Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 4: Analyse Driver
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Step 4: Analyse Driver
30.18
| 00:00 | - Step 4 is to analyse the driver performance. |
| 00:03 | And as amateurs, this is where we tend to find the biggest gains as this is what's usually limiting our performance just the way we're driving the car. |
| 00:11 | So let's jump across to my laptop screen and get into some of this driver analysis right now. |
| 00:16 | Here you'll see I've got AiM's Race Studio 2 software sitting up here and I'm just going to orientate you guys to a few of the basic parts of the user interface. |
| 00:26 | So in the middle of the screen here, and that's really where we're going to be doing the bulk of our work today. |
| 00:30 | This is a time/distance plot which is something we've been through in detail in the main body of the course. |
| 00:35 | On the right hand side we've got a track map of the circuit this data was gathered at and on the left hand side we've got some information about the channels we've got shown up here. |
| 00:45 | So if I just scroll down here, you'll see as I click each one of these buttons, we can add or remove channels into this time/distance plot. |
| 00:54 | You'll see each of the laps we've got selected here, so we've got two laps, one for each driver so one lap per run, both from a qualifying session and you'll see I've got a different name associated with each of the runs there and this is the fastest lap from each of their qualifying runs. |
| 01:11 | You can see the software has selected blue for one of the laps and orange for the other. |
| 01:16 | So the blue lap is a 1:38.962 and the orange is a 1:39.812 so about a second difference between both of those laps. |
| 01:25 | We can come in here and select a different colour if we wanted to to make things a little bit more obvious. |
| 01:32 | Now as far as the rest of the tabs we've got up here, if you come to the laps tab you can see each of the lap times associated with each run so it's a little bit hard to see here because each one of these file names is quite long but you can see in one of these runs here, you can see we've got 5 laps and in red the fastest lap is shown there automatically for us. |
| 01:54 | We can use these little arrows to tab across to the other run and then we can see as well we've got the fastest lap from that run selected. |
| 02:01 | We can come in here and select extra runs just by clicking here, it'll make a little check box and we can keep overlaying more and more laps. |
| 02:10 | The vast majority of the time using just two laps as an overlay is more than enough, it does tend to get really messy and just a bit overwhelming with the amount of data we've got showing in there when we have more than two laps. |
| 02:22 | So let's get into the analysis and let's see what we're looking at here. |
| 02:26 | So from top to bottom, what we've got, I'll just go through each one of these channels, we've got the speed traces at the top, then we've got the brake pressure underneath that, we've got the steering, then we've got the gear position below that, we've got throttle position below that and at the very bottom we've got the very important time variance channel which we're going to use to guide us through a lot of the analysis and to help us find where to look and where we want to spend most of our time. |
| 02:54 | So what's interesting about this time variance as we look at it here is rather than just being a pro/am situation where you've got a pro driver and an amateur where one driver is just clearly faster than the other, what tends to happen there, while you've usually got some lumps in that time variance plot where you've got one driver, usually the pro, gaining a lot of time compared to the amateur, you do tend to have an upward trend across the whole run, meaning that not only are there big chunks of time defined but just generally they're faster everywhere, they're carrying more speed in every braking zone and through every apex, they're getting on the throttle harder and they're faster down every straight. |
| 03:30 | What's different a little bit in this data we're looking at between two amateurs, while we do have a second difference between both of these lap times, we've clearly got some parts of the track where one driver is doing a better job than the other. |
| 03:42 | So this is great because not only can we improve one of the drivers but both drivers can actually learn something from each other and improve both of their performances together. |
| 03:51 | So we can see that here in the shape of the time variance channel. |
| 03:54 | We can see through this section of the track we have this big lump coming through here, we've put the cursor on there. |
| 04:00 | I'll actually show you guys as well how these channels work. |
| 04:04 | We can see for each channel here we've got some summary of the value we're looking at. |
| 04:09 | So let's start from the top here, we can see the current value of the speed trace in the right hand side here and then also some statistics that go with each one of them. |
| 04:20 | So these statistics, the important thing to understand about these is that these are the statistics that relate to the current zoom parameters. |
