Perfectionist that I am, pretty much the entire car has been rebuilt this evening, apart from the engine.  Not satisfied with the imprecise and uncontrollable steering, I completely rebuilt the whole assembly from scratch using my own custom design.  The system I’d used yesterday was taken from an official Lego model, and used their official steering pieces, but the problem lay in their axle; because the ball joint was only one stud’s width away from the pivot point it meant that the mechanism accentuated any give in the gearing rather than compensating for it.  So I rebuilt it using ‘conventional’ Lego pieces to give me a ball joint 2 studs away from the pivot point.  It took some fiddling around to get it all lined up properly and get the suspension strut sitting nicely, and then some more fiddling to get it to attach to the front subframe, but we’re finally there – I have a front suspension/steering assembly that I’m happy with!

Next on my list of things to sort out was the rear axle, which just looked plain ugly.  It would do the job, and would probably be mostly hidden by the bodywork once that was figured out, but I just didn’t like the way it looked or the way it worked – it just wasn’t realistic in any way shape or form.  So that was stripped out too.

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