shock absorber designs and settings when hydraulic shock absorbers became widely used after 1927.
They reconsidered the relationship between track width and the distance between the front and rear axles to improve straight-line stability at high speeds.
They improved weight distribution by moving engines and transmissions closer to the middle of the car
They increased the rigidity of the then common ladder chassis designs.
They increased the diameter of the brake drum to improve braking efficiency.
They reduced their overall weight by replacing steel body panels with aluminum panels (often made by hand).
They improved the performance of standard engines by adding carburetors to the usual single carburetor on standard engines, redesigning intake manifolds to improve airflow, increasing engine valve diameters, or reducing crankshaft stroke to increase engine speed. Other innovations included reducing the weight of flywheels and increasing the bore diameter of the cylinder to compensate for the reduced crankshaft stroke.
While collectively these and other design innovations/adjustments created cars that demonstrated measurable performance improvements, even the best sports cars of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and 1960s were still extremely primitive by today’s standards. Nevertheless, despite all the shortcomings, British sports cars succeeded and generally outperformed their European-made competitors in almost every motorsport discipline practiced at the time.
The most notable of these was the hill climb competition, in which competitors raced up unpaved hills, the aim of the competition being to see who could overcome off-road terrain in the shortest time. Various Triumph Motor Company models were incredibly successful hill climbers, as were several MG models. However, Triumph Motor Company’s success in building race-winning sports cars came to an abrupt halt in the 1960s when British Leyland acquired the company.