| 04:26 | So what I mean by that is we've got minimums, maximums and averages and you'll see here if I zoom in a little bit, these statistics update which is quite a nice function because it shows us at a glance the maximums and minimums just for the section of data that we're looking at at this point in time. |
| 04:41 | But the reason I wanted to point that out is if I put my cursor down here, just through that big lump in the time variance, if we come across to the right hand side here, we can see we've got roughly 6/10th of a second. |
| 04:51 | So between the red driver, the red driver is losing compared to the blue driver. |
| 04:57 | So these are the exact points on track we're looking at to try and find gains in lap time, this is a really clear difference. |
| 05:05 | So the 3 parts I'm probably going to concentrate on here are this big 6/10th chunk at the start of the lap, then a little bit further into the lap in the next series of corners, we've got another jump up here and then later in the lap there's one a bit further down here that we'll get to in a second, these are probably the biggest chunks in time. |
| 05:24 | In the middle of the lap here, you can see what I was talking about where one driver's actually gaining, the red driver's actually gaining time back with respect to the blue driver through the middle of the lap which as I said doesn't tend to be the case when you've got a pro/am combination but in this case where you've got two amateurs driving the car, even though one's faster than the other, this is the part of the track where one driver can learn from the other. |
| 05:47 | In this particular case, I think I mentioned it earlier but one driver is a left foot braker and we will see that in some of the braking traces, a little bit different, we've got some crossing going over as well which is where the accelerator and the brake are being used at the same time when they're transitioning from off the throttle to onto the brake. |
| 06:04 | Now the downside with crossing, even though it does allow you to transition to the brake quicker, it does tend to be harder on the car, harder on the drive line, you get more heat in the drive line, more heat and more brake use, you start using more fuel as well. |
| 06:18 | So while there can be some advantages to being a left foot braker, you do have to be careful about how much you're crossing and we'll see some of that as we go through some of the braking technique as well. |
| 06:25 | So let's jump into this analysis and see what is going on with this big lump down here in the first part of the lap. |
| 06:34 | So you'll see as well as I zoomed in there on the right hand side the track map zoomed in so we're only looking at the series of data that relates to the part that we're zoomed in at as well and we can see as we move the cursor through here, we can see the cursor updates on the track map to our current position which is really nice because it just helps us give a little more context about what we're looking at in terms of the data. |
| 06:54 | So as always, the time variance channel does relate quite closely to what's happening with the speed trace as well. |
| 07:01 | So we can see anywhere we've got, generally any time we've got that big jump in the variance, we'll usually be pretty clear what's happening in the speed trace as well. |
| 07:08 | It's just another piece of the puzzle as far as us helping work out exactly what's going on and why one driver is faster than the other at different points so we can see down here, we've got the red driver is dropping off significantly faster than the blue driver. |
| 07:24 | They're also slowing the car a lot more, particularly at this particular point here where I've got the cursor. |
| 07:29 | You'll see, if we look over at the track here as to what was actually going on in this section of the track, you can see we've got this little bus stop section which is essentially just a little chicane at the end of the straight there. |
| 07:40 | Before we head into this really long right hand corner which is actually over 180° corner, it's a really long carousel type corner. |
| 07:47 | And that's what we see in this speed trace here, we've got this really flat section here which is only something you really see when the car's going to be cornering consistently for a really long time. |
| 07:57 | It's not a feature you would otherwise normally see but what we do see is when the two drivers enter the bus stop here, enter that first chicane, one driver's carrying significantly more speed through that first section of the bus stop and even after they exit the bus stop section, they're actually into the main part of the corner, it's taking the red driver quite a long time to catch back up to that steady state speed. |
| 08:19 | Driving the car at steady state like that through a long corner is probably one of the easy things to get right, you're starting to approach something similar to using a skid pad where the car, as long as the car's balanced, then it should be relatively easy for two drivers to match each other's performance, there's not a lot of transient stuff going on, you're really just trying to balance the car on the edge, just add as much throttle as you dare, as you can get away with while finding the right amount of steering input to keep the car on the right path there. |
