Quote from MadCatX :

AND A LITTLE PHYSICS LESSON:
Random does NOT exist, if you will be able to give attention on EVERYTHING, every particle in space, you WILL be always able to presume every "random" event with 99,5% percent accuracy. (if you will use superstring space theory for calculations) Because anybody is not able to do that, we call hardly presumable events RANDOMS....

Did you just suggest we apply superstring theory to race engine parts modeled in a PC based simulator?

I'm not sure if thats funny, or just really silly.

Quote from Michael Miskella :

ive always loved the look of F1 cars since they are pure funtion. doubt they will look exactly like that though, running that in real life and you'd have 2 flat tires on the rear since the wings are only supported on the inside :P

F1 cars (unfortunately) haven't been close to pure function for thirty years, and haven't been pure function for more than fifty.

You want to talk about function over form, then you'd attach the wings directly to the suspension uprights rather than the body. This was how it was originally done, but it was soon thereafter legislated out of existence. Thus the compromise aero/mechanical grip setups of today.

Also...purely functional race cars don't have open wheels....

Quote from nikimere :

I have raced for 13 years now and never once have i had a 'random' mechanical failure. Every failure has been down to a human error. Nearly all teams will replace parts that are prone to breakdown (maybe because they are a weak part *again a human manufacturing mistake*) regularly to save from mid-race failure.

What do you race?

Quote from izard :

1150 kg 2.5 L v6 with fwd, just like my car would be great!

Ah, a KL swapped MX3 owner I see....very cool. Come chat at mx6.com sometime if you are bored.

Wow, the title of this thread is simply brilliant.

Dude, they need to have a reality show about your family.

Quote from Tweaker :

I do see trackdays that don't require a rollcage, but maybe that is very rare.

Still, I have to say that I like the fact that the cars seem less of a race car in a way by not having a rollcage.

I've seen track days too that don't require cages, but I haven't seen head-to-head club racing that didn't require a cage. I agree that its nice how the car seems roadgoing with a stock interior...seems appropriate, even if its unlikely in real life.

Quote from Batterypark :

They represent road cars, and racing them represents most likely racing your buddies on a track day. I think it's perfectly realistic not to have rollcages in them.

On our side of the pond its pretty hard to find club racing that doesn't require a cage. I'm not aware of any.

I would suggest that the roadcars aren't like road cars taken to a track day, unless you want to limit them to the "default" setup. The setups people actually use on these cars are dozens of hours of work removed from what a track day car would be like. For instance, you can adjust the brake bias. In real life, that feature requires manual brakes with twin master cylinders and a balance bar. Also, the springs/dampers/roll rates that people set are nowhere near a track-day with the buddies setup.

Last edited by skiingman, Sun 23 Oct 2005, 22:26.

Quote from XCNuse :

true but hte only RWD cars out there are those 2 bmws, and the only awd cars out there are the subaru wrx's
both of which are always in the very rear end lol

Hasn't always been that way. The liquid nature of the rules will even it out soon enough.

Quote from sinbad :

Totally agree. Random failures do not exist in real life. If a part breaks when another "identical part" does not, when used in the exactly the same way, it's because the parts were NOT identical.

Outside of computer games, there is no such thing as an identical part.

With parts that see fatigue (uh, the ones that break and end your race) the state of science doesn't come close to allowing someone to define the life of a part with 100% accuracy. Since race cars are by definition built on the edge, it is very realistic to base failures on a statistical model. Sure, the input of the driver needs to be taken into account, as that obviously influences things.

This doesn't change the fact that in real life, someone will lose a race because a part failed in a mode the designers either:
-didnt anticipate at all, and may have never seen in many hours of testing.
-knew may happen eventually, but the chance was determined to be small enough to be an acceptable risk.

Quote :

If something happens to the car they can see what caused it, they don't just go ahhh well it's random and we were unlucky.

As stated, there are plenty of failure mechanisms that aren't thoroughly understood. The cause and subsequent solution might not be forthcoming. Even the very best designs sometimes fail unexpectedly.

Quote :

Same with punctures. No puncture is random, you get a puncture because you drove over something sharp.

I don't think you fully comprehend the concept of "random". Something that is "random" can be described by the science of probability and statistics. Assuming no user error (driving off the racing line) suffering a puncture is about as random as an event can get. You do get the puncture because you drive over something, but that something being where it was at that time can be described as random.

Quote :

If you want to enjoy the forced dnfs of engine blowups and the like now, in the same way as they'll be done if it's random, you don't need all that stuff coding in. Just put all your names into a hat before the race, and the names that are pulled out will not finish. It's that simple, and that silly, and adds nothing to the experience.

