Practical Corner Weighting: 2. Prepping the Car
2. Prepping the Car
02.49
00:00 | - The next step of our process is to get our car race ready. |
00:04 | This begins with our alignment, as we saw in the body of the course, the specifics of our alignment will affect how the car sits on the scales and this will affect the accuracy as well as the repeatability of our corner weight readings. |
00:18 | In this case we've started with a full wheel alignment using our string setup on this particular car. |
00:24 | We've already got a reasonable amount of experience with this particular car at the track that we're going to be competing in and we've got an idea of what sort of numbers work for our camber as well as our toe. |
00:35 | Here we've started with our camber set at four degrees negative on the front axle line and 2.5 degrees negative on the rear axle line. |
00:43 | We're using two millimetres of toe out on each side of the front axle line and one millimetre of toe in on each side of the rear axle line. |
00:52 | We also want to make sure that our tyre pressures are set to our expected hot running pressures. |
00:58 | In this case we have set these to 30 psi. |
01:01 | We now need to give some consideration to our fluid levels in the car. |
01:06 | Should go without saying that both our engine coolant and our engine oil levels should be topped up to their normal operating levels. |
01:14 | However there is some flexibility in what we choose to do with our fuel load. |
01:19 | The Toyota 86 uses a 50 litre fuel cell that's fitted behind the passenger and driver's seats. |
01:27 | This will affect the corner weighting and balance as the fuel load burns off. |
01:32 | If we were competing in a endurance race, where we were expecting to run through a full tank of fuel on track, generally I would recommend setting the fuel load to about half a tank. |
01:44 | Obviously this means that our corner balance is only going to be perfect when we are at half a tank of fuel but it means that we're going to be closer to the mark both when our tank is completely full and completely empty. |
01:57 | Rather than adjusting our corner weighting at one extreme. |
02:01 | For our particular application though, we don't need to worry about that, the car is not being used for endurance racing. |
02:07 | Instead what we're going to be doing is running this car in sprint races which are short five to six lap races and generally with this sort of racing we will be operating from a full tank of fuel so that's where we're going to set our fuel load for the purposes of the next steps of our process. |
02:24 | The last consideration here is to add ballast to the driver's seat to replicate the race weight of the driver. |
02:31 | In this case we've got a driver all up with gear and helmet, around about 84 kg so we've added that much weight to the driver's seat. |
02:41 | With our car now prepped and ready to go, we can move on with the next step of our process. |