| 08:44 | And we see that that red driver, even though they're in the corner for a while, it is taking them a while to get up to speed there. |
| 08:51 | So let's just have a look at the time variance for how much time is being lost there. |
| 08:55 | So if we start down here at a time variance of essentially zero and we get through that middle part of the bus stop where they start entering the main part of the corner, so let's call it somewhere about there. |
| 09:06 | So we've got roughly 4/10ths ish that they're losing through the bus stop alone and then from there to when they are caught up we're getting up towards 6/10th so it's roughly 4/10ths through the bus stop and roughly 2/10ths they're losing just through trying to gain that speed and get back up to that steady state speed in mid corner so there's a lot of time to find there but certainly most of it is entering that bus stop. |
| 09:29 | Now as to the reason why, it's pretty clear here if we look at the brake trace. |
| 09:33 | So this set of data up here is our brake trace. |
| 09:37 | We can see that the red driver is braking significantly earlier and also with a bit more brake pressure as well, and this is one of the times that we could hover the cursor over here, over each one of the maximums, so we can see if I hover over the maximum of the blue driver, we've got about 950 psi of brake pressure and if I hover roughly over the maximum of the red driver we've got let's say roughly 1100 psi so pretty big difference in brake pressure there but this is one of those nice features of having those statistics automatically completed for us, we can see up here because we're zoomed into just this braking zone, we can actually read those numbers directly off the statistics here off the brake trace, so it's already completing them for us, giving us that 960 ish versus 1100 psi. |
| 10:20 | It's already summarised for us and that's also the points where those statistics are computed, are automatically shown there for us with these little, in this case red arrows indicating the maximums with the blues indicating the minimums. |
| 10:33 | So that's quite a nice feature of the software there. |
| 10:37 | So as far as finding out how early one driver has braked with respect to the other, that can be a little bit software dependent. |
| 10:44 | In AiM's software there's a couple of different ways we can do that, well there's a few different ways actually. |
| 10:47 | We could hover the cursor over and we could read it directly from the X axis below. |
| 10:51 | So we can read off the value there and read off the value where the blue driver starts braking. |
| 10:57 | That's one way, it's probably not the most efficient way of doing it. |
| 10:59 | The other way is to read, on the top right here we have the distance channel read out for us, so we can do that there, same thing we can just check the cursor at both points. |
| 11:07 | One of the nice features that a lot of pieces of software will have is a delta function where we can automatically place the cursor at different points and it'll show us the difference between the two channels so let's do that now. |
| 11:18 | All we need to do is come up to the top right here, click this delta button, then all we do is click once at our first point of interest and click again at our second point of interest and it's going to give us the difference between them and in the top right that's really what I'm interested in looking at. |
| 11:33 | That's giving us this value in brackets. |
| 11:35 | We've got roughly 20 metres so straight away we've got a really useful piece of data, we can go and transfer to that other driver and say look you're braking 20 metres too early for the bus stop, that's something that's easily actionable by them at that point. |
| 11:48 | So that's one thing and the other part is obviously they're carrying too much brake pressure through this section. |
| 11:52 | You can see how much more they're retarding the car through here. |
| 11:54 | And certainly in this second piece of braking here where we've got the brake, from the red driver, they're braking and they're coming back on and giving another extra pump on the brake pedal where the blue driver at that point has really, is definitely on a downward slope as far as how much brake pressure they're using through this section and we see a pretty strong correlation there with that second dab of brake pressure that the red driver is using, we see an even bigger split in the time/distance here and we see the exact same thing in the time variance, we get that big ramp up in the time variance. |
| 12:26 | So straight away, just through this part of the chicane, there's 4/10ths we can find which is absolutely a massive amount of time and it's a pretty simple technique difference, it's something we can explain in really clear terms to one driver so that's a big gain we can find there. |
| 12:44 | What you'll generally find in this next section here, leading onto that steady state corner when they are able to carry more speed through that chicane in the first place, they're not actually going to need to speed up to get to that steady state speed, they know they can carry through that long right hander. |
