(Mid)west coast drive?

[Arpan]

Hi all!

This year, our team opted with a 6 cim 6 wheel west coast drive as our drive system. Because our shop monkeys didn't want to work with chains, we are using belts, and because our shop monkeys wanted easy access to our belts, they are outside the sidewall tubes, making our cantilevered shaft rather long. The FEA indicates this will be fine.

One of our mentors thinks that our drive system's pushing power could be improved by eliminating the belts to the front and back wheels and using the space where the pulleys used to be on the center axles for ... more wheels.
Thus the center axles would have triple wide performance wheels, and the front and rear axles would have a single performance wheel each. Only the center axles would be driven.

His explanation of why this would still give us excellent traction (6 wheels in contact with the ground) while improving turning (we have enough weight this year to get our CG more or less directly above center with a specifically lightweighted steel underbody plate) made a lot of sense to me.

I haven't seen anyone else try this, though, so I'm curious as to what the community might think. Are we just being silly?