- Welcome to today's RaceCraft member's webinar, the second one of the year.
Today we're going to talk about some more motorsport data analysis but
specifically we're going to move more into some of the more common displays
we use when we're looking at driver analysis.
Whereas in the last member's webinar we looked at sort of a more general overview,
this time we're going to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty of really understanding
driver performance.
So there's a couple of things that have been going on in the shop for us recently just to
give you guys a little bit of an update, we've got both our GT86s we've been
working on.
So there's the RaceCraft GT86 which I know a lot of you guys will be familiar with.
We've also got another GT86 which is also a project that's part of our sister
company at High Performance Academy.
So that car is an SR20 powered GT86 which any of you guys that follow High Performance
Academy closely will probably also be quite familiar with.
So if we just jump across to my laptop screen I'll just show you guys a little bit about
what that car's about and some of the stuff we've been working on.
So this is sort of a general layout of how the car's set out.
We've got a Nissan SR20VE, turbocharged in our case.
And one of the big projects that we've been working on recently has been to increase the
cooling efficiency of everything we've got in there so like a lot of cars, a lot of really
heavily modified cars, cooling is a really massive problem.
It's a huge challenge and you're often trying to fit a large amount of cooling
capacity into a really small space and that's really no different to what we've
got here.
So if I just switch to another view here, this is looking a little bit closer at what's
going on, so what we've got in this section here is the radiator and in front of the radiator
stacked right on top of it is the intercooler.
They're nested really closely together and they actually seal completely against each
other and then to the side of that in each one of the wings we've got an oil cooler
each side.
Now this one here is for the transmission cooler and this one here is for the engine
cooling itself.
Even fitting those things in place was a massive challenge.
The amount of space that you've got to work in really reduces really quickly when
you're trying to fit this much stuff into the front of a road car.
It's often really not optimised for fitting this many coolers in the front
of it.
The coolers themselves aren't really too bad but if you think about it as a whole
package when you start to add ducting and everything.
And particularly when you want the ducting to work properly and efficiently, that's when
it really becomes a big challenge.
So I've got a couple more shots here, so this is a shot with the intercooler and
radiator ducts fitted to the car.
So these are made out of composite, the front one is carbon kevlar and the
rear one is just a pure carbon, we use carbon kevlar at the front just to give
us a little bit more impact resistance.
It's not uncommon, this particular car is an endurance racing car so it's not uncommon
for the ducts to get a bit of a hard time, whether it's nudging of the cars or maybe
small, hopefully small hits to the fence and stuff like that.
So you tend to try and make something that's quite a lot more impact resistant at the front
of the car and that's why this one's made out of carbon kevlar mix.
So you can see this duct here has a diverging on the inlet and a converging on the exit.
And the idea there, we've actually got a video on YouTube talking about the
technicalities of that, of why you shape ducts in that way to increase the cooling
efficiency.
But there's some pretty strong physics that goes into the reasons why.
So if you head across to the High Performance Academy channel,
the YouTube channel, you'll see there's a tech talk I gave on that if you're
interested in digging a little bit more into that.
But what I specifically wanted to talk about today was some stuff we're doing with
the oil coolers at the side.
So the way we've got that laid out, sorry it's probably better in that previous
view, essentially there's an area in the bumper in this sort of area here where
we can feed the oil coolers.
We've also, another thing that I actually forgot to mention, even down the bottom
here which is a little bit hard to see, but there's this long thin duct here which
is actually there to feed the brake ducts, so you can see the brake ducting is
just hiding in there behind the oil cooler.
This duct down here is what feeds the brake ducts.
But in this area here just to the side of the main inlet for the intercooler and
the radiator is where we're feeding the oil coolers and the main thing I want to
talk to you guys about today was actually the outlet duct of which we've got a
prototype here.
So if we just switch across to the overhead camera for a second.
So this here is a, you can see if I look from above it's actually got some curvature
in a few different directions here.
This here is, will sit on the outlet face of the bumper.
So this is the main bumper, sorry the main outlet on the side of the bumper.
So that the front of the front wheel will sit about here and this just sits towards the rear
of the side of the bumper and what's going on here with this duct, this is
obviously a prototype, it's very rough, it's just been a really rough print but
just to give us some rough sizing into how we're going to fit everything in there.
Essentially you can see this shape here roughly lines up with the outlet on the
side of the bumper and what we've got to do is transition from this relatively
complex shape, through to this rectangular shape and this rectangular shape is this
flange and this flange is what's going to mate up to an existing duct that we've
got on the back of the cooler.
So the idea is that this whole section comes off with the bumper and this mates
up with a section on the side of the oil cooler that will have a matching lip
and a seal around the outside of it.
