The online racing simulator
Quote from Hallen :Oh come-on... do you really want that kind of massively powered (400+ hp, 900lb) all wheel drive, non-downforce car in LFS? It is too much car for most drivers to handle.

Silly thing to say. Most of us came to LFS for the challenge of a real driving sim.
Have another look - you'll notice a "" smiley
IMHO you can't handle an AW11 at the absolute limit without doing it with the RAC first. LFS is the best simulation to date. I have saved some nasty slides and near misses IRL with nearly everything! Rwd, fwd, awd, trucks and cars alike, with the help of LFS's "seat time" I beleive it made me a much better driver in the sence of control over the dynamic forces acting upon a 4 wheeled vehicle.

I'm not saying if you can drift or turn hot laps in LFS you can in real life, but, it will improve your awareness of the vehicle and the behavior of it.

RAC with intake restriction set to about 115bhp and hybrid tires helped prepare for this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LHsWMVsdWE

AW11 MR2 (built for auto-x) with summer performance tires, open diff., about 95bhp, and a LFS fanatic behind the wheel! (btw, this is my brother behind the wheel not me! I'm driving the legacy estate chase car)
Quote from K. Tsuchiya :IMHO you can't handle an AW11 at the absolute limit without doing it with the RAC first. LFS is the best simulation to date. I have saved some nasty slides and near misses IRL with nearly everything! Rwd, fwd, awd, trucks and cars alike, with the help of LFS's "seat time" I beleive it made me a much better driver in the sence of control over the dynamic forces acting upon a 4 wheeled vehicle.

I'm not saying if you can drift or turn hot laps in LFS you can in real life, but, it will improve your awareness of the vehicle and the behavior of it.

RAC with intake restriction set to about 115bhp and hybrid tires helped prepare for this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LHsWMVsdWE

AW11 MR2 (built for auto-x) with summer performance tires, open diff., about 95bhp, and a LFS fanatic behind the wheel! (btw, this is my brother behind the wheel not me! I'm driving the legacy estate chase car)

Couldn't agree more. My driving skills greatly improved after getting my G25 and playing a lot with it.
A bit OT. Did you downgrade your MR2 performance ? Because I thought that the AW11 had a 4A-GE (like the Toyota Corolla), which pulls about 115-120bhp. Maybe you meant 95whp ?

Nice video, by the way If you wanna train more, I am working on a mountain track league, maybe you should check my topic (A new idea for a new league ?), should threads below ^^
Tristian can we should get your race car in LFS.
Quote from tristancliffe :Have another look - you'll notice a "" smiley

Yes, exactly. I am not saying the dp1 would be easy to race in LFS, it wouldn't. But damn, what a great car to have in LFS. Chances are, most of us will never have a chance to drive a car like that in the real world, so LFS is a perfect place for it.

However, with what Dennis is doing in the real world, he is helping open the door to real, purpose built, performance cars that are reasonably priced. Eventually, even some of us could have access to one of them.
Quote from K. Tsuchiya :...
I'm not saying if you can drift or turn hot laps in LFS you can in real life, but, it will improve your awareness of the vehicle and the behavior of it.

Well said. LFS won't make you a race driver, but I personally believe that it really helps to prepare your mind for performance driving. Understanding the racing line, braking points, car behaviour and even catching slides come just a tad easier I think.
Quote from Hallen :Well said. LFS won't make you a race driver, but I personally believe that it really helps to prepare your mind for performance driving. Understanding the racing line, braking points, car behaviour and even catching slides come just a tad easier I think.

Just as you understand more and more competitive racing...Since playing Lfs I undestand the F1 dynamics so much more!When I see a pass now I can understand much better what is involved in it...The same applies when I race hire karts, my passes are much more professional, not to talk about the second I've shaved from my lap times...
Looking forward to hear more about the dp1, looks like great project, hope it pays off
Quote from Hyperactive :Looking forward to hear more about the dp1, looks like great project, hope it pays off

thanks the payoff is already there in terms of experience and the opportunities that became available because of it. but of course there's much more to do and to learn.

check the site for updates every now and then, there's a lot more coming
Quote from dpcars :check the site for updates every now and then, there's a lot more coming

Good to hear... having followed your progress since the napkin sketches, I was really excited for you to have got some financial support and premises to move into! I think I'll have to make a trip down to PIR once you get the production dp1 chassis going with the V8 in it
Can't believe i havnt seen this thread till now. Thats awesome. Just imagine full grids of them

Thanks for taking the time to try get this in dpcars
Hello
That looks really interesting for LFS
It's a kind of car LFS doesn't have yet!
Where can I find all the specs of the car? (power,weight etc...)
Quote from Zen321 : Maybe you meant 95whp ?

