Data Analysis Fundamentals: Throttle Histogram
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Throttle Histogram
01.57
| 00:00 | - Since the throttle pedal position defines the amount of torque the engine delivers, analysing the throttle pedal use during a lap can give us a good metric to analyse the way the driver is using the available engine power and how well balanced the chassis is. |
| 00:15 | All things being equal, the more throttle the driver is able to apply during a lap, the faster the car will be and the lower the lap time. |
| 00:23 | At the same time, the better balanced the chassis is, the easier it will accept throttle during corner exit. |
| 00:30 | The two specific pieces of data we're interested in here are the percentage of time the driver is at full throttle and the average throttle position during a lap. |
| 00:39 | Any time we see these two values increase, we can generally expect an improvement in the lap time although of course there are considerations that may come into play. |
| 00:49 | So throttle application alone can't be used as a sole indicator of performance. |
| 00:54 | The full throttle percentage can be derived from what's referred to as a histogram which breaks up our data from a full lap into what we call bins. |
| 01:04 | A bin is just a range of throttle movement and every sample from the full lap that spans that particular range will be placed into that bin. |
| 01:12 | A simple histogram for the throttle might then encompass 10 separate bins spanning from 0 to 100% throttle opening in 10% increments. |
| 01:22 | The average throttle percentage can be displayed directly on the time/distance graph of the throttle trace rather than from your histogram. |
| 01:29 | And your analysis software should provide an option to display the minimum, maximum and average values for each channel within the time/distance graph. |
| 01:38 | Alternatively this could also be derived from a channel report which we'll discuss shortly. |
| 01:42 | Once you've got a driver who's able to put in a consistent lap time, these throttle metrics can be a quick way of analysing a setup change to see at a glance if it's made an improvement to the balance or made it worse. |