So this has been a really big focus for us recently as far as upgrading this car is just
making sure that we can properly match the size of the inlet and the outlet
ducts and making sure we put nice smooth transitions wherever possible.
In reality with anything like this it's a huge compromise, there's lot of things
that aren't ideal in there but you've just got to make do with the space that
you've got.
As far as other work that's been going on in the workshop, I've been doing quite
a lot of work on the RaceCraft GT86 which is the one that's still FA20 powered.
So we've been doing a whole lot of data upgrades to that recently.
So as part of both our data analysis fundamentals and our upcoming
advanced course, I'll be filming lots of worked examples and we're going to
be using that car with mutliple different data systems.
So we've got an AiM based system, we've got the MoTeC system which is
already a built in logger dash that we already use in that car and I've also upgraded that to
use MoTeC's V2 camera which the beautiful thing about that is it allows you to take video
and data and because they're both MoTeC products that are designed to work together,
it nests, it synchronises the data and the video for you so there's no manual processing of
analysing those two things so if when you're going through the data analysis you can have
the video there and as you move the cursor through the lap, it'll automatically update
to where you are in the lap on the video which is a really nice feature.
And the third system we've got in that car is a VBOX system.
So the idea is, we're going to be able to take that car out on track and we're going
to be able to capture 3 completely different systems worth of data in one go and
that's going to give us a lot more material to do worked examples, to cover more
brands than if we just had one system fitted to the car.
The other big upgrade that's happening back on the SR86, the first car that I talked about is
we're in the middle of a brake upgrade in the back of it.
So if we just flip over to the overhead camera again, currently we've got some
D2 calipers fitted to it which are definitely more of an entry level motorsport caliper.
We're fitting these Endless calipers, so we've got a very similar caliper set up
on the front of the car already.
Really this is a much much more high end caliper, a lot of that comes from the fact
it's monoblock and what I mean by monoblock, you can see here that there
are actually no joins, the entire thing is made of one complete piece which as a
result makes it much more complex and much more expensive to manufacture.
You'll see in a lot of I guess more entry level calipers you've got, tend to be made in
two halves, so there'll be a split line through here.
And the idea is it makes it much easier to machine, you can machine one side at
a time and then you can just bolt them together.
The downside of that is you can have installation stiffness problems.
And I'll come back and talk a little bit more about that in a second.
But one of the things, the beautiful thing about using a monoblock caliper like this
is we've got this bridge that's permanently bonded into the caliper and again that's
for compliance issues.
So when it comes to brake compliance, or compliance in a brake system, a lot
of the time, the way the driver feels that is for a given amount of pressure, either
hydraulic or physical force you put on the pedal, when you've got compliance,
it means you end up with more pedal travel than you would otherwise have
and quite often that can be unsettling to the driver, it can make modulation of the
brake pressure more difficult.
Generally the more consistent the position of the pedal is, the easier it's
going to be to modulate the force on the brake pedal.
So that's the reason that you want to go for something like, well one of the reasons
you might want to go for something like a monoblock caliper 'cause it's just another
source of compliance.
What I mean by compliance is if you've got something like a two piece caliper or something
without bridges.
This is, what we call this section here, we call that a bridge.
The idea is that as these, because these pistons are being forced in each direction from
the hydraulic pressure, the idea is that the more pressure that you've got in there,
the whole caliper can actually start to spread apart and the result of that is
that you end up using some of your pedal travel, not just to create extra
pressure but it actually gets taken up as the caliper swells and moves and of course
that compliance is a stack up of the entire system so whether it's compliance in
the brake hoses themselves or compliance or maybe some looseness or movement in
your pedal box or the calipers or even the brake pads themselves squishing depending
on the type of brake pads you're using, that compliance is something we're always
trying to get rid of so that's a small upgrade for that SR86, GT86 based car.
So something else I want to mention as well is we've got a Whiteline promotion that's
currently running.
So if we just switch across to my laptop screen again, I'll show you guys one of
the ways you can get to that.
So there are a number of ways you can get to it but if you head across to our
Instagram page and you go to the link in our bio, I'll just click on that here,
it'll take you to the promo and the promo for the Whiteline promo is we're giving
away a full Whiteline handling kit and our car setup package.
So our car setup package is our corner weighting and our wheel alignment courses.
And depending on what car you've got, you can pick what you need to out of the
Whiteline catalogue and we'll send you that, it doesn't matter where in the world
you guys are, it's not going to cost any more, the freight's included in that as well.
So once you come to this page, you can see there's a number of different ways
you can get entries into the competition.
It's a really great deal, very easy to enter so I definitely recommend you guys jump on
that, it would be a no brainer.
You can also see up the top here we've only got 29 hours left on that
promotion so I suggest you guys go and jump on that.
One of the, there was a couple of videos we put out recently which were pretty good
tech heavy pieces.