Well thats obviously wrong. There is a huge difference between a race in which a competitor doesn't start and a race in which a competitor retires on lap 32. This difference might very well effect who else finishes the race and the order they finish in.

Quote from XCNuse :

why would you put a RWD car in a FWD GTR class lol?

Ever watch SPEED Touring Car Challenge? Interesting racing, FWD, RWD, and AWD competitors.

Quote from Racer Y :

Really? I can?
Gee whiz, as far as I can remember it was always roughly 2dollars for a pound.
LOL kinda like buying meat or produce... But I thought that was because the
UK had to overinflate things to help pay off it's BIG Gov't social programs...
Gee I didn't know that pererpetual over pricing was due to the good
'Ol US of A.... Man, we're such a bad country.... Shame on us.......
Please.............

Note to everyone. In case you didn't know, we 'muricans are not all this clueless. Thank you, that is all.

Yes, the race cars presumably have straight cut gears, and the tranny whine in the enclosed race cars should almost drown out the engine.

Quote from Gabkicks :

i still can get in 1:33's with normals and probably 1'32s. i've heard people who get wr times use hybrids because they can hold a higher max g.

weird, that doesn't seem like it should be the case.

Quote from jtw62074 :

The only issue I'd take with Skiingman's post is the statement that a sliding tire produces 30% less grip than a non sliding one. Of course, this really means that somewhere past the peak force slip angle the force drops 30%. This simply is not true. Street tires on dry pavement peak and are flat, flat, flat, even the radials JeffR mentioned Ok, maybe as you get out to 60 degrees at high speed you may see some drop, but it's not anything approaching 30%..

I only used the 30% figure as that is what was used by the LFS programmers in the text for the training sessions, regarding straight line deceleration.

Quote from JeffR :

As I continued to steer inwards, the cornering forces dropped down to .8g's this is more than 30% loss in grip.

Why is this unexpected? The rough spec is that a sliding tyre has 30% less grip than a rolling tyre, but that doesn't directly translate into how much cornering force will be lost at the front wheels when you slam them into the steering lock. They may be producing 30% less grip, but instead of the force vector pointing toward the center of the turn it is pointing to a point well behind the center of the turn. The vector component perpendicular to the car's travel will therefore be (much) more than 30% smaller.

Quote :

Ran another test, initiating a spin, but then centering the steering wheel, grip remained about 1.1g's even with the car going sideways.

How are you measuring grip in this instance? Via the counter at the bottom of the screen? That figure is AFAIK perpendicular to the vehicle, not the direction of travel. I would therefore assume once again that the component perpendicular to travel would be less than 1.1g.

Quote :

Last test, slamed on the brakes, locked up the tires, slight loss in grip until the tires over heat. While drifting sideways or with all 4 tires locked up, there is very little loss in grip, but steering inputs can cause an extreme loss of grip. This doesn't make sense to me.

I don't think the locked wheels are dropping in grip as much as they should in straight lines. I think your perception that steering inputs cause huge loss in grip may be related to a less than thorough understanding of what happens when you turn the wheel. Open up the suspension dialog and see how crazy high the camber numbers get at full steering lock. Full lock plus forward travel will equal almost no grip at the front wheels.

Yeah that setup is really nice, just turned six laps with it and nailed some 1:34.60-90s with mouse.

back in S1 days when I was a n00b I remember thinking the XR GT was a bear to drive. After spending a lot of time driving Formula V8 and XR, its like a pleasant stroll around the track. Driving it fast is still baffling to me, but just driving it is easy now.

Quote from Rotary :

This is one.. it's to stop cattle escaping their paddocks without the use of gates on roads

Cool. I don't know if anything similar is prevalent in North America, I usually just see gates of various types.

I've seen lines painted across roads to "instruct" deer where to cros....lol...dunno how effective that actually is.

If you want an example of this effect drive over a cattle grid slow, and then drive over it faster.
You will notice as you get faster the displacment gets much lower. (but the acceleration as its dependant on your speed will get faster)

What is a cattle grid?

Quote from tristancliffe :

Generally speaking ANY internal combustion engine is most efficient at peak torque at Wide Open Throttle (WOT).

It's a huge influence on road car engine design and gearing considerations.

I get really annoyed by people that don't get this important concept you've just hit on the head and assume throttling losses are small. One is a degreed engineer. Go figure.