| 12:58 | So that will sort itself out, it's really that chicane, it's the first big braking event of the lap, it is probably a relatively intimidating part of the track so it's understandable that a driver is going to have a difference there but we'll find there, what I will normally find is if you improve the braking through that chicane, that speed through the next part of that right hander will naturally come and we won't probably even need to worry about that. |
| 13:21 | One other thing I can see in technique straight away here looking at the way these guys are driving the car, is that the red driver is significantly busier on the steering wheel input. |
| 13:31 | So if we're looking at the steering wheel here, in this middle trace, you can see how much more unsteady, we can see a lot more of the waviness in that signal. |
| 13:40 | Now a little bit of that is just down to natural style, sometimes it can indicate some stuff about the way the car is handling but in this particular case, it really does look like a style thing. |
| 13:48 | You do have to be aware of it, it can be an unsettling force for the car. |
| 13:52 | If the car's not struggling with instability, it's not the end of the world but it does tend to put a little bit more heat into the tyres, certainly the front tyres, because you're adding these unsteady inputs, it does tend to load up, magnify any instability problems you might have so it's just something to be aware of there, I've certainly worked with lots of drivers in the past that do have this style of steering trace. |
| 14:14 | It's not necessarily a huge negative, it's probably not something you would choose to have as far as a trait but it's just something to keep an eye on if you do start struggling with things like entry stability and stuff like that. |
| 14:25 | What the driver's actually doing with the steering wheel. |
| 14:28 | The other big thing to point out here is actually the difference in gear position. |
| 14:32 | So in the channel below the steering we've got the gear there and we can see we've got one driver using 4th and one driver using 5th. |
| 14:41 | Now a little bit of that is down to the blue driver which is staying in 5th gear, they're obviously carrying more speed into that corner so it kind of makes sense that they would be carrying more of a higher gear through there because they're already carrying more speed through there. |
| 14:55 | But again that can be a bit of a telltale sign that having the gear, using a different gear, it can affect the car quite a lot. |
| 15:03 | So what I mean by that is when we're in a lower gear, we tend to have more engine braking so straight away, in this case because it's a front wheel drive, we're adding a little bit more steady state braking load to this thing without even using the brakes so it does tend to take away some of your cornering power. |
| 15:20 | So you do have to be a bit aware of that as far as not overloading your front tyres by having more engine braking than you need. |
| 15:26 | Obviously the other end of that, if you are exiting the corner, then to some extent being in a lower gear can be helpful for getting out, getting more drive out of the next corner. |
| 15:36 | It's just something to be aware of, certainly take note of which gear each driver is using because it can definitely affect the balance and stability of the car as well. |
| 15:46 | So we've definitely beaten that corner to death, we have a pretty good understanding of what's going on there so let's move onto the next one, moving onto this next little lump in the time variance here which we're going to concentrate our efforts on. |
| 15:58 | So we've got a couple of similar trends here, let's start with the speed trace. |
| 16:03 | So we can see pretty clearly, again the red driver's braking quite a lot earlier. |
| 16:07 | Well they're certainly slowing the car down more. |
| 16:10 | The apex speed looks somewhat similar, we can see down in the stats there that we've got 75 versus 70 so there was a little bit of a difference, the red driver is certainly slowing the car a little more. |
| 16:24 | What else can we see here as far as the time loss? So if we take the time loss from there to there, we've got say 6/10ths and by the end of that corner we've got 8/10ths so let's say roughly 2/10ths lost through there. |
| 16:35 | The interesting feature we can see here in the time variance is that it ramps up quickly and then actually the red driver, even though they've lost a whole lot of time on entry, they are gaining some of it back on exit so it's still a net loss for them but it's interesting to see the different way they're driving the car there. |
| 16:53 | So let's dig into that a little bit more. |
| 16:55 | So first thing is the difference in the braking point so let's again do our braking point analysis. |
| 17:01 | So we'll use that time delta function, just chuck the cursor on here and then click again and we can see we've got let's say 13 metres. |
| 17:10 | So 13 ish metres is how much earlier the red driver is braking before the blue driver. |
| 17:15 | Now we've got a similar thing going on, it's not a massive difference but there is a little bit more brake pressure being used by the red driver. |
