Quote from TFalke55 :

To balance the strengths of cars within each class, the cars will be fitted with the following weights, restrictions and/or pit stop times.
A dynamic balancing system is be introduced to balance the cars on a race-by-race basis. The methods used in the dynamic balancing system need to be transparently published.
The mandatory pit stop times are a minimum time a competitor has to spend in the pit service area over the course of the race session. They are calculated considering the world record lap time, the race distance, the expected number of stints and the expected service times of the pit stop. It is assumed that the change of all tires takes 13 s and the refueling takes place at a rate of 0.2 l/s. It is furthermore assumed, that the change of cars’ performances throughout a stint are similar enough, to base the model on WR laps.
Failure to complete the pit stop times will result in a post-race time penalty of 10 s + 2*Δt, where Δt is the difference between the mandatory pit stop time and the served pit stop time rounded up to the next whole second.
The pit stop times will be published in the threads for each round.

I thought to start this thread as a dedicated place to discuss the Balance of Performance. The model for the calculation of these numbers is described in the excerpt of rules. The final values will be determined a few days before each round.

(last updated 9th July 2020)

I'm looking forward to your comments.

Why not going air intake/additional mass route for ngt at least? :c

Basically I do not want to run different models for different cars. Keeping it to one approach hopefully also means that I can use the data of all cars that run the race to reevaluate the numbers after each round.

While I think that the time pitstop system is a good idea, handicap given to FZ5 seems quite harsh, given that it is much harder on tyres, and also needs to carry more fuel than RAC and LX6.

I'm looking into it again. Especially after rewatching the TRR Championship race last week, I share the feeling that the FZ5 might be disadvantaged by my method as it is so far. This weekend I tried to derive something from the variance of the AI performance over the course of a stint, but that lead to nothing (obviously). So I probably spend some evenings analyzing lap charts.

So... I've crunched the numbers for the first round of the season. I therefore wrote a little script to fit a quadratic parabola into lap data I gathered from several league races from the past 5 years. I only used the laps from the winning driver of these races and divided the lap time by their personal best lap or personal hot lap time to normalize them. The script does not use data points that are too far away with a naive data snooping approach, so starting laps, pit stop in and out laps or accidents are ignored. The rest is used for a least-square adjustment with a Gauss-Markov-model as backbone. From the resulting curves I calculated the area and thereby got an average lap time that was multiplied in the final step with the WR to get the actual track into the model.


The LRF class is naturally less dense


Still a big problem of this very method is the data quality and the availability of good long races for the LRF cars. I hope to introduce the lap times set during OEC into this model. I want to release the script and raw data I used later this week, therefore the LRF numbers might change. Final pit stop times are to be released by Thursday.

Do the data contain the number of pitstops one car needs to make in this race? LX6 should have less fuel and burn it faster, so there could be more stops with this car than with RAC/FZ5.

I calculated with 2 pit stops in the LRF class. From what I see the LX6 should be able to do so. Then again if I am wrong that extra time in the pits would probably not change the minimum pit time as the time penalty would be reduced by the amount the LX6 needs longer in the pits.
Anyways I think a 3 stop strategy could very well be a viable option for LX6 drivers and FZ5 drivers.

Edit: Probably less so for the FZ5, as tyre usage is a bigger factor.

I tweaked the model a bit more and plotted the expected race graphs. Target was to have the cars within a second in the final lap as seconds are the smallest time frame I can expect racers to keep an eye on during pitstops. I noticed that there is a difference between the (more) continuous modelling based raced distance and the discrete modelling based on completed laps of the estimated race time. Therefore the minimum pit stop times change once more:

Quote from TFalke55 :

I tweaked the model a bit more and plotted the expected race graphs. Target was to have the cars within a second in the final lap as seconds are the smallest time frame I can expect racers to keep an eye on during pitstops. I noticed that there is a difference between the (more) continuous modelling based raced distance and the discrete modelling based on completed laps of the estimated race time. Therefore the minimum pit stop times change once more:


-->minimum pit stop times for Round 1
UFR: 25
XFR: 22
LX6: 174
RAC: 41
FZ5: 77


If you calculated everything right, it means that the lx6 needs to be almost two seconds faster in every laps on the race even if its one second slower compared to the wr laptimes. To be totally honest, i am not sure its possible to do so.

