Hey!
I was only slower on Sunday because I was stuck behind you for most of the race.
My fastest lap was my last lap of the championship race
Hey!
I was only slower on Sunday because I was stuck behind you for most of the race.
My fastest lap was my last lap of the championship race
Josh and Michael, outstanding driving to the end. Josh the recap and sharing of info is to be commended. You have answered dozens of my newbie questions and never even looked at me funny. Thanks! And thanks for the brake pads. You kept me out there this weekend and I owe you.
Josh made changes after qualifying and after the first race. Since he had a poor finish in the first race, he started pretty far up in the invert and was leading the race going into Turn 2. After that, there was no need to push hard and saving the tires for the third race that he would have started from last was the best plan. Also, you don't want to risk throwing the car off track pushing harder than needed. Well, other than the lap he messed up the entrance to the Bitch because he was distracted by an empty water bottle underneath his pedals. As a person who assembles safety critical flight hardware for astronauts in a FOD free lab, I'm wholly embarrassed to have missed that since I gave him the water in impound after the first race...
Anyway, if we didn't think there would be a delta in performance by going with a fresh set of tires we wouldn't have put them on. I don't think that number is a fair representation of the delta, though. If race three had been run in the dry, I think the delta between old and new would have been a little bit bigger. If the rain on Sunday morning had come without lightning, Josh would have been fine as we had rain tires ready to go. For those not keeping track, that's a set of practice tires, a set of lightly used tires, a set of stickers, and a set of rain tires brought to the track for one event. Having won my AI championship without ever owning more than one set of wheels, this seems completely nuts to me...
Richard P.
Last edited by RichardP; 06-13-2019 at 09:45 AM.
Quick SM Recap for me
After Hallett in March I noticed the bushings were walking in my rear upper control arms, ended up pulling all rear suspension and fixing the bushings and inspecting everything.
Due to the work on the car TnT was critical, on junk tires the car was pushing bad, the rear bar has 3 adjustments, ended up going full stiff which fixed it up on those tires.
Lap times were not bad on 30HC tires but the car was very difficult to drive.
Saturday comes, strapped on shiny 6HC tires, balance was now crazy oversteer, went full soft on the rear bar and made some small air pressure adjustments, around 34 hot seemed ideal based on pyro temps for the tires.
Car was now solid, made a friend for qual, did a little bump drafting and got pole by .2.
Checked the datalog, found the car was a little rich, dropped fuel pressure by 2psi for a bit more power.
Finished P1 for all races so I started up front, had a little fun on the start then left the field usually finishing with a 5 sec gap or so.
Final race was very interesting with the legends cars, they were all over the place, I would give one a pass then it would sputter out and I would pass them back OR I give them the pass then they go off track.
Had a red one spin right in front of me, almost tboned him, went 2 off, I almost spun but kept it together and finished P1 for the final race.
Next is COTA in 2 weeks with SCCA with the big boys!
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.
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