SundayDriver

The other thread about how to tell if your car handles, had some great insights. Especially this:

These are some great comments. Here is my view, after some years of experience, as to what it takes, as a driver, to learn to make your car handle:

1. The first thing is that you have to learn the difference between understeer and oversteer. I have had the opportunity to drive a lot of other cars and I can tell you that if a DE driver says their cars oversteers, there is a 95% probability that it has a mild push, as opposed to pushed like a pig. Almost no one has driven a car that is actually loose. For club racers, the number is better but I think it is still over 50%.
The first step is to get yourself in a car that is actually loose. Find a car that oversteers or get a pro to help with setup and really screw it up. If you don't do this, you will never progress much further.

2. Get a crew chief for the day at a test day. Your test day has one, and only one, objective. That is to learn to feel the car. You drive a few laps to get settled (this is best done on a track you know very well). Then come in the pits and let your crew chief make setup changes to the car. They DO NOT TELL YOU WHAT THEY DID. You go out, feel the car, come back and tell them how it handles compared to previous session. Do this over and over. Sometimes your crew chief needs to send you out with no changes.
Since you have no pre-conceived notion of what the car should do, you have no choice but to trust your own judgment. I promise you that this is the best investment in testing that you can ever make.

3. Now that you know the difference and trust yourself, start doing your testing by noting how the car handles during entry, mid-corner and exit of each corner. It is not enough to just come back in and say the car pushes or it is tail happy. You need to identify which corner and which parts of corners the car does certain things. Think through why it is doing that in those places. A good set up person can help but if you don't have that, then get a copy of Engineer in Your Pocket as it has all sorts of tips for adjusting handling in different parts of corners.

If you can get your car within 5-6 seconds of the equivalent pole time in a strong club race, you are ready for this development. If not, then spend your time only on coaching till you get there and can start understanding setup.

I am sure others will jump in with more ideas. Hell, we might even discover that VR has a good idea or two.

Larry Herman

Interesting thread, Mark. Part of the challenge in understanding and changing what your car is doing is understanding how your driving is influencing the car. I remember reading about an F1 team in the 80s where one driver complained that the car plowed like a pig, and the other driver got into it and promptly dialed up tons of oversteer. He actually complained that the car was "too pointy".

Your inputs, how you brake, and where you release them, when you get on the gas, and how much you track out vs how much you try and "hold the car" will all affect how the car responds. Your own driving idiosyncracies may cause you to try and make your car compensate for the way that you want to drive it.

That being said, I think that your suggestions on how to learn what the car is doing is a very good start.

cooleyjb

Doing Step 2 for the first test day next year. Costing me only a couple of hundred bucks and it'll be full trackside support.

Should be a very enlightening day.

paradisenb

Thanks for the tips Mark. Can't wait to follow this thread.

I'm anxious to test the extremes of setup. I think this is critical experience if I am ever to become a good drover. Probably the only way I could ever answer the question, 'What is good handling' with any certainty that I know what I'm talking about.

Veloce Raptor

Excellent thread, Mark. And thanks for the gratuitous chum in the shark tank at the end!

IMO, step 3 should precede step 2. Once a drover has experienced true, wild, el dorifto style oversteer, and can identify it again (in contrast to the various shades of understeer--excellent point), he/she then should baseline their own car with the kind of detail in step 3. At that point, investing in set up help at the track will pay the kind of dividends you woudl expect, IMO, but not before.

Professor Helmüt Tester

Amen. I've followed people around the track, and heard them say "wow...my car was loose". My response is generally "MFA it was loose...you were just surprising your tires at every entry. You're driving like an autocrosser...knock it off and you won't be loose".

Turn all the *****. Diddle all the diddles. You're never going to learn what each doodad feels like if you don't diddle them and feel the effect. "Feel ?" you say ? Yeah..."feel". Drovers go fast when they aren't afraid of the car. A car that feels scary IS scary.


The whole "entry, mid-corner and exit" thing was the major revelation to me when it came time to start tuning a chassis that actually responded to "tuning".

Always go out on-track with a plan. If you're just going out to punch out laps, chase your friends or impress your buddies, you're wasting gas, tire and brakes...go play golf or rearrange your sock drawer. HAVE A PLAN. Work on a corner. Fiddle with pressures. Play with trail-braking. Don't be a schmoe and play in the asphalt sandbox...it's too expensive and too dangerous.

BTW - The Carroll Smith guide is really called "Engineer in your Pants". Really.

sjanes

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SundayDriver

Chum on demand.