Never had it dyno'd and always fear sounding like a fool stating power numbers that might be on the high side for a car with 180,000 miles and has probably been abused a fair amount of it's life.

Having had a 2nd gen supra that was considerably crappier and quite a few years older that handed the MR2 it's butt in power, I feel the MR2 could use a rebuild pretty bad. It's awful slugish when picking up from a roll or even more so from a dead stop.

I swear my 4AFE cars had much more go power than this (dare I say it) junk engine people refer to as the holy grail of toyota performance when it's like the over rated honda engines everyone in america can't get enough of. Life begins at reasonable torque numbers, not high revving junk like most "tuners" sink countless thousands into.

The 4age and most honda engines feel like a slick shod UF1, all noise, all handling, but absolute crap for torque to turn the driveline and tires.
wow!
I'm just amazed
Less than 400kg for a 3.0L V8 with 400 horses
Quote from Sir moi 407 :wow!
I'm just amazed
Less than 400kg for a 3.0L V8 with 400 horses

And don't forget all wheel drive you wouldn't be able to get the power down nearly as effectively without that.

Bob Smith has the dp1 in his VHPA program. You can load it up and look at the acceleration times. The dp1 with 400hp will rival an F1 car for acceleration.

The tires are interesting. Dennis had a lot of trouble getting any heat into them when driving the prototype. Sure, he wasn't going 10/10ths, but still... It probably has something to do with the very low weight of the car. Finding the right tires will be an interesting challenge.
Quote from Hallen :
The tires are interesting. Dennis had a lot of trouble getting any heat into them when driving the prototype. Sure, he wasn't going 10/10ths, but still... It probably has something to do with the very low weight of the car. Finding the right tires will be an interesting challenge.

the main issue is that on the prototype the tires are road-legal R compounds which by definition are made for much heavier road cars. i WAS able to heat them up on a kart track where the turns never stop but on a full-size track there are too many straights also, the prototype only has a stock 180 hp 4-cyl hayabusa motor. my engine builder tells me he should be able to get close to 500hp from the 3.0L version of the V8. good to have a few spare horses just in case the weight comes in a pound or two over target.

lesson learned though - this thing has to run on slicks. i don't anticipate any low-heat problems once i put proper racing tires on it. we'll see.
Quote from dpcars :i've been playing with my LFS setup and after thinking about it for a while realized i had to sit A LOT closer to the screen... the result is quite amazing actually (there is a slightly more detailed writeup on my site http://www.dpcars.net/etc.htm)

http://www.dpcars.net/etc/lfs6.jpg
http://www.dpcars.net/etc/lfs2.jpg
http://www.dpcars.net/etc/lfs3.jpg
http://www.dpcars.net/etc/lfs4.jpg

Ah, a realism/immersion setup, and a lovely one at that. While struggling with the same issues, I've done pretty much the same you have, with slightly different setup. I hope I can offer some useful advice:

1. Adjust the pitch (up-down viewing angle) to make the horizon on screen match the real world horizon behind the viewscreen. This makes the brain connect better (balance senses and all) as there's less mismatch with what the senses is telling it. You'll probably have to adjust the seating position too if you want to keep that instrument cluster view.

2. The Field of View (FOV) looks like it is yet a bit larger than real life, and that would make things appear smaller than they are to the eye in real life. Lowering this (zooming in, in essense) might give immersive results. You should even be able to do the exact math to calculate this by measuring your real field of view from eye to edges of the screen, in degrees, and then setting LFS to exactly that number. I don't know if it's horizontal or vertical FOV that LFS uses.

Please let me know what you think.
Quote from Mikkomattic :Ah, a realism/immersion setup, and a lovely one at that. While struggling with the same issues, I've done pretty much the same you have, with slightly different setup. I hope I can offer some useful advice:

1. Adjust the pitch (up-down viewing angle) to make the horizon on screen match the real world horizon behind the viewscreen. This makes the brain connect better (balance senses and all) as there's less mismatch with what the senses is telling it. You'll probably have to adjust the seating position too if you want to keep that instrument cluster view.

