Practical Corner Weighting: 6. Testing Your Results
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6. Testing Your Results
02.47
| 00:00 | - Now that you've got your corner weights adjusted to your desired targets, it's time to get the car out on the track and see how it's affected the car's handling. |
| 00:07 | It's important when we're testing like this however to make sure we're comparing apples with applies and the track conditions are the same or at least similar. |
| 00:17 | A change in track temp or the impact of a brief rain shower can drastically affect the available grip and impact on your perceived results. |
| 00:26 | Any time we make any changes to the suspension we want to approach our first laps of the track carefully to ensure we haven't negatively impacted the car's performance and handling. |
| 00:36 | This means that leaving the pit lane and driving at 10 10ths isn't particularly smart. |
| 00:41 | Instead what we want to do is start slowly and build up our pace over the course of two to three laps, feeling out the way the car turns in, the amount of grip that's available and ensuring that the car's behaviour is predictable and that we've gone in the right direction. |
| 00:56 | Once we're confident that our changes haven't produced any negative effects, we can press on and see what our changes have done for our handling balance. |
| 01:05 | The questions we should be focusing on while we're testing our new setup include, does the car brake in a straight line or does it tend to consistently lock one wheel or pull to the side? Does the car tend to suffer from understeer or oversteer and if so, is this condition driver induced or an aspect of the car itself? Is the handling trait the same in left hand and right hand corners? When assessing this, we do need to be mindful of the fact that the car may have a different handling balance in low speed and high speed corners, particularly if you're dealing with a car that has high aerodynamic downforce. |
| 01:40 | With this in mind, ideally when assessing the left to right balance we want to do this through a similar corner with a comparable entry speed and radius although this obviously isn't always possible at every track. |
| 01:52 | We also need to consider that theory doesn't always work out in practice and often we may find that our car actually performs better if we move the cross weight percentage above or below 50%. |
| 02:05 | This is where testing with different cross weight percentages can be helpful so that you can get an idea of how your particular car handles with a given cross weight and where the sweet spot happens to be. |
| 02:16 | You'll also find that as we vary the cross weight percentage, the car will handle better in one direction than another. |
| 02:23 | After all, getting the car to handle the same in each direction has been a big focus of this course. |
| 02:29 | Racetracks don't have an equal number of left and right hand turns though so we may find that focusing on improving the car's performance in a right hand corner at the expense of left hand performance may still yield a net improvement in lap times at a track that has a clockwise layout. |
