Hallett Recap - 2019

[RichardP]

I knew I had to run as cleanly and quickly as I could to close the gap. Qual lap after qual lap, Michael was doing the same thing.

I was pretty shocked to look at the lap times for the two front drivers. I put together a list of the times and the splits. It's pretty cool to see where Josh was losing time behind the AI car and where he is able to start closing the gap. You can see them slowing down a bit on lap 18 to pass the workers trying to unstick the BMW from the mud just past the Bitch. That same BMW came back on track and stopped just past Turn 3 to put out the caution in Turn 2 for the rest of the race.

The biggest takeaway from their times is the staggering consistency for both of the drivers over the whole race. The first lap is longer because of the standing start. Michael has one lap in the 28's on lap 8, another for the caution, and the final lap when he exited the last turn in the marbles because Josh was on the inside. He has three high 26's in a row followed by a 27.1 when Josh is really on him - at the end of the long race. The rest of the times are all in the 1:27's. Josh gets a slower start because of the AI car. Apart from the caution, he has four 26's when he is closing in and the rest are in the 27's. He has 16 laps in the 27's and 17 laps below his Saturday qualifying time.

The consistency thing when really going for it is interesting to me. A long time ago, Chris Marvel and I were at a TWS DE in my car. He was good friends with one of the other instructors and they would always go at it hard if they met on track. He came in from a session completely exhausted and said I needed to look at the data because he was sure his best lap time was in there. He said he didn't have anything else left to give on track. I found that he did all of his best segment times in that session but none of the laps were his best. He did his best lap time in the previous session when he drove "normally." It was a learning opportunity for both of us.

Just looking at lap times is a pretty high level look at data but I don't see any of the expected sloppiness at the end of the run when the tires, brakes, engine, and driver are all getting overheated. The fact that they both raced that hard for that long without over driving and making mistakes is amazing to me. It would be cool to do a deeper dive of the data between them.


Richard P.