Quote from Anthoop :

You put Maldonado in the same category as Vet/Rai?
Having a name and having to fight for a name are two different things..but...what?

Of course not. Don't put words in my mouth. But Maldonado isn't suddenly terrible, he remains a fairly talented ex-race winner. Hard to judge him or Grosjean because the car is so evil. The Marussia for example is not much slower but much easier to drive.

Hamilton helped by safety cars, but did well in last few laps to hang on.
Rosberg/Bottas/someone else hurt massively by 1st safety car coming out after they'd passed the pit entry.
McLaren daft for putting both cars on inters. Should have split the strategy at worst.
Ricciardo superb again. Vettel was superb all weekend until his spin, and the resulting track position spoilt his strategy options.

Would have been a better race without the neutralising safety cars, but not bad by any means.

The Lotus was evil earlier in the year. I suspect almost anyone would have had similar incidents. What was actually impressive was how FEW crashes either of the drivers had. But it's cool to mock Maldonado...

I do find it odd that people see worse results in a dodgy car for, say, Raikkonen, Maldonado and Vettel and assume the driver has got worse? Even simplistic comparisons to teammates are more often meaningless.

I presume these "analysts" are braindead idiots.

Only a week late with the photo.

Yes, they adjust things. Compound, cooling drillings, thicknesses etc, but I doubt they'll change master cylinders or caliper piston sizes.

Even if they did, the amount of downforce at Monza at 200mph is more than enough so that they can't lock their wheels at high speed in a straight line regardless of driver effort.

And the changes are linked to engine power restrictions like in LFS. You seem to be drifting away from the point that reducing engine power by 5% shouldn't have an influence on braking in a given car, unless its a manual adjustment by choosing options in the setup menu.

If you now asking if it's physically possible to fit brakes that could lock the wheels at high speed, then yes. Of course it is. But they don't because they would ultimately be slower - they'd be heavy, difficult to modulate and wouldn't work well (probably too much thermal capacity for normal materials and normal braking events etc.

But F1, GP2 and F3 cars don't lock their brakes no matter how hard the driver presses. If you lower the power of the engine than the braking ability does not change. So it shouldn't in LFS.

I'm not a good person to ask. Having lost a brother in a road accident, I realise that life is fragile and I have chosen to take the risks of racing (albeit somewhat controlled). I also consider everyone else (marshals, drivers, spectators) to have made the same choice (even if they haven't, or haven't done so consciously!).

So I would be fine to drive past stalled cars at high speed. I don't particularly like the idea of hitting it (or a tractor, or a marshal), but I certainly wouldn't want the race spoilt by that risk - I can choose to slow down, and so can all the other drivers. The marshals don't have to volunteer, and even if they have they don't have to obey the "run across the track and remove that stranded car whilst others continue to race nearby" command. By removing the element of choice, you take the responsibility away from the drivers (or marhals), and hence their decisions about what risks to take become muddled.

For me, racing can be too safe, but I need to expand on that for it to make sense. Otherwise I'd be racing the flimsiest car I could find, in petrol soaked t-shirts, with piles of debris on the track for me to hit, followed by some catch fencing with the finest wire available...

So... I like my HANS device. Everyone should wear one or an equivalent. Even on track days. Hell, if people weren't so bothered by wearing suitable safety wear in a car on a road, I'd say helmets, HANS and harnesses in all road cars. I like my carbon tubs. I like tyre walls. I like nomex. I like yellow flags. I like marshals, and would like them to be able to do what they do with a sensible amount of safety. I like safety scrutineering before a race. I like wet tyres. I like ABS on road cars because I recognise that 99% of people don't know how to drive, they just know how to get from A-B.

But I don't like starting races behind safety cars because someone in an office looking at the insurance document thinks it's too dangerous. I don't like miles of run off. I don't like aborting races because a car has crashed, unless marshals/medics have to swarm around the car. I don't like tracks with so much tarmac run off that it's almost impossible to not be able to rejoin. I don't like that everything has to have blame attached, as if there is no such thing as an accident. They might be foreseeable, but in some things (like racing) that shouldn't mean, to me, that they are entirely prevented.

I've not really got to the bottom of what I think is "acceptable risk/safety" and "unacceptable risk/safety", or why I think it. I'm not thinking it to be different or argumentative, and I know I've got a lot of holes in my logic. But I really don't want things to be too safe. The risk is why I like racing. I love to feel the feeling that having navigated a corner better than ever (and ideally better than everyone else at my level, although that's rare this year), I know I was moments away from a massive accident that could have hurt/cost me but my skill/judgement stopped that from happening. If racing ever just becomes driving around, and the penalty for a misjudgement is just you don't finish... then that's lost a massive part of the appeal. I crushed my T-5 vertebrae last year when I misjudged a braking point at Zolder, took off over a high kerb and belly-flopped back on to the track. It hurt. But I finished the race in a car with bent suspension and barely being able to breathe - whose fault is that? The tracks for not having safer kerbs? The Clerk of the Course for allowing the race to go ahead or continue? Or mine for accepting the risk and making a misjudgement? The latter, of course. I had to be extracted from the car and taken to hospital, which they later invoiced me for. If they'd told me that at the time I'd have taken my chances and got out, given time, myself.

I watch racing for the thrill of competition. I don't like to see crashes. But I want crashes to continue to happen, so that drivers respect the limits, and race hard within those limits. Schumacher (as an example) wouldn't have been half as 'dirty' had he been in a spaceframe car with 200 gallons on fuel in a welded aluminium tank next to his elbows. The balance is making sure that drivers are safe, but not too safe.

