This year has been a watershed for motorsport - the silent grip
of electricity
has spread further most notably. But while the technology we've seen developed on track this year is undeniably impressive, the squishy organic bits that command that technology have largely gone unnoticed. Or the human's role in the process is rather underplayed, in my opinion.
Systems are clever, but they're only as intelligent as the person who programmes them and the individual that deploys them. Knowledge is power, understanding key.
The human brain is more agile than any supercomputer, but how some drivers' bonces have developed to accommodate for the role of different technologies to make a car go quickly frankly fries mine.
A lot to think about in an LMP car!
Migration, migration, migration
Earlier this year, Anthony Davidson revealed some details of a feature Toyota calls its 'brake migration tool' on
the TS040 Hybrid
. And the way it works is pretty trick.
Example: the car heads into a heavy braking zone, the driver feels lots of rear locking, so he adjusts the brake bias towards the front with a straightforward control in the cockpit.
Next lap, the rear locking is gone, but now, on turn-in and with the inside front wheel unloaded, that begins to lock - it's here where the brake migration tool comes in.
It can use the brake-by-wire system to 'migrate' braking effort between the front and rear axles during the braking phase to eradicate any locking.
It's managed by the driver using rotary switches on the steering wheel but isn't automatic, meaning corner-by-corner it has to be set.
It's a similar system to that used in F1, so although Audi and Porsche complained over its legality initially, it's now fair to assume that, also using energy recovery systems, both German squads have similar technology.
This is from a Porsche 919 Hybrid. Huh?
More than middle management
So, let's recap on what a driver is actually having to manage during just one part of one corner on a solitary, isolated lap of anything between an hour and a half race and 24 hours depending on the championship.
Approaching the corner, a driver has to analyse battery charge status and manage how much energy they are using and can regenerate - just the right amount of fuel saving by lifting so as not to exceed their instant or three-lap average values, just the right amount of coasting to charge the battery so there's enough electrical energy to utilise the extra power from the electric motor(s) on corner exit, but carrying enough speed and braking late/hard enough to ensure the lap time is bang on the lap delta.
On top of that, the driver is having to feel track conditions and tyre grip evolving - not a task local to this technology or modern motorsport, but a significant one to manage all the same - only now they're having to interpret where any locking occurs in the braking phase (on top of everything above, remember) as well as manually adjusting brake migration by the right number of stops corner-to-corner.
Throw in some slower traffic when you're trying to brake for said corner (as many as four different categories in sportscar racing with GTE Am, GTE Pro, LMP2 and LMP1-L, which may all be passing each other in front of you) and the level of mental agility and computational brain power needed to drive a hybrid race car is, quite frankly, mad.
Then there's the actual racing in catching and passing the car in front, or pulling away from the one behind, and protecting the tyres. Straights are no longer a time to have a breather, there's too much to manage.
Then we're onto rally drivers...
Of course, rally drivers have been ingesting multiple sources of information for years. Talk about changing grip levels? Try driving on changing surfaces with a tyre choice that's fundamentally a compromise.
Try driving flat-out on a single track road while not knowing when the next corner is coming, what direction it goes in and how severe it is, relying on instructions from nutter number two in the co-driver's seat. Even then, nutter number one in the driver's seat won't know what conditions will be like on the other side.
Active differentials may have been outlawed since 2011, but in the 2000s WRC cars had three active diffs that could be controlled in-car by the driver in real-time if required.
Continuously variable locking parameters for front, middle and rear diffs (fully locked off the line for max traction, open just a split second after if needed) meant on top of everything else, the organic power needed to calculate all this and drive a rally car fast - managing oversteer, setting the car's attitude, jumps and so on - was vast.
"So where's the cruise control?"
Is the mother of invention, apparently - in motorsport speed is a necessity, the inventions are fairly obvious.
But necessity is also diverse. Going quickly necessitates that drivers can extract the maximum from these inventions, and in doing so it's meant that the way engineers and competitors approach going fast has changed.
As a fan, I'm in awe of the technology and how man has reacted; how quickly drivers have to think and how much information they have to assimilate to win no matter what it is they're driving.