On a street car with a stock brake system, the brakes can very well go away from one corner to the next. It happens plenty at track days. Usually the cause is boiling brake fluid that causes air pockets in the lines. You push the pedal to the floor and you get nothing.
But, Like Mykl says, with a car that is properly setup for racing with super high temp capable fluid and pads, you should only see fading over time as things get too hot.
If you watch racing at all though, you do see most drivers reach over and tap the brake with their left foot while going down the straight, especially a long straight with a tight corner at the end. They are checking for a soft pedal and pumping up the pressure. Do you think they would do that if brakes didn't just go away from one corner to the next? It doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen. (Or you can have a brake disk explode on you like happened to Johnny O at Sebring in the Corvette a few years ago)
I do want to see brake heat modeling. I think we can use sufficient visual indicators (the ones that Tristian normally hates, but seems to be in favor of in this case ) in the interface that we can manage the system.
It is Le Mans "grouping". The ALMS uses the FIA/Le Mans rules (mostly) and all cars that run in the ALMS are eligible for the 24 Hours of Le Mans. For certain races in the ALMS, like Sebring, the class winning cars get an automatic invite to the 24 Hours of Le Mans which is much coveted.
If you live in Sebring then you are lucky. Sebring is the classic American sports car race.
And only in relative terms. Those cars are ugly as a whole... and slow. I do watch GARRA stuff, but it just misses the mark for me.
Turbocharge, if you want to know more about ALMS, since you seem to like the cars, go to www.americanlemans.com. And btw, it is a bit of an insult to call an LMP1 car like the Audi R10 and Grand Am Rolex car.
Yes, I would love to have LMP1 and LMP2 type cars in LFS. It has been asked for many times before though.
I don't know if this would be of any value, but this link has some interesting books available for those of you who really want to get into the details of tire modeling.
The RAC is definitely better on throttle lift. Much less oversteering problems there. It does still exist, as it should for a rear/mid-engined car.
I think a locked diff has a purpose and could be used for certain situations. Drag racing immediately pops to mind, but I am sure there are other situations.
I would like to see the recent discussions on the tire physics that was mentioned above. Does anybody have a link? Tire (tyre) physics threads are usually hard to search for because the words are too common.
Maybe it is just a naming problem? What if it were called "competition ECU adjustment" instead of "intake restriction"? This would imply something that limited power across the spectrum instead of what an air restrictor would normally do.
If you want to read more about everything that has been discussed before on resets, search in the improvement suggestions forum.
Here is my contribution and a good thread on the topic http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=156616#post156616
Second item:
I kept getting many Yellow Flag warnings when racing offline with the 15 AI cars. The cars were not off track nor spinning. It was very odd. Every few seconds I would get a yellow flag warning, or multiple ones that lasted for a number of seconds, yet like I said before, no AI car actually crashed. Could it be that just small body contact like the AI's seem to incessantly do could cause this?
I don't have the replay, but I think it will be easy to duplicate if necessary.
Uh, and who exacly does like it?
Cool stuff Dennis. If the software is free to try, then I will download and take a look at some of this.
Still have to get a helmet...
I don't have a shifter, yet. I use the sequential style on my DFP with my complete ECCI pedal set with clutch.
The problem I have is that the brake depresses too far below the gas pedal and I have a problem doing heal toe work because of it. As a result I don't do it much. I would like to do it as practice for the real thing though.
lol, I suppose that is pretty true (of course it depends on your preferences). But driving the worst F1 car when you are trying to keep up with the best, looks to be pretty nightmare-ish to me.
Yes it was. It has a special place in my heart. I wrenched on them for about 6 years. Then I got my commission and went to flight school where I learned to fly them. It is a real, "hands-on" kind of aircraft. Very responsive but you could never get complacent with it. It would bite back in a big hurry.
It does look a bit... odd to me. Maybe it is all the different lines on the car.
But, that does not mean that I think it is ugly; far from it. I love the look of my old Huey helicopter, but it is a design that is far from sexy. It is in the meaning of the thing and the uniqueness of it that sometimes dictates the reactions to the aesthetics.
After reading all of Dennis' blog on both the DP and the Bikini projects, I feel a bit of a connection to the car. I at least understand, in a small way, what has gone into the building of it and I can appreciate its form in a different way now.
Why didn't you say that in the first place? I can understand your position now.
Although I disagree with some of your positions, I do agree that the Devs will do what they deem to be appropriate in their own time frame. I totally respect that and in fact I encourage it. Most of the time, "design by committee" does not work.
We are not trying to be pushy, at least I am not. I think it would be cool in LFS, but there are tons of cars and tracks out there that I would love to have too. They will happen when the devs are ready or not at all. I will still love LFS.