| 17:21 | In that situation, if you've got an amateur driver in particular, sometimes people, they find it really difficult to move their braking point a little bit further forward. |
| 17:30 | It is really important, like we talked about to maximise your braking technique as far as making sure you are exploiting everything out of the car possible. |
| 17:39 | Now this is a little bit corner dependent, some corners, particularly when you've got a whole lot of corners linked together, you don't want to necessarily always be using the maximum brake pressure. |
| 17:47 | It is corner dependent. |
| 17:48 | Typically, particularly when we're talking about a front wheel drive car here where the front tyres do tend to be a bit overloaded. |
| 17:54 | So this is definitely a case where trying some different technique options, trying braking later and harder versus maybe softer and a little bit earlier, just trying different ways to get the speed out of the car and seeing how the car flows through that corner entry phase is definitely worth checking out. |
| 18:10 | So we've got that 13 metre difference in the brake application there, that's definitely accounting for our biggest difference in speed here. |
| 18:19 | Now the next biggest thing I see down here is actually the steering input is really different. |
| 18:23 | So in the middle here we can see that the red driver is using a huge amount more steering input than the blue driver. |
| 18:30 | Now what it looks like is going on there, particularly when we look at the lower apex speed, so roughly 5 km/h lower at the apex there, it really looks like the red driver is getting the car slowed more, getting it turned more, getting it turned harder and then driving straighter out. |
| 18:44 | And that is backed up a little bit by what we actually see in the speed traces here. |
| 18:48 | So even though this is lining up with what we see in the time variance with the red driver gaining some time back here is that the speed trace is significantly higher in the red driver on that corner exit. |
| 19:02 | And that is a typical situation that you get where one driver is getting the car slowed more, getting it turned and driving straight out and because they've got it stopped and turned and they're driving straighter rather than using more, trying to carry more steering later in the corner, it tends to give them a better exit and that's exactly what's going on here. |
| 19:20 | So I think in this particular situation there's probably something for both drivers to work on here. |
| 19:25 | Clearly the red driver is braking a bit too early, they can move their braking point a bit further but in this case I'd also be telling the blue driver to think about getting the apex speed down a little bit, getting it stopped, getting it turned and driving harder out because there's certainly a decent little gain there on corner exit through that section of the track, particularly on a quali lap where we're not worried about racing or haven't got traffic around us, we're just interested in extracting the most lap time out of the car. |
| 19:50 | Again we've got a difference in the gear selection there. |
| 19:54 | And that difference in gear selection, it's not necessarily that there's a right or a wrong answer there, it really depends on the balance of the car, using a different gear as I said before can have quite a big impact on the grip and the balance, particularly the balance in the mid corner depending on what sort of handling trait you're dealing with. |
| 20:11 | So I can't tell you straight away just by looking at this data what's the right situation, what the right call is there on the gear but again I suspect part of that better drive out of that corner may be that they are using a lower gear out of there as well. |
| 20:25 | I'm not sure how traction limited they are at that point on track but using a lower gear will generally give you a bit more punch out of that corner. |
| 20:33 | So that's it for that corner and let's move onto the last section of the track which is quite close to the end of the track actually so let's dig into that a little bit more. |
| 20:40 | So it's this corner down here, this bottom corner which is sort of the last tight corner on the track. |
| 20:46 | Let's look at how much time difference we've got here. |
| 20:49 | So the red driver at this point on track is 6/10ths down to the blue driver and if I put my cursor down here, we're let's say roughly 8/10ths down so it's about a 2/10th loss just in this last corner here. |
| 21:01 | So let's again dig into what's going on. |
| 21:04 | So again it looks like our old friend the braking marker has got something to do with this as well. |
| 21:10 | So let's, if I just click down here where the red driver is applying the brakes and again where the blue driver is applying the brakes, so we've got roughly 20 metres there difference which is quite a big difference considering how slow that corner is. |
| 21:24 | Let's look at the maximum approach speed down here where we've got roughly 140 km/h so that is quite a big difference in the brake pressure. |