2. The Field of View (FOV) looks like it is yet a bit larger than real life, and that would make things appear smaller than they are to the eye in real life. Lowering this (zooming in, in essense) might give immersive results. You should even be able to do the exact math to calculate this by measuring your real field of view from eye to edges of the screen, in degrees, and then setting LFS to exactly that number. I don't know if it's horizontal or vertical FOV that LFS uses.

Please let me know what you think.

ideally, for a 90 degree FOV your eyes need to be half of screen width (actual width, not diagonal) away from the screen. so for a 40" wide panel like i have, the eyes should be 20" from the screen at 90 deg. that's not quite practical with the present setup (as a background project i'm thinking of how to put something together that makes it work). i'm about 30" away and as a compromise run about an 80 deg FOV which is not perfect but pretty darn good. i like that i have to physically turn my head to look through corners!

with large monitors dropping in price every day there might come a time when i just get a 60" wide panel and all will be good. until then one has to make do

Quote from srdsprinter :The DP1 has been spotlighted in by SolidWorks (the CAD program used in the design of the DP1).

http://files.solidworks.com/ca ... /pdf/random_research1.pdf

Interesting notes there to those who read through the article about what the future of Palatov motorsports might hold! Electric?

the electric stuff is a separate endeavor, i like to think of it as my 'carbon credits' that way i don't feel guilty about wantonly burning up dinosaur juice on the track, i offset it with doing good elsewhere. there are, of course, plans for greener powerplants for the racecars too but that's a ways down the road. some fun things though

it won't be boring, that's for sure
I like so many things Solidworks can do, but I can't get my head around the simple stuff. I'm too indoctrinated into the Autodesk way of doing things - I used to use AutoCad, but now I'm an Inventor person.

I tried Solidworks again today, simply because I read that article and loved what it produced (and I read something in Racecar Engineering the other day too), but my gosh simple things aren't simple to me!
Quote from tristancliffe :I like so many things Solidworks can do, but I can't get my head around the simple stuff. I'm too indoctrinated into the Autodesk way of doing things - I used to use AutoCad, but now I'm an Inventor person.

I tried Solidworks again today, simply because I read that article and loved what it produced (and I read something in Racecar Engineering the other day too), but my gosh simple things aren't simple to me!

it's a very different way of thinking. you need to think more conceptually in sw, i.e. in terms of solid shapes you create. everything starts with a sketch and the key thing is that a sketch basically defines RELATIONSHIPS and SHAPES rather than 'hard data' - it can all be tweaked at any time and all subsequent steps rebuilt with new data. rather than exact dimensions think 'concentric', 'tangent', 'parallel', 'vertical', etc... dimensions are changeable and secondary.

the real trick to using a parametric system is to think of building objects in terms of parametric blocks that relate to each other. i keep hearing autodesk guys call it 'history' but that is fundamentally wrong. it is not 'history' because you can go back and change it at will and that is the essential difference from 'deterministic' programs. i think of the steps used to create something as a 'structure' of the object.

don't know if that made any sense or not...
Quote from tristancliffe :I like so many things Solidworks can do, but I can't get my head around the simple stuff. I'm too indoctrinated into the Autodesk way of doing things - I used to use AutoCad, but now I'm an Inventor person.

I tried Solidworks again today, simply because I read that article and loved what it produced (and I read something in Racecar Engineering the other day too), but my gosh simple things aren't simple to me!

Add me to the list! Fortunately, I don't have to do much CAD these days (more of a Matlab person), but after trying out Inventor a few months ago, SW was promptly ditched. As you say, it's the simple things that don't seem right in SW. Having said that, I hate AutoCAD with a passion
I hate Autocad as well, and am unable to achieve simple tasks with it despite years of attempts.
I use(d) SWK a lot at work, when my job required me to actually engineer something, and have always loved the flexibility it brings to 3D work. It gives the user a power to edit back the work up to the base sketch in a few seconds and explore all possibilities.

Drawbacks exist: due to this flexibility teamwork and reusing another designer work prove highly difficult without strong design rules...

The car does look fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG