djr81

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.

I do some fairly basic data logging for my car at the track. I use some maths function which I have written in Excel to help analyse the data. I guess my question is can anyone offer some more ideas as to how to draw more information out of the otherwise impenetrable squiggles on the screen? I have done the usual things: Rpm versus speed (at 100% TPS) to determine where the engine spends it working life. % of time versus negative gees to show how crap my braking is. Terminal velocity for various straights etc. Done the overlay thing to see where I am dumping time on the slower laps. (see .pdf file) Graphed the X-Y function to check the effectiveness of corner entry & exit. Used the logger to determine which of the corner entry options is quickest. Also spent time looking at squiggles to determine if there is too much understeer in the setup or too much wheelspin. But I can't help but feel most of the "understanding" is only there because I was driving the car & intuitively knew what was going on anyway. So can anyone help point me in a direction to further my understanding? lap_comparison.PDF

Yeah, I love watching the safety car going round and round and round. Almost as much as I love the fact that that Big Brother shite with fkwit & shouty bitch wastes two hours of perfectly good airtime that could be used to broadcast something interesting - like I dunno a motor race.

R32: Looks great until people try to add more "styling" to them. Then it just looks like a dogs breakfast. R33: Thinking of R33's helps me get to sleep at night. Yawn. R34: Nothing wrong that another 200mm in the wheelbase wouldn't fix.

Yeah kgf = kilograms of force. 1 kgf = 10Newtons. It is the plate pre-load. I set my Nismo diff to the middle setting & there are more clunks than a clunk convention - although clunkage is dependent on the clutch plate size, number and to a lesser degree the diff ramp angle.

There are three lines to the canister. The most important of which comes from the fuel tank. Do not just blank this off or worse, leave the open end near your nice, hot turbo. The other two lines connect into the engine intake. The canister can be relocated to the RHD drivers side after you move the battery to the boot. Happilly the two connections to the engine intake are plumbed across the front of the motor. So you can use one of them to reconnect the fuel tank line to the relocated cannister. The two lines from the engine intake are then nice & close to the cannister & are easy to hook up. That is what I did anyway.

The fundamental problem is that what works well on the track is usually far too harsh for the road & what is nice to drive on the road is inadequate for the tracks. Having said that check the Nismo GT Pro LSD TT range (or whatever the most recent stuff is called) as they are the nearest I have found to a reasonable compromise.

I suppose it should be said that in the 20 years since the GT-R has been around there have been a great many advances in tyre technology. The limitation of group A in this regard drove the design of the car. As long as your modded GTS-T can develop good horsepower & get some semblance of traction you will be in good shape. Certainly your bank account will be better off than if you had gone for a GTR aka a traktor.

Well the best advice you will get is to stop driving like an idiot on the road and take your car to a track. Apparently when a car gets impounded it doesn't really matter what type of diff it has. Typically girlfriends don't much like having to walk everywhere either.

Personally I don't believe the difference is as marked as some people think. A GT-R needs alot of work to start returning good, competitive lap times these days. Anyway for mildly modded example I would put the difference at about one to one and a half seconds over a 60 second lap. Which is half a lifetime in motorsport terms.

Yeah, that is the one. I felt a bit dodgy the fourth time I filled the damn thing out.