Practical Corner Weighting: 2. Preparing the Car
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2. Preparing the Car
02.07
| 00:00 | - Now that we've got a location to corner weight the car, the next step is to prepare the car for the corner weighting process. |
| 00:06 | What we need to do here is ensure that the car is completely race ready and by this I mean that the car needs to be in the condition it'll be in before leaving the pits and heading onto the track. |
| 00:17 | This is because you need to mimic the conditions that the car will be in whilst out on the track. |
| 00:22 | For example, if you corner weight a rally car with the driver in the seat by no co driver, you're obviously going to end up with an imbalance when the car is out on a special stage. |
| 00:32 | Here you need to consider the weight of the driver and co driver if applicable and normally we'll use ballast to replicate these weights during the corner weighting process. |
| 00:41 | Remember even things like your helmet and your race suit will affect your total weight so you need to factor these in when you're adding ballast. |
| 00:49 | Next we need to consider the fuel level in the car and this is where you're going to need to decide on a bit of compromise, particularly for longer endurance races where the weight of fuel will vary significantly during a race. |
| 01:01 | For short sprint races, we may only see the fuel mass change by five to 10 kg, however an endurance car can easily burn 80 to 100 kg of fuel during a race. |
| 01:11 | There's no perfect solution here and we'd recommend corner weighting the car with half of the normal fuel load. |
| 01:18 | This will mean that the balance will inevitably change through the race but this is going to give a better overall solution through the duration of a race than using either a completely full or completely empty tank. |
| 01:30 | We also need to make sure that the other fluids are topped up to their normal levels including oil, water and we want to remove any loose items from inside the car. |
| 01:40 | Next you need to perform any changes to the alignment that you've decided are necessary before the next session. |
| 01:46 | As we've discussed earlier in the course, changes to aspects such as the camber will have a minor effect on the measured corner weight. |
| 01:53 | Lastly we need to set the tyre pressures to the normal hot running pressures and disconnect the anti roll bars to ensure that they aren't pre loading the suspension and influencing the corner weights. |
