djr81

There is an age old saying Duncan: The fastest cars are in the car park. Most people with a half decent track car will stare at their feet & start mumbling when asked what it has on it. Most people with a half decent road car will bang on about it for hours and hours, or post up some huge thread in an internet forum.

Aluminium sheet is easy, cheap & light. You can get whatever guage you want (eg 0.8mm, 1.2mm, 1.6mm) from most industrical insulation businesses. It is easy to bend about and doesn't weigh very much at all.

Which means, I think, that it has been a year since Sato in the Super Aguri overtook Alonso in the McLaren on the outside. Ahh, the good old days.

Dyno sheet, Baron. Dyno sheet.

If you check the Nismo web site you will find the LMGT4 in an 18*9 is 8 kg near as damn it. Tyre is another 12kg or so. Rays wheels eg RE30 or CE28 in the same size are only 100 grams or so lighter. Not sure about the stocker however.

The cycle rate of the R32 ABS is pretty slow. Not sure how many Hz it runs at but I haven't come across an ABS that runs as slow as that one.

Sticker tells all........

The shafts in turbo chargers spin at speeds in excess of 100,000rpm. So there is no point hypothesizing about where the bits of turbine wheel, shaft & housing are going to end up because the answer is everwhere. Including in your precious RB26.

The Alonso thing, then the Spygate thing, now this. Hasn't Lewis suffered enough? http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,2...5012974,00.html Oh and I was a Hamilton fan before I found out about this. I mean Jacques Villeneuve could drive once, then he got hooked up with her in the story. Then he got dumped by BMW. Coincidence? I think not. Good drive by Sutil by the way. Shame for it to finish in such a manner.

I watched the episode when they built the race cars. Well some of it. The "expert" commentators were explaining how putting more weight over the rear wheels helped them grip better and caused the car to understeer. It was at about that point I threw up and left the room.

The more usual ride height for the front is 355, 345 on the rear. This will help avoid your issue on the front but may cause them on the rear. It will also help the car to handle better. 255 width tyres on a 17" rim should clear in most cases - as long as the wheel offset is correct. It should be a +22 which will be written on the inside of the rim (You need to take it off)

The -1.1 wasn't on the 51.49 lap. It was a whole other seat trim puckering experience. The most I usually see on a "normal" lap is 1.05 or thereabouts. My bad braking is basically a combination of a lack of talent, bumps and creeping up on the braking markers during the day. I have to try & convince myself I can grab an extra yard or so before hitting the anchors. Plus the brakes go away because they are too small anyway. The pedal effort is very high in the Skylines for some reason. Compared to my daily driver Foulcan it is rediculous.

I usually get racetech, but unfortunately that has degenerated into what the component suppliers have got new to sell this month. I used to get racecar eng but it disappeared from the shelves at the newsagent ages ago & I have not seen it since. I will have to see what I can find. Not sure quite what you meen by speed corrected steering angle. I did some maths work on determining the rate of change of yaw angle in the car to ensure the car was turning less as it exited the corner. That may be similar but it would perhaps be more useful plotted against distance or speed rather than time. See the attached. As for the brakes, well when the tyres are warm I can't get the ABS to activate. Occasionally it will do it over the bumps at Collie, but generally no chance. The most I ever saw was 1.1 gees which was during a holy crap moment when a Cobra infront of me didn't check his mirrors. Long_circuit_with_yaw_rate.PDF

It isn't a question of acting innocent, nor a question of getting caught. It is simply an attempt to convince people that doing things like this bloke did can have really bad long term consequences. Putting aside the obvious like killing and or injuring people, the low end of the scale includes bad shit like: 1. Bringing more negative publicity to the car enthusiast community 2. Damaging and/or destroying your car. 3. Getting yourself a criminal record. 4. Losing your licence. 5. Getting yourself an awful driving record that makes insurance near on impossible to get. And it goes on and on. If anyone wants to listen to those members of SAU who have done track days & the like they will get a consistant message about entering properly organised, sanctioned events of any kind: 1. It's safe. 2: It's responsible 3: It's legal. 4: It is by far and away far more challenging and enjoyable than arsing about on any public road will ever be. Which is all there is to say, really.

