Practical Corner Weighting: 6. Testing Your Results
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6. Testing Your Results
05.31
| 00:00 | - For the last step of our process we've headed to Highlands Motorsport Park to put the car to the test. |
| 00:05 | And as we saw during the worked example, we have made a reasonable sized change to our corner balance. |
| 00:13 | When we head out on track, the things we want to keep in mind of course are to build up our speed slowly and test to make sure that we haven't adversely affected our handling balance. |
| 00:23 | This really carries on from our analysing handling balance module within the body of the course. |
| 00:29 | We found that while the car was pretty good in most respects here at Highlands Motorsport Park, we were having a little trouble through turn 13, the fast left hand corner. |
| 00:39 | So this is what we're really going to be focusing on, has our corner weighting improved the balance through that corner? But at the same time we also want to make sure of course it hasn't negatively impacted on any of our other aspects, in particular here we're looking at our braking performance in a straight line, we want to make sure that our steady state handling through a corner hasn't been adversely affected and we also want to make sure that we're still able to generate relatively equal G forces in both left hand and right hand corners. |
| 01:09 | With that in mind, let's head out on the track and we'll see how our changes have affected the car. |
| 01:17 | Out on track now, the first thing we want to do any time we've made any changes that could affect the handling, is we want to build up our speed slowly. |
| 01:25 | What I'm doing is allowing everything in the car to come up to a normal operating temperature and this just gives me a chance to build up my speed lap after lap. |
| 01:34 | We want to check that the car isn't doing anything strange under brakes. |
| 01:38 | We can see that the car is still pulling up in a nice straight line and we also just want to slowly build up our cornering speed as well. |
| 01:45 | The last thing we want to do is go into the first corner at maximum tack and find out that the car is no longer handling how it did. |
| 01:53 | At the moment, everything's feeling good, although I'm still continuing to build up my pace slowly but surely. |
| 01:59 | Here I'm coming through a hairpin right and the car is turning into the corner quite well, it's still quite easy to provoke oversteer with too much throttle but that's to be expected. |
| 02:09 | Alright now with a little more heat into the tyres and confidence that the car isn't doing anything unpredictable, we can start to push on a little bit. |
| 02:17 | Coming through the carousel here, which is a bank left hand corner, the car's feeling nice and stable and this translates to good driver confidence. |
| 02:25 | So far, everything's feeling pretty good. |
| 02:28 | Alright coming up to turn 22, leading onto the front straight and this is a corner where we really require commitment and car balance is critical so let's see how it feels. |
| 02:42 | Turn in is nice and positive and the car feels nice and balanced, the car's doing essentially everything that I'd expect. |
| 02:49 | Now we're coming up towards turn 13 and we'll see if we've managed to improve the balance here. |
| 02:55 | Out to the right hand side of the track, you can get the car turned in, looking for our apex, the car's feeling quite stable now and really well planted on track. |
| 03:03 | I still couldn't hold the throttle flat through the corner but it definitely felt better. |
| 03:07 | So let's head back to the pits and we'll have a look at the data and we'll see what we've learned. |
| 03:11 | With our track test now complete, we'll just take a moment to go over what we've learned and what we've found. |
| 03:17 | First of all, it's important to know that the changes we've made haven't made the handling worse, that's obviously the first place we want to start. |
| 03:24 | The car still brakes straight, it still turns well, it still does everything that I'd expect. |
| 03:29 | Our main focus there was turn 13 and while this doesn't necessarily translate too well to video like this, it's straight away very apparent from the driver's seat that the balance has improved. |
| 03:43 | The car felt more neutral, it didn't feel like it wanted to swap ends and get loose and this ends up improving driver confidence, this allows me to use more throttle. |
| 03:54 | And this obviously ultimately improves lap time. |
| 03:58 | Now if you do have data available you can also use that data to help back up what you're learning from the driver's seat feedback. |
| 04:05 | In particular here looking at our GG diagram, making sure that we are still seeing equal lateral G forces left and right. |
| 04:15 | Now particularly if you've got a car balance that wasn't seeing that to start with, unfortunately in our case it was pretty equal, we'd be looking for an improvement here. |
| 04:24 | In our case because we were already seeing relatively equal lateral G forces left to right, we simply want to make sure that we haven't made that situation worse. |
| 04:33 | The next thing we can look at through turn 13 which was our focus is the way the driver's able to use the throttle. |
| 04:40 | And we can see here that the driver can't stay flat on the throttle but it is possible to use more throttle through that corner, again that adds up to improved cornering speed. |
| 04:50 | So at this point we're happy with the changes that we've made to the car. |
| 04:54 | Now of course as we've discussed through the body of the course, this can be an iterative process. |
| 05:00 | It may be that you want to manipulate that cross weight percentage further and see if you get an improvement in your overall lap times by biasing the car towards handling better in one direction than the other. |
| 05:12 | Specifically here at Highlands Motorsport Park, given that it is a predominantly clockwise track, we may actually get an improvement by focusing on the cornering performance through right hand corners and sacrificing a little bit of our lateral grip through left hand corners. |