This was a video of an interview I did at the back end of last year with a Formula
Student or Formula SAE competition that was running locally here.
A couple of the local teams got together and did a mini competition.
For any of you guys that aren't sure or don't know what FSAE is or Formula
Student depending on what part of the world you're in, it's essentially an
engineering competition that takes place at universities where they build miniature
formula style cars to a pretty stringent set of regulations but you do get a huge
amount of innovation as part of them and certainly these cars are not exception to
that, in this particular video, is digging into a little bit of the aerodynamics.
So why the wings are there in the first place, why they're shaped and sized
the way they are and some really interesting technical detail in those, I certainly learned
a lot talking to Paige here.
There was vortex generators in the front wing and talking about how the front
wing conditions the airflow for underneath the floor of the car and everything.
That was I thought a really interesting discussion so if you guys are interested
in aerodynamics, you can head across to either our YouTube or our Instagram
page and you can find that video being hosted in both of those places.
Now there's been a bit more activity on our forums recently as well.
That's been quite active, it's been taking up quite a lot of my time recently engaging
with people who have had some really great questions on the forums and there
was one that came up I think yesterday or the day before that I just wanted to
jump on which I thought was a pretty interesting discussion and it was one
of our members talking about recording the tracking sheets or recording the history
of what happens to them on track.
So in this case it was Shane Plohl who was saying, essentially telling us when he
goes to the track, it looks like he's doing a bit of club racing, the sorts of things
he's recording and how he's recording them and Shane's question was,
how are other people doing it?
Are other people using electronic things, spreadsheets or computers or
are they writing it on pen and paper and just getting a bit of a discussion about that
and this is actually something that's pretty close to my heart, it's something I've put
a lot of emphasis on in my career so far.
Essentially, it sounds like a really boring subject but essentially recording all of
your progress, recording all of the settings on the cars, recording what happened
during a session, tyre pressures, all that sort of stuff.
And this, I gave Shane a pretty long winded answer, he gave us some examples here of
the sorts of stuff he's recording and then I talked about a couple of my experiences based
both on some really simple experiences and I would say quite low level or quite
small teams all the way through to the high end stuff I've been involved in and that
spanned everything from writing things on pen and paper, right through to
completely dedicated software that is available to all of the engineers in the team
and it's fully syncing so everything is updated in real time live and that can
happen both to the track and both to people back at home base as well,
being synced over the internet.
So what I'm talking about here is information like obviously setups,
run sheets, which is where you would record what happened on every single
lap, what the lap time was, any driver comments or driver feedback or anything
that happened at that point during the race or during the run, taking driver
feedback, engineer feedback, driver debriefs after the session, tyre pressures, tyre
sets, which TPMS sensors are fitted to which rims, all this sort of stuff.
There's an enormous amount of information that you have to track as you run your
car on track and that goes for whether you are running it yourself as a one man
band or right up to the highest levels.
So I thought this was a really interesting discussion and I really hope to see a few more
people jumping on this part of the forum as well to see how other people are
dealing with their record keeping, whether they're just doing it with a pencil and
paper or whether they're doing something a little bit more advanced and I would
definitely say, my personal experience, when I'm working with a smaller team
or maybe a team with a little bit more basic infrastructure, the way I usually deal
with it is I usually make up paper booklets, pre organised booklets where I can write
things in with pen and paper.
I find that gives me a lot more flexibility, it means I'm not relying on any more team
infrastructure, whether it's networking or even electricity in some cases.
'Cause some circuits may be more or less reliable.
So I thought that was a really useful discussion that Shane brought up and
I encourage you guys to go and check that out and maybe add some of your
own thoughts in there as well.
We've got, just wanted to mention as well, we've got upcoming courses, so obviously
if you guys are watching this, I'm sure you guys are already aware of our current
courses which is our Wheel Alignment Fundamentals, our Corner Weighting
Fundamentals course and our Data Analysis Fundamentals course.
We've also got our Advanced Data Analysis course coming out soon as well as a driving
course and a suspension tuning course that's going to be coming out later in the year
as well so hopefully you guys are looking forward to seeing those ones coming out
soon.
Just remember guys, that Whiteline giveaway, I definitely encourage you to go and jump
on that, doesn't cost you anything to enter, it's a really great deal.
We use a lot of Whiteline products ourselves on our shop cars and I can definitely
vouch for them being a high quality product so I encourage you to go
jump on that deal and get entered into the draw.
So that's the end of the pre show for today guys, I'll be back in a second
and we'll start the webinar lesson proper.
If you liked that video make sure you give it a thumbs up
and if you're not already a subscriber, make sure you're subscribed.
We release a new video every week.
And if you like free stuff, we've got a great deal for you.
Click the link in the description to claim your free spot to our next live lesson.