why bother putting up a poll and asking for other people's opinions if your mind is already made up? rationalizing why your style is the best doesn't make it so. pehaps it is true that if you spend most of your time just below the limit, a small skid will upset your rhythm, but the fact remains that you will still be faster most of the time.
when planning a race, a project, or just about anything, i always try to think in terms of "racing to win" instead of "racing to lose". if your race strategy involves going past the limit often, just so you will be comfortable when that happens, you are "racing to lose" in my book. in other words, you are planning for how to deal with problems before they arise, but by planning for them, you are actually making them happen. "racing to win" means planning not to have such problems in the first place. ie, if you practice keeping the car just below the limit, then you will be less likely to cross the line, and you wont need to worry about what happens if you start skidding.
first of all, computers do not measure time in miliseconds. the clock on a computer running at 2 GHz ticks 2 million times for every milisecond of time that goes by.
second, if computer clocks were out by 5%, that would mean your clock would drift by 72 minutes a day, and this guy's online/offline speed difference would be 5-10 seconds per lap, which is clearly not happening. i would say the average computer clock is at worst 100 times more accurate than that, meaning the biggest difference you would ever see would be less than a tenth of a second per lap, but that's assuming that the clock adjustments in multiplayer are actually big enough to cause entire frames to be missed, and that's a HUGE assumption. with 2 million clock cycles per milisecond, and 10 miliseconds per physics update, there are 20 million clock cycles to tick by per physics update, and most computers will be sitting for a long time between physics updates anyway, waiting for the next tick. there is a ton of room for computers with different clocks to add or subtrack ticks and still keep in sync with each other, and never miss a frame.
i've noticed that sometimes it's a bit easier to go fast offline than on, but i'm happy with the simple explanation, which is to do with framerate and lag. online the game can be a bit jerky, while offline it is usually a little smoother, and the jerkiness in the display translates into jerkiness at the wheel, and a slower lap time.
i'm glad they did at least something right by retracting vettel's penalty, but everything else about the race is still a joke that just keeps getting worse.
the race report might as well read like this:
Q: "what's pink and red and travels 300 km/h?"
A: "a baby dragged behind lewis hamilton's F1 car"
engine cooling is much better these days, probably thanks to the electronics. don't you remember hamilton sitting motionless at the end of the pit lane for extremely long periods during quali earlier in the season, or when he went off at nurburgring and waited for the crane to put him back on track?
if the cars can withstand sitting motionless at 30 degrees, i'm sure they can stand driving at 80 km/h in the rain.
yes, he could have. he could have followed the safety car at a reasonable pace, like he was supposed to, and if he'd been doing that then he wouldn't have needed to slow down at all.
but i forgot, hamilton is perfect. he makes perfect starts, perfect stops, has perfect strategy, and is a great guy who everyone should look up to. foregive me for calling a spade a spade, but he's just as dirty as MS, if not more so.
oh give me break. he comes charging up to the back of the safety car, going much faster than it, everyone naturally follows him, then he slams on the brakes and let's it pull away by 25m or more. he knew exactly what he was doing. the safety car didn't slam on the brakes or cause that situation.
i agree. no hamilton didn't "make" vettel run into webber, but he certainly did create a situation where something like that might happen. what other reason could he have for repeatedly slowing to a near stop (he did it under all of the safety car periods, not just during this one), other than to cause havoc behind him?
ok, what about webber then? did "everybody" get rear ended under safety car? no. some people went off the road on their own. lots of people were hit by others, some seriously, and some not. for example, hamilton nearly got taken out by kubica. it wasn't any skill on his part that kept him in the race, it was luck. if kubica had hit him on the wheel instead of the side it could have been all over.
if i was alonso, i wouldn't want to be hamilton's team mate either.
however, it doesn't seem like there are any other viable options. ferrari has 2 drivers they like, bmw has 2 drivers they like, and none of the other cars are fast enough. so i think he's going to have to suck it up, put this season behind him, and focus on having a better season next year. i think the politics really got inside his head this year, and it's unfortunate. but i think he deserves a fair shot next year, and if he just accepts that hamilton isn't a team player, and only worries about his own races, he'll be fine.
i don't blame him for the mistake. it could have happened to anyone. i'm saying that the fact he was up to 3rd proves the race was a farce. the track seemed to have enough grip, but the visibility was so bad that it gave a huge advantage to anyone in front, and it simply wasn't a fair sporting event.
i don't know if i'm more disgusted by the race itself, the commentary, or all you people who thought it was exciting to watch. that wasn't a contest, it was a lottery, and the results don't really mean anything.