With the Sutil incident in question, I would have been totally, 100% happy about the car being there for x amount of time and moved under yellows. Until marshals were expected to run across the track - that is (to my twisted mind and flawed, incomplete logic) too much to expect.

I repeat - I have thought about this and why I think it, and I can't put it into a watertight reasoned paragraph. My logic is full of holes, and I patch them up with exceptions or special cases when they occur to me or are pointed out to me. I am aware I shouldn't be allowed to run a race track! And I know I'm not speaking for everyone.

Quote from Anthoop :

Look at it another way....
When the real racing car runs around the track in wet weather he will use the brakes in a different way than when running in the dry.....presume for a moment that it will always be wet...would the brake system be designed differently from the outset?

Yes.

Yes if you consider temperature considerations
Yes if you ignore the lower temperatures.

But that doesn't change the fact that an F1 car CANNOT LOCK ITS BRAKES AT >~150mph (without lateral load transfer) with 'normal' brake system designs.

In a high risk environment (an F1 meeting), how much risk is too much? 20%? 5%? 1%? 0.1%? And how does one quantify that in the heat of the moment?

No, ultimate braking force is limited by pedal effort required in real life on high downforce cars with normal (incl. F1) brake set ups.

No, I don't change braking force in LFS. I set it so I can't quite lock wheels in the high downforce cars at top speed, but after that I never change it.

For realism purposes, talk of mouse users is redundant. Cater for them, but mouse driving has no place in regard to "realism".

Well, you get feedback in a real car, in the form of forces. So I guess that's FFB.

It almost sounds like you don't know how brakes actually work , from drivers leg to contact patches.

I'd define "a few" as more than 2, and less than about 10 or 12 ish. Anything more probably becomes a few months. I certainly wouldn't rigidly stick to the structure that more than 4 weeks (of an estimation done in the head, probably on the spur of the moment, judging expected progress given known joblist) suddenly equals "a month" etc.

It was a flexible date, intended to say "it won't be the next few days, but neither should it be months and months or years from now".

So relax.

Quote from Anthoop :

I was not taking rules into consideration ...just giving the fact that you can lock the wheel if there is enough braking force.


Are you saying that a (conventional pad/disc) brake will perform best within a certain range?

Yes, if you modified the cars to generate enough brake torque then they could lock the wheels. But my original point is that it's silly to calculate that torque in LFS as it's not realistic.

Sort of. If you had a set up that could generate the hundreds of bar needed to lock the wheels with human leg strength, then the drivers would find it very difficult to generate just 15 bar at corner entry - just the weight of their foot would probably be enough. And as they don't want to lock wheels, they don't do that.

Max pedal pressure = x hydraulic pressure = y brake torque given coefficient of friction and effective radius etc < torque capacity of warm slicks on a dry track pressed down by about 1200kg.

Whilst you probably could swap master cylinder sizes and caliper piston sizes to make it lock at any speed, the teams don't do that because the drivers would lose the ability to modulate the brakes at low speed.

Even an F3 car cannot lock the brakes at 140mph with max pedal pressure.

That's why the shape of a brake trace in a high downforce car is like a triangle - hit the pedal as hard as you can, and then bleed off pressure as downforce drops.

Best way to clean those tyres is to do about 8000km. That will wear off the patterns.

I could run you in a car for ~£2000 per day. Very cheap!!

Yes, Aris is a good guy. He's helping with a mod that I'm part of too.

No, but that has nothing to do with it. Weirdo.

It's odd that sims set brake force so that it can lock wheels. LFS does it, and Assetto Corsa does it too. Yet high downforce cars CAN'T lock their wheels at high speed. A better approach would be for sims to simulate brake line pressure, effective disc radius, and disc-pad friction to generate a torque that can be compared to the torque capacity of a given tyre as if varies with load/camber/slip etc. It's too simplified otherwise, and the replacement equation isn't much more taxing.

An F1 car, for instance, can't lock up it's brakes at 200mph. It has too much downforce, and the brakes will not overcome that no matter how hard the driver presses.

From what I saw last week, lap 2.

Made a seat today for the Trulli team (I didn't get to do Jarno though, but chatted to him throughout the day), and then mucked in as a volunteer mechanic. They started building a car yesterday, and got 5 laps out of it today. Gave them a round of applause for their efforts.

Quote from Töki (HUN) :

Shame about those accidents, but it's the co-driver's job to write the notes. Seems like they were simply too fast. Can't really blame the jump for that.

Agreed.

Rallying (and indeed motorsport in generally) would be shit if we removed all the challenge, difficulty and danger in the name of safety. The competitors WANT some danger and risk.

No actual news that we didn't already 'know', apparently. http://formerf1doc.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/good-news/

Could be some sort of ECU strategy for better clutch engagement. If you're in neutral with the clutch up, the ECU assumes you just want a steady idle. But if you press the clutch, it thinks "you're going to engage a gear and start moving soon, so I'll prepare by advancing the ignition and injecting a tiny bit more fuel". Perhaps. ECUs can do lots of clever things these days to make cars more efficient, more user-friendly and less prone to stalling, vibration etc.

I doubt many engines would actually have any problems at all from running lean on the overrun. Happens all the time on carbs (the popping noise). It's not like EGTs are high, and knock limits won't be an issue.