| 21:33 | Now this corner is a little bit interesting, I know this particular track and what's actually going on in the braking zone for this corner as they approach this really slow hairpin like corner is you can see both of them are actually dipping down in the brake pressure here so both of them have got an initial hit, both of them drop before coming back onto the brakes harder Now at first glance that looks like pretty questionable braking technique and of course it does depend on the car, definitely depends on the braking point and the handling traits of that specific car but the reason that's happening there is there's actually a bit of a rise in the track there. |
| 22:05 | So what I mean by that is as you approach the braking point you can get on the brakes and then the car gets light as you go over a bit of a rise before you drop downhill and drop into this corner so that's why we're seeing part of that brake pressure lift. |
| 22:18 | It's just because if you use a normal brake shape where you get on and slowly bleed off you would find you'd get quite a lot of brake locking but in this particular case with this car having ABS, this is where you'd get a lot of ABS intervention jumping in because you'd easily have a whole lot of front lock going through there because you've got the front of the car going light when you're going down the hill. |
| 22:38 | So that's why you're seeing both of these drivers doing that particular feature there. |
| 22:42 | But that is going to depend a lot on the car, on the speed of the car because that's going to depend where you're doing your initial braking, certainly where you're doing the bulk of your braking, how much you're going to have to lift and where in the braking zone you're going to have to do that. |
| 22:54 | But certainly again that biggest difference really is just that early braking marker and that is a bit of a trait that you'll see certainly between two drivers. |
| 23:03 | One driver will often have quite a different braking technique as far as generally braking too early in some parts of a lap with respect to the other. |
| 23:10 | So that really sums up the bulk of what's going on throughout the lap.. |
| 23:16 | Let's jump into a little bit of the middle of the lap now and seeing maybe where the blue driver might be able to find some gains in here. |
| 23:22 | So let's have a look in here. |
| 23:26 | So one thing I can see straight away here is on some of these straights, the blue driver is actually losing out on a little bit of acceleration. |
| 23:34 | It's a bit of a trend throughout the lap actually where the red driver has got better drive or a bit better acceleration throughout the lap. |
| 23:40 | I do wonder whether part of that is it looks a little bit like one driver, the blue driver upshifting a little bit earlier. |
| 23:49 | So we can see the gears jumping up here throughout the lap and we can see the split in the way the speed trace works and any time you see that, it can be to do with the throttle being lifted, it can be to do with how much steering input one driver's using with respect to the other but in this case it looks like a lot of it is to do with one driver upshifting a little bit earlier than the other. |
| 24:09 | We've also got, let's move a little bit further through here. |
| 24:11 | This is quite a fast section of the track coming up here. |
| 24:16 | And we can see again we've got that divergence in the speed trace up here. |
| 24:20 | Now if we come down to the throttle we can see that the blue driver roughly where those speed traces start to diverge from each other we can see the blue driver is having quite a big lift on the throttle through here and there is a little bit of steering, we can see the steering is non zero through this section of the track, this is this fast left hand section of the track. |
| 24:36 | And because you've got a bit of steering input at high speed, any time you lift the throttle you are going to get quite a big slow down effect on the car just because you've got a bit of induced drag by having the front tyres turned so a small component therefore is going to be going towards slowing the car down, it's going to be adding an extra drag force through there so that's why we see this difference through here. |
| 24:56 | So assuming the cars are similar at this point, what I mean by that, assuming the configuration of the car, we've got the same tyres, same fuel load, stuff like that, this is definitely a section where the blue driver should probably be holding a little bit flatter, carrying a bit more speed through that section of the track. |
| 25:09 | It's not a huge time loss there, what are we talking, through this lift here, if we've got 5/10ths up to the braking zone, yeah so let's say it's half a 10th, something like that but certainly nonetheless there's still a gain to be found there. |
| 25:21 | So the next thing we want to look at as part of this driver analysis, it's usually a good idea to have a look at the GG plot to see maybe a little, gives you a bit of a different perspective on how each driver is using the tyres and exploiting the envelope of the car. |
| 25:35 | So one of the ways you can do that in AiM's software, the way I've got it set up here is I've got some pre configured displays so I just need to click this GG diagram that I've already got set up here. |