i wont even talk about how it screwed up the championship battle. just look at vettel and webber. vettel is actually one of my favourite younger drivers, but there is no way he should have ever been up to 3rd place in the first place: the torro rosso just isn't that fast. so it doesn't really matter that he crashed under the safety car, because he shouldn't have been in that position anyway. it was a joke.
is anti-lag the same as launch control? several programmable engine management systems have the latter now (motec etc), and the new porsche gt2 will have it from the factory.
sounds to me like a problem of too much weight transfer for your driving style. during trail braking, the weight shifts to the front of the car, but the front tires are doing double duty, both braking and turning, so they can't turn in very hard. as soon as you lift off the brake, the front will have more turning grip available, and will turn in quite hard, causing the rear end to whip around. this can be very handy in some situations. for example, it can save you from plowing off the track when you brake too late.
as suggested, being a little smoother coming off the brake might help, but if you'd rather not change your driving style, try increasing the front bump and/or increasing the rear rebound. this should reduce the weight transfer to the front and give you more predictable steering. but don't use too much or you'll end up with understeer.
when alonso cut in front of hamilton off the start, i lol'd. it was good to see him on the receiving end after what he did to massa at monza. then came T1. yikes! looking at the replay, alonso had the right of way, and technically did nothing illegal, but it sure seems like he pushed hamilton off maliciously. but then again, what's that expression people use? "it's not my fault if he decided to park his car out there." surely hamilton must be starting to understand that others besides him also want to win the championship. the only thing that really surprised me was that he was surprised by the move.
other than that, a pretty boring race at the front. good effort by kubica to recover from his start grid penalty. too bad he got stuck behind so much traffic (especially coulthard).
there isn't really enough information available to know what's really going on, or who are the biggest bad guys, and there isn't much point in speculating.
that being said, it does seem very convenient that the drivers were given immunity in exchange for their testimony. as someone else noted, if there was enough cheating done to justify punishing the team, then how could the drivers have not benefited from the team's cheating? it's almost as if the FIA is pandering to both sides. ie, Ferrari gets what they want, but Hamilton still gets his chance to be world champ as a rookie (which apparently people think is important to the popularity of the sport?).
but alas, all we really know is that when big money is on the line, things get very weird.
lowering the rear sounds like a reasonable thing to try. it should cause a slight weight shift towards the rear, as well as increased negative camber, both of which will give more rear grip. on the other hand, the lower CoG may result in less lateral weight transfer during the corner, which might translate to more responsiveness, but lower ultimate grip, so you might consider a slight reduction in rear arb at the same time as you lower the ride height.
i don't really think the drivers can be blamed this year. the car just hasn't been as reliable as it needs to be. i'm sure kimi would have defended harder against hamilton's pass if he knew he had a car that he could push, but after his crash in quali and massa's problems earlier in the race, i think he was conserving the car, trying to score a few points, instead of pushing it and risking scoring none.
most of you guys are still making this way too complicated. stop thinking of preload as a force, and start thinking of it as a length (as has already been suggested).
and yes, the preload device does come free during shock compression. the spring remains fixed against the perch, but the preload device is allowed to move freely on the inside of the shock, using a piston and bumpstop. under tension, the preload device will apply equal pressure to the shock housing and to the spring, but when the spring is compressed the tension is relieved and the piston is allowed to move away from the bumpstop, and the forces become zero at both ends of the preload device. after this point the spring handles all the forces being applied to the suspsension, but before it, the spring handles none.
in my observation, preload reduces "top". ie, the travel between the normal sag point and full extension, essentially eating up travel that was being wasted anyway. preload only affects the apparent stiffness of the spring if too much is used, and it compresses the spring farther than the weight of the vehicle would naturally cause it to sag. a highly preloaded spring may tend to feel very stiff over smooth terrain, but will come to life over bumpier sections.
for those who still don't believe that preload affects the stiffness, imagine a spring held 1cm shorter by a clamp that is fixed in place. if you want to compress the spring further, any force being applied by the clamp would be relieved as soon as you moved the ends of the spring. therefore, to compress it further, you would be doing all the work, and the preload would be contributing nothing, and so the first 1cm of travel beyond the clamp position would require the same application of force as would have been required to move it 2cm from rest.
i almost choked on my beer when he blurted that out, along with him declaring that hamilton was "racing for the win" when he was in 3rd and losing time every lap. at least somebody corrected him and said, no actually he's in damage control mode.