In practice, many modern engines tend not to be least thirsty at WOT because of open-loop fueling. They tend to work best at that point right before the ECU goes open loop. Full throttle-closed loop is only some new EPA regs away for some of us. Not a good thing for an enthusiast.
...
Re: this thread in general:

I don't think the fuel consumptions for LFS are all that accurate, but I do think a lot of people that have posted here are clueless about the fuel consumption involved in racing....any motor burns a lot of fuel run flat out for any modicum of time.

I just calculated fuel burn for an FV8 on KY Oval because its the simplest case. Gasoline is assumed at 6.35lb/gal, therefore one liter is about 1.677lb, the FV8 world record setup burns 1.875 liters on one hotlap. With a BSFC of .4 (typical for modern racing engine, super high end motors may dip below this) the FV8 is calculated to be producing ~700hp. If you move the BSFC to black-smoke belching turbocar range, it seems more accurate. I haven't tested any other cars, itd be interesting to see the results.

Quote from Woz :

As stated all the forces are driven from the front wheels which in turn get transmitted through the steering column.

Some cars have have far less feeling through the steering than others but this is all based on steering geometry and the effect this has on how the forces are transmitted.

Thats exactly what hes talking about. Castor/camber/SAI/the whole enchilada effects the torques that the tires feed to the steering column. They are called "self-aligning" sometimes because they generally work in that manner.

There are some interesting exceptions. Brake moderately on a split surface with big negative scrub and the car will pull TOWARD the slippery half of the surface

Quote from XCNuse :

either that..or im thinking about something else

Stagger. You are thinking of stagger.

I only mention this in repetition so I can mention how Bill Elliot's NASCAR racing for NES made use of that cool feature....
:lol:

Quote from tristancliffe :

Pressing I to start it results in the message "You are a noob, you engine/gearbox/driveshafts are borken. Learn to drive".

Did I miss something? I've never actually had my car stall after a spin...I thought that was a feature we were still waiting for?

Quote from Lightsaver :

i sadly made the same experience on this server. its my first day playing licenced S2.

i dont remember me standing on track. im allways trying to drive carefully.
after someone touched me at start i spinned and caused an accident and got banned after this.

sorry but im not trained to hit shift+s in less then 0.1 sec.

anyway i hope i can get a second chance.

Its cool. You'll get bored of the silly oval races and join some real servers soon enough. People tend to be a lot less silly on the servers that involve right turns in my humble experience.

I don't go to the FV8 oval servers often anymore because they are quite often full of sillyness of all sorts.

Banning people for a spin at the start is absurd and ridiculous. If the person behind you can't avoid you, its their own damn fault.

Quote from Resound :

This is determined not by peak power of the engine, but the area that you'd get if you graphed the torque curve of the engine (torque x rpm equaling power, of course) over the used rev range.

Thats only true if you don't have the perfect gearbox.

Thus all my statements including "with reasonable gearing" as a precaution.

Quote :

Acceleration as an instantaneous value

Not the way its expressed in automotive publications and the ramblings of enthusiasts. Time to distance or speed is what "acceleration" tends to refer to in these contexts. Not that its right...its obviously not. I've incredibly rarely heard any automotive enthusiast talk about actual accelerations.

Again, all my statements say "acceleration over time" which is what car people talk about.

Time to either speed or distance depends on the power produced. Torque can be used to determine this if you know all of the relevant figures. Since the relevant figures are often difficult to know and consume a good bit of mind-space, relating hp/weight figures is very simple, effective, and accurate.

Quote :

So at high power/low acceleration (at or close to top speed) horsepower is more significant. So saying that overall torque is more important or power is more important is a bit simplistic, the emphasis will shift dependant on specific factors.

This is all pseudojargon. There is no particular end of the scale where one or the other is more effective. The laws of physics are the laws of physics, given certain data you can obtain other data.

Neither is more important...the laws of physics are rather non discriminatory. However, the entire point of the discussion is that a single hp/weight figure is far more meaningful than a single torque/weight figure for determining time to speed or distance...aka "acceleration."

An 800hp/ton car will always go from a to b in less time than the 400hp/ton car, so long as the gearing is appropriate. Even if the 400hp/ton car exhibits a larger value for the integral of the torque curve this is still true.

The 800hp car could perhaps only make power at 6000rpms...a single speed motor. Area under the curve would be zero.

Quote :

Or as people who think less and do more would say, torque makes you accelerate, power gives you top speed.

You can't have one without the other. The torque at the top speed must be sufficient to produce the power.

Its really critical to note here that torque at the wheels does the acceleration as colcob explained.