Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 5: Analyse Chassis
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Step 5: Analyse Chassis
04.04
| 00:00 | - The next step is to go through and analyse any chassis channels that we have. |
| 00:04 | So the first part of that is to go through with the driver and understand if the car is doing anything that they don't like. |
| 00:09 | So what I mean by that is handling traits like entry stability problems or balance problems, this is the place where you're trying to fix problems with the car rather than problems with the driver. |
| 00:20 | The sorts of things you want to go through are looking at things like any brake locking or wheel spin events, decide if you need to make any brake bias changes based on what you see in either the braking or the acceleration zones or any driving technique changes. |
| 00:33 | If you've got brake temperature sensors, you want to go through and check all of the maximums and the minimums to see if you need to make any changes to your brake cooling or your blanking. |
| 00:42 | As we saw in the course, it's not just important to make sure you're not overheating your brakes up also you want to make sure that you're not overcooking your brakes so you're staying within the safe coefficient of friction window for your particular setup. |
| 00:54 | If you've got damper potentiometers fitted to your car and if you've made something like a setup change from one run to another, maybe you've made an anti roll bar or a spring change from one run to the other. |
| 01:03 | This is where you can go through and validate the roll gradient to see if it's made the expected change in the percentage of lateral load transfer distribution that you expect. |
| 01:12 | Again if you've got damper potentiometers, this is a great time to go through and check the damping histograms if you've made any damping changes to understand if the dampers are working in the way you expect based on the changes that you made. |
| 01:23 | Another part that's kind of chassis related that you want to go through is looking at the upshift points to understand whether the driver is following the shift lights correctly so if we jump across to my laptop screen now, we'll have a look at an example of that. |
| 01:35 | Here I've got a shifting analysis page set up on my laptop. |
| 01:37 | I'll just go through exactly what I've got shown here. |
| 01:39 | We've got a time/distance plot with the ground speed, I've got the engine speed plotted here and I'll go through some of these other channels in a second. |
| 01:46 | I've got the gear position plot here, I've got our track map where we are on track and I've also got just a view to show me in a numerical way which gear we're in. |
| 01:58 | So these channels I've got here for shift lights are programmed as math channels for these, matching what I've got coming out of the logger, there's multiple ways you could do that, you could have these coming out as math channels out of the logger. |
| 02:09 | In this case I've got them programmed into my analysis project. |
| 02:12 | If I just zoom into one section, in fact we'll zoom into the section of track that we actually want to analyse to make it a bit clearer which is this straight section down here which is the longer straight in the track and the one we want to make sure we're optimising our gear shift points for. |
| 02:24 | So you can see I've got each one of these channels coming on at different points. |
| 02:29 | When each one of these channels is active, that's when each one of the shift lights is going to be active inside our logger as well, that's what the driver's going to see on track. |
| 02:36 | I've just got a different way of showing the exact same information up here, just showing you guys a different way you can use one of these displays. |
| 02:43 | This particular display is called a colour time/distance plot so it's just a way of plotting the values in a different format to what you're used to seeing on a normal time/distance plot. |
| 02:55 | And you see I've got this red line here which is actually defined at 7500 RPM, that's our target shift point so we want to see how close we're actually getting to that target shift point. |
| 03:04 | Now we can see here on our engine RPM if we're exiting the corner here, we're in second gear going to 3rd, 3rd gear going to 4th and 4th gear going to 5th. |
| 03:12 | So we can see in 3rd and 4th we're actually pretty much bang on our shift point here. |
| 03:16 | But in second gear we're overshooting it quite a lot. |
| 03:20 | And that's pretty common, that goes back to what I was talking about here before because we've got a much higher acceleration rate in the lower gears this is where you often need to have a gear dependent shift light set up. |
| 03:29 | So in this situation here, this would be a case where if I was to go through and tune the shift lights for second gear into lower, making them kind of a little bit lower in second. |
| 03:38 | That would automatically make them come in lower for 3rd and 4th as well and that's not what I want because the driver's doing a really good job of hitting pretty much the exact right points I want so this is a case where I might want to implement a gear position shift light offset to allow me to tune around second gear properly so that's probably one change I'd make to this configuration based on what I see on the shift points for this most important straight. |
