Ideal Lap

[rbpeirce]

I keep a spreadsheet of corner entry speeds, speeds at the end of the following straights and anything else of interest. I then analyze how my best laps compare. On my last DE, I actually improved my previous outing on this track by 5 seconds, from 2'14" to 2'9". That's a lot, but when I analyzed the details I discovered I had sub-par results (at my current level of capability) in 10 of 23 key points, 43%. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.

This led to an interesting idea that may have been suggested before although I couldn't find it. It would be interesting and useful to combine all the laps in a session into the lap you could have done if you did everything to the best of your current capabilities. It wouldn't be fictitious. You actually did it. You just didn't do it all at once. It would give you a bogey to measure yourself against and as you improved, so would your bogey.

Racing drivers seem to be able to knock of successive laps within 0.1" of one another. I'm lucky to get 2". That makes it tough to determine if I am actually getting any better or not. This would help.

[Harry]

The virtual best lap calculation does something like this - but has the optimized sectors organized using split triggers. Using a dynamic raster, like ever section between min (corner) and max (straight) speed, is pretty complicated: the max speed depends on the braking point - changing slightly each lap, and the min speed position depends on the line driven - changing slightly each lap too. The other problem with any calculation of a virtual best lap is you can't combine best sections without analyzing the way the connect. When optimizing one section, you will need to run a suboptimal section before and will get a suboptimal section after. So just combining the best sections will give you something you can't achieve for one lap in reality.

To optimize your own driving I recommend to have a look into the Train the Trainer document, and the display of time won/lost (blue graph) analysis in particular. I has similar conceptual issue like listed above but will identify regions to improve very well.

- Harry

[rbpeirce]

Clearly this is more difficult than I anticipated. I looked at it from an overly simplistic standpoint. Suppose you had two laps. In the first you apex a corner at 40mph and reach 120 on the subsequent straight. In the second you apex at 45 but only reach 115. The ideal is 45 and 120, except it really isn't. You probably only reached 115 in the second case because 45 was too fast for the corner and you screwed something up. Oh, well, back to the drawing boards. I'll review your doc to see how it can help.

[Harry]

Yes, that's what I meant. I'd be interested in other technics nevertheless. Formula One team for example will go far beyond any approach discussed so far.

- Harry