- Hey team, Andre from High Performance Academy here, welcome to another one of our webinars.
Now today we're going to be diving into histograms, what they are and why they are so useful when
we're trying to analyse a large amount of data and I use these a huge amount, particularly with
anything that I'm reflashing using HP Tuners but this is also more widely available in other
products such as MegaLogViewer HD so we'll have a look at both examples as we move
through today's lesson but before we get into the lesson, just a bit of an update on what's
been going on around the shop.
And we've been a little bit quiet over here in New Zealand, unfortunately we have had another
lockdown here thanks to the delta variant of COVID so we are just coming out the other
end of that so it's been quiet over the last few weeks where we really haven't been
allowed to get into the workshop so a little bit frustrating but what that has meant
is that we are now a month away from the first round of our endurance race series.
First couple of rounds have been rescheduled because they fell during our COVID lockdown.
So it's full steam ahead on our SR86 and I'll just update you on a couple of aspects
of that so if we jump across to my laptop screen.
This is just a bit of a shot of something that Brandon's been working on which is this
little electrical interface box here for our coils.
And we've got a set of IGN1A coils.
We originally had a different coil system on this which was the R35 coil packs.
We went away from that because while there's nothing wrong with the R35 coil packs themselves,
they're very very well proven in high horsepower applications, the actual integration with the
P11 Primera rocker cover for a race application just really wasn't up to task.
It was a little bit fiddly and very difficult to quickly and easily remove and reinstall
the coils so we went the way of the IGN1A coil which is obviously again really well proven so
this is just integrating them with the existing wiring and Brandon's been busy with
finishing up the harness that goes between that little interface box and the actual
coils themselves which is what we can see here.
So these are actually sealed, there's a back shell on the IGN1A coil and a
raychem heat moulded boot there just to seal them as well as possible and you can
see a little syringe there in the background and no Brandon doesn't have a drug habit,
that is actually for the epoxy that we use for sealing those boots.
So just part of the wiring going on there.
Now another thing that we have wanted to get into the car for this season of racing
is a proper fire extinguisher system.
So this is obviously just a safety backstop for us in case something does go wrong.
We obviously want the best but unfortunately there is always the potential for something
to go wrong so hope for the best, plan for the worst is kind of our strategy here.
So this is a Lifeline fire extinguisher system.
We can see a couple of these little nozzles here.
Basically we can, we've got these mounted in both the cabin to protect the driver as well as
in the engine bay and sort of generally situating them in a place where we're
likely to potentially expect fire, somewhere around the fuel system, around the
turbocharger as well so those are mounted there and all plumbed now and
this is the fire extinguisher system that's mounted in behind the driver's seat.
And a fire extinguisher, a portable fire extinguisher is a requirement for any
race car here in New Zealand.
The problem is if you've every actually seen someone try to put out a fire with
a handheld fire extinguisher, it's really actually quite amazing just how little
impact they'll have on a reasonable size fire so the more fire extinguisher we can
get into the car, the better as far as we're concerned.
If nothing else, even with a minor fire it can do a lot of damage so the ability to
put that out quickly and minimise the damage to the car, that's worthwhile in my book.
So looks like we should be pretty well set up on that front.
Now another thing that's been going on, or about to go into the car is a set of air jacks.
And while personally I've always been pretty keen on getting a set of air jacks into a
racecar just because of watching professional motorsport over the years.
There is a practical element to having these as well.
With the aero body kit or aero parts that we've got on the car, particularly the front
splitter and the rear diffuser, what that does is it makes it very very difficult now for us
to quickly and easily jack the car up in order to perform a wheel change or something like that.
So while yes it can be done, if we want to change from let's say a slick to a wet during a race,
trying to change all 4 using a manual jack is going to be incredibly time consuming so we've got
these going in and these will be plumbed into the car.
Now that in itself creates another hurdle though because what that means is it's quite difficult
to actually work underneath the car just on the air jacks.
And this is because they obviously only jack the car off the ground far enough to actually change
a wheel so they're going to get the wheels in the air but that's about it.
