Practical Corner Weighting: 4. Making Ballast Adjustments
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4. Making Ballast Adjustments
02.30
| 00:00 | - Once you've taken your initial weight measurements, the next step is to make any ballast adjustments to the car. |
| 00:05 | Of course this step is only applicable if you are in a situation where you need to add ballast to the car so if that's not the case you can skip this step completely and move on. |
| 00:16 | As we've discussed in the body of the course, this is a step that we can spend a lot of time on when developing a brand new car and deciding on the correct location for some of the heavier components that we'll be adding. |
| 00:27 | It's much harder to make substantial changes to an existing race car. |
| 00:31 | As we've already found, it's also difficult to make substantial changes to the left weight percentage and the front rear weight split through just jacking weight around with our ride height so this is where ballasting becomes a very useful technique. |
| 00:45 | One of the more common uses of ballast would be to offset the driver's weight by placing ballast low on the passenger side of the floor. |
| 00:53 | What you're able to achieve is obviously going to be dependent on the starting point in terms of left weight percentage and how much ballast you need to add. |
| 01:02 | Remember that ideally we want to add any ballast as low as possible to keep the centre of gravity low. |
| 01:08 | We also want to be mindful of where the ballast is located relative to the centre of the car.. |
| 01:14 | This gets tricky because we want the ballast to ideally be located close to the car's centreline to reduce the polar moment of inertia, however placing ballast right on the centreline will have little effect on our left weight percentage. |
| 01:26 | The further we place the weight away from the driver towards the outside of the car, the more influence a given weight will have over the left weight percentage. |
| 01:35 | This might sound contradictory, however this actually still works within our aims as what we want to try and avoid is placing weight at the extremities of the car such as the front and rear bumper lines. |
| 01:47 | While you may not be in a position where you need to add ballast to the car, there are almost certainly some items that you can relocate in order to help the situation. |
| 01:57 | Components I'd consider moving would include the fire extinguisher or built in fire suppression system, the battery and other components such as a cool suit box or driver drink bottle. |
| 02:07 | While all of these items might seem relatively insignificant, optimising their location in the car can still add up to a worthwhile improvement. |
| 02:16 | Lastly we need to be mindful of making sure that any components we relocate or any ballast we add to the chassis are securely mounted, so that they can't come loose in the event of an accident. |
