Motorsport On Monday: 12/1/2015
What exactly do racing drivers do in the off season?
Which is fine and well as R&D at the factory keeps on going, but how does a driver match that pace of development to get the most from the car they're given the following year?
In the off season I've gone away and worked hard over winter to come back stronger with a better idea of just how any given driver in any given competitive series does this. Well, I re-read a book over Christmas that's always lurking around the house somewhere.
From F3 to Deltawing, Krumm has experience
It's called Driving on the Edge: The Art and Science of Race Driving and it's written by GT1 World Champion Michael Krumm. Krumm has raced everything from Formula 3 to Super GT, karting to GT1, both times round. And the DeltaWing. In short, he's qualified.
The book's not only a fascinating insight into an area of motorsport we don't usually get to see or hear about, but a reminder of just how good proper racers are and the sizeable gulf in talent and ability between them and a knuckle-dragging mouth breather like me.
We don't get to see that area of motorsport because it's as secretive - if not more so - than the engineering developments. Teams spend hundreds of millions finding tenths, but if one man or woman can find that for free just by analysing and improving how they take one corner at one track then their salary is money well spent, relatively. They're not readily going to tell their rivals how they've found time for free.
Pitch, roll, weight transfer, traction... lots to consider
In the beginning Krumm takes it back to basics, talking about pitch, roll, weight transfer and the traction circle. He claims a surprising number of drivers don't understand these simple concepts so by setting a baseline knowledge to work from he can educate with his experience, giving a fascinating insight into the mental aspect of the sport that is all too often under-represented.
Vision's the key. You look where you go, so by focusing on your braking point, then switching your gaze immediately to your apex point once you hit the brakes, you should never miss an apex if you've got the line right. Same goes for the exit once you've kissed the inside of the corner.
What I'd term 'normal people' can take lessons from the book that actually work, too, giving you an idea for just how much a driver has to manage inside the cockpit during a race.
Krumm has worked with Nissan for many years
The mention of weight transfer is very important. Krumm talks about developing techniques that can find you time. He says in a modern car with enough mechanical and aero grip to make your neck hurt, you don't drive the traditional line of out-in-out, but make a small double apex of longer corners by braking deep, deep to the apex.
But by doing this and throwing in a few down changes - especially if there's someone following you - you'll be leaning on the tyres giving them as much and maybe a bit more than they can take.
It's here where you can actually find time. You don't want to brake any earlier as you'll lose ground to the person chasing/you are chasing. But you can't brake any later for fear of losing control and therefore more time. Which is where weight transfer and this guarded, unpublicised process of self-analysis in race driving comes in.
Downforce requires a certain driving style
So, by keeping brake pressure constant at the maximum, bleeding it away as steering lock is applied and speed decreases, you can open the throttle - just a few per cent - to reset the weight balance.
Opening the throttle causes the car to pitch down at the rear, counteracting the nose down attitude when slowing down and giving more grip and balance.
Next time you're on a track day, try it. You obviously have to be a left foot braker and in a car that allows it, but you won't be surprised to learn it works. It's quite incredible how much harder and later you can brake, and how much calmer the car goes through the corner at a faster speed.
Krumm has the results to support beliefs!
That's how astute professional racers are. And with many testing bans now in force, these techniques and areas for performance improvement are developed by hard graft; hours studying telemetry graphs and days spent in the simulator to try and pin down that elusive lap, only to do it again at the next circuit.
Switching to anecdotal evidence from two wheels, when former BSB champion John Reynolds was racing, he'd split corners up into multiple sections. If he could gain a hundredth in each section, that might be as much as five hundredths per corner - on a lap with 10 turns, that could be as much as half a second gained.
It's this micro analysis the pros are so good at. The best drivers can spot these faults to drive their metaphorical chisel into to extract more time from a car. Between sessions in the gym that's what they spend the winter doing, but we rarely get to witness this side of the sport.
A few tricks to try at a track day then...
He spotted Alonso ripping the steering wheel of his Renault F1 car into the downhill left of turn five at Barcelona, forcing the car into heavy understeer. It's only later that Krumm learnt Alonso's car that year was particularly oversteery, and that he was inducing understeer to neutralise and balance any movement from the rear on turn-in.
"It was a very strange technique, [but] he was actually showing extreme flexibility and experience at a very young age" to drive around a problem.
Tenths mean prizes
Next time you see a change in driver performance from day to day or even session to session, although it might be a setup change that's yielded the extra speed, don't write off the role of the driver in improving his or her lap time.
With modern motorsport changing so rapidly at the moment with the introduction of new systems and even more to manage, this makes the work racers do over the winter even more impressive.
[Images: LAT]
Shame the first few posts and just dull pedantry - why waste your time fellas? This is *clearly* the motorsport off season, and always has been. And there will *obviously* always be some exceptions to that, which there always has been too. Picking one example from the latter doesn't make the former incorrect, does it.
It just seems that Motorsport Monday, as a premise, should be a round up of the weekends' motorsport activities - which in the past it has been. Were it to have been a quiet weekend, no problem..but actually there have been a couple of pretty important events take place.
I'd also say this article was worthy of being stand-alone, rather than under the M-M banner.
I wouldn't consider it to be pedantry..
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