And if we jump across to my laptop screen here we've got this rather elaborate looking
setup here which can be used to jack the car higher.
So basically this is two piece, we've got this little top section here which can be slid in
under the air jacks on their own to basically prevent the jacks from retracting if the air
supply was removed or something.
This is essential if you're going to do any work under the car just to protect the
mechanic who's there.
This bottom section though, this is what we can use to actually allow the car
to be lifted in two steps.
So basically it's slid in, you can see this little aluminium slider here so originally
that would be in the out position.
We have the car on the air jacks, we put this in position and then we retract the air jacks.
So then basically the car is sitting on this black section here.
What we can then do is slide that little silver slider in, into the position it's in there,
that gives us another stand, jack the car up again and it raises it basically two steps in the air,
so pretty handy if we are going to be doing something like changing the transmission
or essentially doing anything under the car so a little bit of work to go but we have got
just under a month so pretty confident that we're going to be in a pretty good place
come the start of this season, definitely we're a lot better off than we were this
time last year.
Got a car that has been relatively well proven, shaken down, seems to be pretty quick and
fingers crossed so far reasonably reliable but we know what motorsport is like and we aren't
taking anything for granted.
And as usual, we'll keep you in the loop with what's going on as we progress.
Now I did touch on this briefly last time we had one of these webinars but I just
want to talk about it a little bit more detail.
So if we jump across to my laptop screen here, there's some data from a shakedown
race that we did at Teretonga Park Raceway which is about 2 hours south of where we are
in Queenstown.
We went and did a little club day sprint and just basically got a chance to get some
more track time at one of the tracks that we will be racing at in the endurance series.
And the data that we've got here at the top is our damper position.
So we have had the chance to get a set of 4 damper pots on to the car.
So these monitor the damper position and allows that to be logged.
In its own right this is useful to a point.
We've used this with some coast down tests to get a bit of a sense of how much downforce
we're getting from the rear wing and the front splitter, rear diffuser etc.
Basically what we're looking at there is the static ride height when the car's stationary
and then we do a coast down test where we'll get the car up to around 200 km/h, 120 odd
mile an hour and then clutch in and allow the car to coast.
And obviously at higher speed the downforce from the aero kit will reduce the ride height so
it gives us a bit of an ability to at least get a sense of what the downforce is as well as
the balance front to rear.
The other aspect with this is it can be used to help actually tune our bump and rebound
damping and that is through our suspension histogram.
So basically by monitoring the suspension position over time, the velocity of the damper
can be calculated and actually that's done here and then the MoTeC i2 data analysis software
then allows us to demonstrate this or display them in a histogram.
So what this is looking at is the bump and rebound rates and the percentage of time
that they are in different bins here.
So if we look across the top left here, we've got our rebound which is what I've
just circled, low speed and high speed.
Now this isn't to do with the speed of the car, this is to do with the speed of the damper.
And basically we split this into sometimes low, medium and high speed damper position
or damper velocity and what we're looking at there is low speed is the sort of areas where we're
looking at driver input.
So when we turn the steering wheel and the car will sort of turn into a corner and start to
body roll.
That sort of low speed body roll, that's what we're talking about when we're talking about
low speed.
Likewise when we get on the brakes and the car will start to nose dive, again that's low
speed.
When we're talking about higher speed velocities, we're talking about the
undulations in the road, the actual bumps and how the car will ride those bumps and
then if we're looking at very high speed shock movement, damper movement, we could be
talking about where we ride a curb and the damper moves very very quickly.
The idea with this is what we're looking at ideally is that we should have a nice normal
distribution curve which is actually not what we've got here, we can see there's a bit of
an offset between our bump and rebound sides.
Whereas if we look at the right front we can see that we've got what is a much more
consistent and even normal distribution curve so that can help us or guide us with our
bump and rebound damping.
A lot of dampers though, what we will have is a single adjuster and that will affect to a degree
both our bump and rebound together.
While this is useful still a lot of this does come down to a bit of driver feedback and it's always
advisable, we've just recently gone through this with the car, going out and doing a set of runs
and actually checking what the car feels like and how it responds all the way from full
soft through to full hard.
