Vorderman, have you test my car engine? Just some posts above.
I did test it - it seemed fairly slow to me, with no real powersliding or drifting, but the car was very stable and didn't flip over all the time, which is good. Reading your posts it seems that your full engine has a different drifting system - would you be able to make a demo of your full system for us to see?
3) self destruct?
I mean when the simulation goes crazy and breaks - typically all the bodies start flying madly in circles and then everything disappears or the program locks up. It seems to always happen following an impact of some sort, in many cases not even a severe impact.
The trick to get stable cars with ode is using geomtransform so you can push down the center of mass of the object
I did try this, but by offsettting the mass rather than using a geomtransform - I just spotted on the ODE mailing list that the mass offset doesn't work correctly, so possibly it had no effect in my program - I'll try the geomtransform instead.