Um I usually do this via the engine dyno print out. Basically you plot the rear wheel torque in each gear on the y axis and the road speed on the x axis. It gives you a series of cascades which allows you to pick the gear change points in road speed & then average and transfer them to rpm. In the case of a Gt-R it just shows you need to rev the berries out of the motor in every gear - well mine does anyway. Mmm quick gear changes = unhappy synchros. Just the price you pay, I guess. Max negative gees is slightly over one. In other words my tyres have more grip than the brakes have stopping power. I find myself being chief sponsor, driver, engineer, gofer, brollie dollie, mechanic, crew chief, owner.....and basically not having enough time on a track day to think things through properly. Combined with a dodgy memory from old age & infirmary the tick sheet/prompt sounds like a good idea. Otherwise I am forced to rely on the inference that ending upside down in the sand trap means the latest brilliant idea didn't quite work. From what you have said I will go away and try & sort out a more efficent way of overlaying segments of laps. With regard to lateral gees is there a particular part of the corner sequence where most time can be gained. Obviously the corner exit is up there, but I was more thinking of where to go after you have found all the grip, ie finding more grip more often rather than just peaking the thing at 1.25 gees or whatever.

For whatever reason the RE55's appear to be much cheaper on pricing than almost all the others - in the larger sizes anyway. Plus they have a reputation as being the quicker tyre. But maybe Yokohama has made a gain.... As an aside I was watching the utes from Wanneroo on the weekend just gone (Go the yocal Grant Johnson) and amongst the PR blather from one or other of the Jane family was the claim that the new 18" tyre/rubber combination was, relative to the 17's worth over half a second a lap. Any comments?

He did not make a sensible choice. He simply decided not to compound his stupidity with even more of the same. The reason this sort of stuff is treated so seriously is because it can and does kill people. Something that picking up small change from the pavement is unlikely to do. There are no conditions on a freeway or any other public road where it is safe to do 263km/h when other road users are doing 100 or less. The closing speeds are frightening. You only need someone to change lanes infront of you (What you don't check your mirrors for people 100 metres away?) for things to end up in the mother of all accidents. Now I say accident, but it isn't really, is it? More of an inevitable consequence of recklessnes & stupidity. I cannot believe anyone is defending this idiot.

Roy, as good as it was, last years McLaren was no FW14B. Benetton signed Patrese for what he knew of the Williams active suspension system. Plus he was an excellent development driver & a damn nice bloke to boot.

He went P3 in the Williams BMW in 2004(?) Got pants by his team mate - some hack called Heidfeld for 2nd.

I don't think anyone is getting excited. My point was simply that you are never going to stop British TV from hyping British drivers. LH is just the most recent. Before him were Jenson Button, DC, Damon Hill and worst of all Nigel bloody Mansell. He would drive like a dickhead, fk his car & then the commentary would all be about how desperately unlucky he was. LH is ok by me. I sort of figure it is a bit harsh to criticise him for not having won 7 world drivers championships half way through his second year in the sport.

Thanks for the reply, Gary. The problem I have with most of the books is that they spend an inordinate amount of time banging on about how to install data loggers & alot of basic stuff that because of my work (Mechanical Engineer) I pretty much already understand from uni days. As for logging, at the moment it is pretty much just the basics: Lateral, longitudinal gees & RPM in one unit as shown by the graph, above. I run a camera on the back shelf so I can check for steering input smoothness & general car behaviour. I have the Ruzic attessa controller so can log (or will be able to when it gets wired up) the 4WD function. Plus a Power FC so just about any of the engine parameters are accessable via datalogit Between that lot most of the inputs can be accessed, but not necessarilly in one application. Unfortunately I don't have a GPS system which sucks although a mate has a 5Hz phone logger which I can pinch I suppose. To use the case of understeer as an example obviously you get square waveforms (for want of a better word) on the lateral plots. Which basically shows you having to hold lateral acceleration for too long on corner exit - in other words not trading off lateral for longitudinal grip as should be done. This shows up on the X-Y plot too. But I guess I am whittering on now. Questions are two fold: Do any books move much beyond the basics & focus on the interpretation of the data. As an example check the X_Y plot. Obviously the quicker time (This is a scatter plot of the chart at the top of the thread) shows a fleshing out of the braking plus turn in component & a happier car through the right hand sweeper - something that helped lap times. Pretty basic stuff, do the books go much further than that? Are their any maths functions you would recommend that may illustrate setup issues beyond what may otherwise be intuitively obvious? scatter_plot.PDF

I think what people may be missing is the complete and utter stupidity of doing such a speed on the road & the completely indefensible nature of this fkwits actions. The bloke was lucky to be stopped before he killed himself or others. No amount of "my car is in better condition than 90% of the cars on the road", nor "i am a really good driver" nor any other bullshit reasons can ever explain away the inevitability of a terminally bad result from such willfully dumb behaviour. The word culpable comes to mind. Personally I was nearly cleaned up by a nutbag in an Evo doing a Vmax run as I was on the way home from a track day. I didn't enjoy the experience.

He did go P1 in Thursday practice. Big question is can Williams maintain their practice form or will they fall away in qualifying as they normally do?

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You would also have to question how a piece of sh!t help together by cable ties would ever pass scrutineering.