So while it was silent here, Lacko reminded me of the Corse Motorsports RAC / FZ5 Cup and the New Endurance Cup. Furthermore I used the data of all suitable races from City The inclusion of these races in my data drastically changed the curves, which is not a negative. It helped a lot to get data points to later stages of a stint and thereby helping the least square fitting there. While it definitely is the case for the LRFs and the UFR, the XFR was not so lucky. Hence I only update the LRF pit stop times for now:
Just to give an overview of what data went into it so far:
Anyways: If you know some competitive NGTR races that were also won by XFRs and had a decent field let me know!


I attatched my files as a zip. (yeah... it is MATLAB code... at a later stage I want to bring it over to python or some other open language, but for know I coded with what I knew would work)

Damn Thilo.

Sorry for derailing this - what soft are you using? This looks very much like Origin. What hurt you so that you're so proficient in Origin?

it's Matlab code I've used... first tried Excel sheets, as I thought that would be much more transparent when releasing, but that they got too big to really understand anything and they confused me, so I switched to coding and as the first round approached quite rapidly I used the language in which I did most of my stuff recently. If I have time for it and get around it I want to rebuild it to python, to have it in an open language, but I currently lack the experience there.

EDIT: Seeing what Origin is, I now understand why you thought so Sobis.

Don't know if I am right with this, so does the 22 seconds for the xfr pit stop mean that's for each pitstop taken individually or a total for all the pitstops added together much be greater than 22 sec?

these times are totals for the race distance. so during the race you need to be stationary for 22 seconds in a XFR at the pits.

EDIT: Important, the timing stops once you've moved. So if you accidently move when it says "finished" and stop and wait again in the pits, it does not count. Keep that in mind.

Not sure if I remember correctly but I believe Airio does report how long your pit stop took. Maybe it's possible for Airio to report to driver how much time you took in pit stops in total, including previous stops?

Something along the line
"Your current total pit stop time is ???/130 seconds"

So I ran the numbers again including now all laps of the Round 1 competitors. It uses the finishing position for weighing the lap counts. Also it now expects a three stint race in all cars, not just in the LRFs, which rendered the minimum pit stop times in the first round close to pointless for the NGTRs. As in the first round, this is the first release and may be amended by updates to the data and/or by further evaluation. Especially the difference in the NGTRs appears rather big, which probably happens due to the UFRs finishing the race in the top positions.

The updated model and all the graphs are attatched to this post.

Those times seem good. I think we will see the benefits of a longer combined pitstop time for the UFR this round. Impressive work, really.

I didn't have time to test it beforehand, but in the race i spent approx. some 70 seconds in pit without any repairs, just fuel and tyres, with FZ5. I did 2 stops, so with this i lost a bit of time.

Same model as for round 2, just updated with the laps from round 2.

Just investigating the pit stops, it seems there has been a wrong estimation for the pit stop times of the LRF cars. They seem to have a different refuelling rate compared to the NGTRs I was not aware of.

After discussions I had with Kid, I tested it one more time

For the final round the LRF refuelling estimation will therefore be changed to 0.6s/l.

I am updating the model currently. I improved the weight matrix, which in turn focuses the estimation on laps of top finishers compared other drivers. While this has the advantage to get a "cleaner" estimation of the parameters, it also ignores now a lot more laps. To compensate this, I amended the ending criteria for the data snooping by raising the upper boundary from 2 sigma to 2.575829 sigma. I also went from an estimation of a quadratic to a linear function for all cars except the FZ5, as it still features a noticeable curvature.

Since the updated script still needs a bit of work, but the race takes place at the end of this week, I'd like to publish the times as of now anyways.

the big increase in minimum pit stop times in the LRF class can be explained by the more realistic pit stop time for the FZ5 and the general projected lack of race pace of the car (0.8-1.0s per lap slower).
The XFR is currently projected to be slightly faster then the UFR by a couple of seconds over the course of the race however it still needs some reevaluation after the model is finished, so both minimum pit stop times are equal for now.
As I said, the times are very much provisional for now.