FINDING THREE TENTHS IN ONE CORNER - RYE HOUSE TEST MYCHRON 4 WITH GPS

In this article we look at just one corner to find 3 tenths. This process took me a matter of minutes at the track and you can do it easily yourself.

Heres what I did:

-Compare two quick laps with a speed against distance graph
-See where on the track our second fastest lap was quicker than the fastest (RaceStudio makes it very obvious)
-Use Race Studio to see why it was faster, show the driver and ask him to do it every lap!

Here are the step by step instructions on how you can do the same

Download your data into race studio analyser and activate your speed channels and plot measures in a graph (ctrl F2). Leave your fastest lap up and find the next best lap, hopefully you should have a second lap between one tenth and three tenths down on the fastest.How is that for precision? It makes you wish that there were similar technology to this to help you improve in all your activities. You could become not only a better kart driver but also a better manager, better casino (http://www.partycasino.com/) 

player, or better runner! Anything! Having a tech coach like this is both very convenient and effective.

Now, the fantastic thing about Race Studio is that it shows you exactly where on the track you are losing time and gaining time, when you have the x axis assigned with distance. They call it distance mode and you can toggle between time and distance mode with this button:-

You'll know you are in distance mode when you can see that the track distance is displayed on the x-axis, in meters rather than time in seconds.

Ok, in distance mode you will also notice something magical...... below your speed trace race studio shows you where your second fastest lap is gaining and losing time versus the fastest lap.

So, the fastest lap is represented by the blue line, which is a staight line. The green line is the second fastest lap compared to the fastest, so you can see in the example how the green line dips below the blue line, then climbs up and then shoots above the blue line and then levels off.

The important thing is that when the green line goes below the blue line, it shows we are AHEAD of our fastest lap! And we were ahead by three tenths of a second at one point. Then the green line shoots back up and levels with the blue line, showing how we lost those three tenths again.

Now if you tell a driver that he was four tenths up on his fastest lap at one point, suddenly he becomes very interested in getting back out and finding that time.

Next you have to figure out why the kart was faster at that point and then how to repeat that so that the driver can go out and use the information to go quicker.

Figuring out why we were four tenths up on our fastest lap

In the example we are at rye house, and I've placed the cursor at the point where the green line starts to dip below the blue one in our time comparison. The cursor shows up on the track map too so we can see where we are on the circuit, the cursor also draws a vertical line all the way up the screen so we can see the corresponding point on the speed traces. (I've highlighted the area of interest in red for your convenience)

So, we can see from the map that we start gaining time approaching the infield hairpin. Now we need to look at the speed traces to see where the green speed is higher that the blue speed. If you look closely the blue and green lines are dropping sharply under braking for the hairpin, but the green line doesnt dip nearly as low as the blue line, before they both start to climb again under acceleration on exit of the hairpin.

This means that we carried much more apex speed and were able to pick up speed well on the exit. Sometimes a high apex spee

d will be followed by a poor exit, but in this case we learned that carrying more speed through the hairpin was quicker and didnt hurt our exit.

Unfortunately, that time gained disappears very suddenly when we try to take the next hairpin too quickly, which you can see when that green line on the time comparison shoots back up again. But because we have data we have the chance to pinpoint where we can make time, figure out why and show the driver exactly how to put together a much faster lap!

Read on to see how GPS reveals a one off mistake found three tenths.

To investigate if the racing line taken on the green lap is able to explain the four tenths found we can take a look at the GPS mode.

If you look closely you can see that the green line is slightly to the outside of the blue line, and that the green line has a marginally later turn in, and also a slightly wider exit. Now usually running a bit wide at a hairpin is slower, but I have always suspected that taking the fairly shallow kerb on the inside is actually slower. It turns out that my driver was in fact using the kerb, but had missed it accidently on the green lap, and inadvertantly found a bunch of time!

Into the next hairpin you can see why he lost all that time almost immediately, by missing his apex and running into the second hairpin too hot. In the highlighted are in the diagram below the green line shows a higher top speed for that section, but also the green speed trace drops much lower than the blue. This is where that 3 tenths we had in the bag dissappears, in a very slow exit from the hairpin.

Now the point is that without the data we would never have noticed this gain in time, hidden in an otherwise slower lap. And even if we had that information from split times, without the GPS we would never have diagnosed it.

We carried on the day by taking hairpin one a little wide, and resisting the urge to attack the second hairpin so hard, and with practice we found half a second on the hairpins alone. There are a lot more tricks to Rye House which our data revealed giving us even more time, using just the MyChron 4 with GPS..... and we are still studying the data and are ready to try a few more!