Quote:
Originally Posted by rwarden
One variable you've not listed is "driver experience" - perhaps intentionally, or not? If you consider youself an expert driver, and have little new to learn, great, this experiment makes sense, but if you are new to road course driving, your best bang for the buck in terms of reducing your laptime is driver training/experience.... just my $0.02...
R Warden
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Thanks. I am not new to the sport. However, this is a tool to decide what mods to do to the car not to the driver. I think I have a pretty decent plan going on the driver education bit. Many people here choose to mod their cars, I probably will someday too. When that time comes, I intend to make the optimal selection. What is an optimal selection? Well that depends on quite a large number of factors. I'm asking for help with three of those factors here.
I know it is hard to picture exactly what I am trying to do. So imagine this. You are about to spend (pick your budget) on your car. In general, you either want to improve how it looks, or how it performs. So lets say that you decide you what to focus on performance. Should you buy brakes? If so what kind. how do you know which brakes are best? Is it the 60-0 time? some other function? Maybe a function of how fast they stop the car, how long they last on the track until they fade, and cost? Ok, lets work that out for each brake kit on the market. do you need to make a couple of reasonable assumptions to avoid complicated calculations involving expensive test equipment? of course you do. Now at this point, most people just give up and say "it depends on too many variables". On the other hand, I say, actually, with a couple of simple assumptions you can get to about the 95% confidence level (so to speak) of the correct answer. Is that close enough for you to make a decision? Probably. It is close enought to put a person on the moon? Probably not.
So in short, this is not a simulator (it will not tell me how fast I will go around a track.) It is a decision tool. It will tell me which modification set will most improve the car, given certain constraints. So far the results have been interesting. Not amazing, but it saves some work and thought.