We did this with our MCA red coilovers and it was really noticeable even as a non
professional driver, with the shocks all set to full soft, we had a car that was really wallowy,
didn't want to turn in, just felt like a big boat at sea really.
On the flipside of that, when we went to full hard, the car was really quite unsettled
over undulations, it wasn't really too stable in the braking area on some corners that were
a little bit bumpy.
So it was quite obvious at least even for me at both ends of the spectrum, we definitely
weren't, we didn't have damper settings that were suitable and somewhere in the mid range,
the car really did respond, we got a nice combination between that crisp turn in
without being upset over the bumps so that's something that's really advisable to do.
The way we did that as well is quite important because I know, if you turn up to your average
track day it can be quite hard to sort of make these changes, we might get a 10 or a 20 minute
session and then you might sit around for an hour and to do this effectively you really
want to back to back this quickly so what we were doing is going out, doing an out lap,
one flying lap and then come in and being really sensitive to looking for those changes
under how the car behaves, initial turn in, through the corner, how it rides bumps,
how it rides the curbs.
Come back in, make a change and immediately go straight back out so this gives you the best
chance, again, particularly if you're not a pro to actually do a good back to back.
Alright let me head back to my notes here.
Now I'll just quickly, while we're talking about suspension a little bit here, I will also just
jump over to our Instagram and just cover quickly off, if it's going to load up here,
yep, just a quick photo here of our MCA red coilover and there's a huge amount of
misinformation and a lot of debate about the correct way to adjust our ride height.
A lot of people, particularly with a coilover like this where we've got the adjustable
spring platform, which is spring based I should say, which is what we've got here.
A lot of people think that the correct way of adjusting the coilover is to adjust that until
we're just contacting the spring so it's captive and the make adjustments to our ride height
at the base of the damper which you can't actually see here, it's out of shot.
Now the problem with doing that is that if we do that, it's actually affecting the ratio
of bump to rebound travel and that can be problematic so the correct way of
adjusting this is to start like we have here with the spring actually removed and what
we want to do is adjust that lower platform, which I've actually lied about, it's actually that
one there we can see and what we want to do is adjust that so that at maximum bump
travel, you'll also see that we don't have a bump stop installed at the moment, we want
to adjust that so that the wheel will not contact the body work or the inner fender,
the inner guard because of course that can be dangerous.
So that sets our maximum bump travel and of course then we would sort of go back
and refit our spring and our bump stop, the bump stop there is going to absorb
that last little bit of travel and take that up progressively which is really important
as well.
So that gives us our maximum bump travel.
Now we then can go ahead and set our ride height but we're going to set that with our
lower spring platform instead of that lower mount.
And generally as a good rule of thumb what we want to do is take the maximum amount of
travel we've got between full bump and full rebound or full droop and we want to set it
up so that from our natural ride height, 2/3 of the available travel is available for
bump travel or compression and 1/3 is available for rebound.
That's generally going to be a pretty good ballpark to get us started.
Now of course from there, individual preferences on ride height, a lot of this does come down to
aesthetics but of course ultimately if you want your car to go fast, the suspension
travel has to be there so setting the car so it's just about sitting on the bump stop so
it looks really good, great for hard parking, not so great necessarily for going around
the track.
Right lastly for today I'll just quickly jump over, we've been really talking a bit about racecar
stuff here so I'll just continue the theme and we have got a data analysis, couple of data
analysis courses out and a lot of people think that you're going to need to spend
$100 or $1000s of dollars on data analysis hardware and what we've done is added a
worked example into our data analysis fundamentals course showing that that's
actually not the case.
There are some really good apps available for your iPhone or for your Android phone,
whatever phone, doesn't really matter.
Such as Track Addict from HP Tuners actually does a really good job using the
built in functions of your cellphone to actually do some data analysis so if you're
interested in some entry level data analysis you can check that out.
You can find that at hpacademy.com/courses and you'll scroll down through that list and
you're looking for our Data Analysis Fundamentals course.
Alright that brings us to the end of our pre show so thanks for watching there.
Give me a few moments and we'll get started with today's lesson.
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