Rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout

Placing the car's heaviest component within the wheelbase minimizes its rotational inertia around the vertical axis, facilitating turn-in or yaw angle.

The mid-engined layout also uses up central space, making it generally only practical for single seating-row sports-cars, with exception to a handful of 2+2 designs.

Because of successes in motorsport, the RMR platform has been commonly used in many road-going sports cars despite the inherent challenges of design, maintenance and lack of cargo space.

Later, Ferdinand Porsche used mid-engine design concept towards the Auto Union Grand Prix cars of the 1930s which became the first winning RMR racers.

But it was not until the late 1950s that RMR reappeared in Grand Prix (today's "Formula One") races in the form of the Cooper-Climax (1957), soon followed by cars from BRM and Lotus.

The mid-engined layout was brought back to Indianapolis in 1961 by the Cooper Car Company with Jack Brabham running as high as third and finishing ninth.

This was followed by the first De Tomaso, the Vallelunga, which mated a tuned Ford Cortina 1500 Kent engine to a VW transaxle with Hewland gearsets.

[2] This represented an extremely innovative sportscar at a time when all of its competitors (aside from the rear-engined Porsches), from Ferraris to Aston Martins, were traditional front-engined, rear-wheel-drive grand tourers.