| 25:45 | And you'll see along the top here, so I've got a GG diagram set here on the right hand side, I've also got a time/distance plot and a track map. |
| 25:55 | So the way AiM's software works is you can, wherever you've got the data selected which is what I've got selected in this particular layout, which is just the, one of the G force channels plotted, so I've got the lateral G force along the bottom and the longitudinal G force plotted in the Y and that's also what gets displayed in the time/distance plot at the same time. |
| 26:14 | The reason I've got the time/distance plot in the track map there is just to help me find exactly which points of a lap I'm looking at when I'm looking at that GG plot. |
| 26:21 | So by clicking through these different tabs at the top here, I'm aiming to look at one data set, so this is, let me just be consistent with that and just change that to red like we were looking at before. |
| 26:32 | So we're looking apples with apples there. |
| 26:35 | So I'm looking at the red data there, I'm looking at the blue data here and if I've got test compare, that allows me to overlay both of those on top of each other. |
| 26:44 | Now you guys know from going through the course that the shape of the GG diagram gives us a little bit of perspective of how well the performance envelope of the car is being exploited. |
| 26:56 | So that's what I want to look at here. |
| 26:57 | So there are lots of different parts of this GG diagram we could be looking at but the thing I really want to concentrate on to start with is really just this section down here where you can just see, we've got the blue driver exploiting much more of the perimeter of that part of the GG diagram which means they are using more combined load out of the chassis and the tyres, they're combining in this case more braking force with more turn in so they're using more of the trail braking area of the GG diagram which is absolutely a valid part of the GG diagram we want to be exploiting. |
| 27:30 | Now it is really, a really important feature of a GG diagram that they are able to be zoomed in on. |
| 27:38 | It really just gets rid of a whole lot of that clutter and allows us to focus in on one specific part of the diagram which is otherwise is a little bit overwhelming with having all of those points on there from the whole lap, it makes it a little bit more difficult to see all of the trends. |
| 27:51 | So let's find, we can see as we scroll through the time/distance plot, we can see that little cursor there moving throughout the GG diagram, I'm just going to scroll across until we find the point on track where we start to find these points of interest on here and we see we're starting to get through them now and if I look on the track map at the bottom left here it's really this hairpin turn down here before we get onto this long straight. |
| 28:15 | So we've got one driver exploiting much more of the car and trail braking there in that trail braking phase. |
| 28:20 | So I'm just going to zoom in to that specific point on the track. |
| 28:24 | There's a couple of different ways you can do that by either with zoom on the track pad or you can go up and down on the arrows there. |
| 28:29 | And at this point, so you can see where we zoom to, just looking at this section of the track and it's really just this point down here that I'm most interested in when we get close down to the apex. |
| 28:39 | Now if I slowly zoom down here we can see the car transitions from acceleration to braking, when both of these cursors go down and then as we turn more and more into the corner and start to exploit more of the lateral you can see these differences here, see how these different cursors, I'm just going to scroll forward and back there, you can see how one is scribing a much wider line on that GG diagram which is what we're seeing here at this point in the blue trace versus the red. |
| 29:06 | So the red is much more going in a straight line from braking to pure cornering whereas the blue is just doing a little bit of a job of scribing around the outside, making a smooth join between full braking and full lateral force there. |
| 29:21 | So straight away that's telling us that one driver is exploiting more of the car in trail braking. |
| 29:27 | We know that because anywhere at that bottom of the GG diagram, that's braking, anywhere to the side is full lateral acceleration. |
| 29:34 | So right down here we know this is down here in the braking zone so that is definitely another point we could be working on with the red driver is finding more pace out of them. |
| 29:46 | So that's it for the main part of the driving analysis. |
| 29:49 | Just going through a few of the main points using the time variance channel to point us towards the places where we need to find the biggest gains. |
| 29:56 | There's plenty we can work on with the driver so it's going to depend a little bit on the drivers you're working with as to how much information they can take in and actually usefully use on track. |
| 30:05 | But usually I aim between two and three main points, summarise those two or three points for them to go and work on in the next session and now we're ready to move onto the chassis. |
