gruntguru wrote: ↑07 May 2019, 00:41
The average slip at that speed would be in the vicinity of 1% or 2% so a 1% oscillation would be significant.
It would be good if someone more knowledgeable on tyres can chip in here. The tractive force would be about 6.7 kN (assuming 330 km/hr and 600kW). Normal force on the rear tyres would be about 4.5 kN plus aero - say 15 kN total?
We're making the assumption that the gearbox is built to transfer torque to the wheels in a progressive way. If there are a pair of non-circular (slightly elliptical) gears somewhere in the transmission (such as you might find inside a fluid pump, in ordinary use), that's not necessarily going to be true.
Having 100% linear torque delivery to the tyres would be optimal in some sort of closed loop system where a low-latency sensor can detect and vary throttle application to ensure the optimal slip for traction and type temperature, but it'd be hard for the driver to feel exactly where the limit is if the driver was the sensor.
Given that the driver is the sensor and is necessarily laggy and error-prone, it may make sense to have an element in the transmission that varies the torque delivery in a nonlinear (eg. sine) pattern. The driver can then feel where the limit of adhesion is because every few feet the tyres will breach and retreat from that limit. Such a system might explain this phenomenon:
https://www.motor1.com/news/39418/photo ... rol-video/
This sort of thing is used in karting, where electronics aren't permitted in things like braking systems (non-circular rotors and non-circular venting patterns on brake discs are common because they permit feel for where the limit actually is).
That said, personally I think the RPM up/down seesaw on the graph is just noise in the data and nothing to do with the above hypothetical system, but everyone likes theories, so there you go.
The only other reason I can think of why it'd do that would be to deploy energy in the ES via the H. You would pulse the H up, suck in more air, shove it through the engine like in "Q3 free" mode, just for a short period of time to let the ICE climb up into the next few tens of revs each time without getting into horrific det issues as you would if you deployed it all at the start of the straight in one lump.
It would also explain why Honda were having so many problems with instability, if this is their strategy for long straights.
I still think this is just noise on a graph. A real Honda data graph would be very helpful; obviously that isn't going to be forthcoming so soon after a race, but Honda have released this sort of thing in the past for old races.