I debated the order of 2 and 3. Not sure it matters that much. I felt that 2 is to develop feel. You may or may not have enough to jump to 3 initially. #2, in my mind, is not to help set up the car, it is just to mess with setup to develop and trust feel.

SundayDriver

I know that, and you know that, but the booksellers don't seem to as you can't find it that way. It is also hard to find "Screw to Win" as well.

Professor Helmüt Tester

The actual title makes it sound like a McMaster-Carr catalog.

v12man

I would say - for number 1 above - buy and read Fred Pughn's book - "How to make your car handle" (oldie, but a goodie and not too complicated)

Once you have figured out and understood what the car can potentially do (oversteer, understeer etc) , then you can start looking for and feeling those behaviors of the car - once you start to recognise them with the butt-o-meter, you can move forward in adjusting the handling, and you will be able to have a more intelligent conversation with your tuner/race shop/advisor about what the car is doing, and when/why it is doing it.

Veloce Raptor

Well, that makes sense. However, my belief is that folks should not spend big $ on trackside support + a talented crew chief/set-up guy until they can understand & appreciate what that person does, and thus be able to perceive what changes the chief makes or doesn't make each session.

Anyway, that is but a quibble.

One other suggestion, especially for racers who do enduros: really get a feel for the differences in your car with a full tank of gas vs. a nearly empty tank.

Oh, and one more suggestion: do all your suspension tuning & testing on FRESH tires. If you use scrubs, you may end up chasing a suspension "problem" that was really related to an oddball tire or two...

MJHanna

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M758

Well,
Since I was in someways the thread starter I will add some interesting points. I can't call them anything other than my experience. Although advice on how to gain that last bit of time would be appreciated

Firstly my experience and what I seek
Started racing 2002. I have completed 60+ races since then. I have a class track at Arizona Motorsports Park (all 3 configurations) and have held the track record at PIR and other tracks. I have won over 30 races in class. I won the 2006 Az 944 spec championship through solid speed and constant finishes. I used to be fast in class, but now even faster guys are racing with us.

I do most race on one track, PIR. I know this track quite well.
Typical Lap time at PIR are upper 1:12's for the fastest guys to the 1:14's for medium speed guys. Actual lap times depend on temperature and warm events sees 1:14 laps for the fast guys. Cooler temps see occasional 1:12's, but mostly 1:13's.

My best ever at PIR has been a 1:12.9 and I have run consistant laps in the mid 1:13's in the cool season. Currently this leaves me about 1/2 sec off my competition, but I also feel 1/2 second slow right now when compared to the best I have ever run. I know I can get 1/2 sec more, but would love to get 1 full second more.

I have been driving the same car for the entire time. Same spring rates and rough settings since 2003.

Lately I feel that my car is just off. It is not quite as fast as I had been and I seem to be able to get a fast lap sometimes, but maybe I am working at it harder than I should.

Test days.
We don't have full test days here. We have at most 2 practice sessions then qualy and race each day of a two day weekend event. The track does not sponsor test days either. I could run with another group for test time, but they don't run PIR.

At this point I don't think testing at other tracks will help my speed at PIR. What do you think?

The other issue is that I can feel understeer/oversteer in all 3 places in the corners. The issue comes down to what to change to improve this and that issue that in looking for 1/2 second what feels good may not be fast. The issue also is that my lap times can fluctuate by how well I drive my intended line. I have been getting over the radio lap times and even not sector times (similar to F1 sectors). This helps, but the differences in times seems so small that I can't understand what is faster/slower. Plus the track surfaces changes from a 8:30 am practice to a 10:30 pracrtice to a 1pm qualy and 3pm race. Based on the comparing speed to the fast guys it will change during the day by 1/2 second at least. Last race I made some sway bar change between sessions and the car seemed to improve, but lap times got slow. Looking at the rest of my class their times seem to slow as well, but I still did not close the gap. I think it helped, but it is tough to besure.

I don't have a LSD so I also must balance that out a bit. Overall my car has been feeling a little off in a trail braking corner entry. It seems like I can't stuff it as deep as I need to and thus causes me to overslow just a touch.

I guess I feel like my car is 95% of the way there, but I am missing that last 5%. I can't seem to figure out where it is. It could be the lack of LSD, but in the past I remember the car being better even with the open diff.


Maybe I need a Data Aq system? Maybe I need a full weekend to test, but I fear doing this without having the fast guys to baseline times may not yeild anything.

I guess maybe all this is just a frustrated rant.

Veloce Raptor

2 suggestions:

1) get data acquisition in your car

2) put a pro or semi-pro in your car for an undiluted, unbiased perspective on its behavior