It was my suggestion, one that I have posed before, that it would be cool to include real tracks and cars for the purpose of Club racers all around the world to use for training and car setup. These people don't have the resources of big race teams, so something like LFS as a tool for them would be very cool, and I think popular too. But that is just my idea; I know there are a lot of things that have to happen first and that my idea may not work out in the long run.
Many people here have not taken the time to read Dennis' logs. Having some of the stuff paraphrased here does no harm. Most of us are car and racing fans and want to see stuff like this. I think it is just interesting and motivating to discuss.
Hmmm, even putting a smiley at the end of that, doesn't make it even remotely funny.
Point was, Tristian was out of line or maybe he was trying to be sarcastic too? Either way, srdsprinter was spot on in his comments. It doesn't take a fanboy for that; it just takes somebody who knows what he is talking about.
If you guys have the time, I highly recommend reading the blog. It takes a while to get through, but it is a very good read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
However, there are some issues with the tire model. One of them causes a situation where we use much lower tire pressures in LFS than we would in the real world. This leads to some pretty dramatic tire flexing. I do think the flexing is accurate given the pressures we use.
Hey Dennis,
If you want to see some good LFS racing, tune into OLFSL TV. Pool 1 starts at 11:00AM our time.
You can use browser plugins or Winamp with the correct codecs to watch. It is pretty cool. There will be an announcer calling the race. (Are we nuts, or what? )
Go here:http://lfs-league.com/
and then click on the OLFSL TV link.
Depends on what you like. You seem to favor open wheel cars and you only have significant laps on a couple of tracks. The highest pecentage on Aston club... which honestly is not that challenging.
You have low miles and your times are not that great (no disrespect intended) so whatever league you join, you will be in the lower pools. This is not a bad thing, you will get to race people who are at a similar level.
Choose a type of car or cars to race and look for leauges that offer multiple pools (based on qualifying times or hotlaps) with a good level of people racing. If you want to try a bunch of different cars, try the OLFSL.
Dennis,
I did have a question about the louver design over the wheels. I understand why they are there.
However, why did you not have the main chassis made with a rectangular hole over where the louvers will go? Then have separate louver panels made. The main chassis could have a lip on the front of the hole and a depression on the rear for the louver panel to slot into. Then use dzus, camlock or similar fasteners to mount the louver panels.
I watch a lot of ALMS, and you see them blow out their louver panels all the time throwing "klag" up through them. Why not make them easily replaceable instead of part of the entire chassis? I suppose it would be more stiff with the louvers integrated?
Forgive me if this is a naive question or if you covered in your blog. It just crossed my mind after reading your design blog on the design process. I am only on page 4. But it looks like the louvers made it to the final design.
I have a 20 meg jpg of PIR. I patched it together from about 30 individual photos. I was thinking about developing a track model for it, but I am not that talented with 3DS. If anybody wants a copy, just let me know.
Good luck with the project and maybe I will see at PIR one of these days. I am hoping to do some lapping days with the local BMW club this year.
Knowing that GT4 is not what we LFS fans consider a simulator, I still agree with the point. Driving a sim is not the same as real life, no matter how good the sim is. IRL you have the real possibility of major financial damage, major bodily harm and possibly death to deal with. It changes everything.
I have some experience with test flights and you do things methodically. In the best cases, you test one thing at a time and try not to complicate things to get the best possible analysis and to minimize risk.
It sounds like Dennis is going about it the right way.
I would love to see Portland in LFS, but that is not going to happen any time soon. I have often thought that if LFS had real tracks and the ability to create your car model, that it could be actively used by club racers all over the world for testing, track knowledge and setup analysis.
Yep, he was not pushing the car hard at all. ALMS LMP1 prototypes will hit upwards of 160-170mph down the front straight and will be touching up against 170+ down the back "straight" (its actually a long curve). LMP1's are 925Kg (2,039.3 lbs) minimum, with somewhere around 800hp making about 2.55lbs/hp. Dennis' car won't have as much grip because of the tire sizes and compounds and no downforce, but if you assume those things to be equal, his car should perform in the same basic range, at least as far as power goes with 2.25lbs/hp.
(JJ Lehto lost the rear wing off his Audi R8 on the back straight in 2005, he hit the boom camera that was shooting the entry to turn 9.)
The DP1 also is not setup with wings, so his downforce is limited. You want to prove the car, and you take it a step at a time.
The spin on the kart track looked more like too much rear brake bias than anything to me.
The PIR updates depend on city funds. It looks like the repaving will get done this year though. The city manager has been withholding funds for the last few years.
You can see from the picture that there is not much built yet, but it looks to be fun eventually (looking at the track map). It won't be able to support professional events though.
Bremerton doesn't have a road course does it? It looks like it just has the oval and drag racing. They are talking about a road course, but it hasn't happened yet, has it?
Pacific Raceways does have an aggressive development plan. They hope to attract some top class racing there eventually, which would be good. The NW only got 2 top races per year, ALMS and CHAMP car, and now ALMS is gone. More racing would be better.