xpensive wrote:Jersey Tom wrote:marcush. wrote:I think most guys in racing completely ignore the effects of slack and and also don´t understand that things don´t necessarily behave like they were intended .
I dunno about that. Certainly not at the pro level. But if you say "most guys in racing" which includes Joe Autocrosser and all the feeder series, then maybe.
Oh but it is, when I was working within american pro level racing I saw xamples of that all the time. All the time.
Sorry if I can't give you any xamples, when that's proprietary information of course.
I'm not sure if X is talking about NASCAR. If so then, oddly, I think you might both be right but separated in time by a decade or so.
A (pre-COT) example relevant to the current topic is installation stiffness. Aero characteristics, contained by regulations, means that performance benefits by lowering the running front ride height. Teams are constrained by a minimum static height rule, and springs of a regulated design that will coil bind if closed too far. There are additional regulations to "fix" other possibilities (a car cannot start with spring separators, for example). It is not many years ago that I overheard a crewe chief calling for an increase in front spring rate to overcome "push" (understeer). His anwser to my dumb question was to stop coil binding (obviously).
Now (but still pre-COT), I believe, cars run through many turns completely coil bound. That has been achieved by taking advantage of the fact that springs & dampers have different load paths, and modifying the structure of the spring path so it can be used as a "bump rubber". I understand that the solution was discovered by accident, but it didn't take long for all teams to "science it out" and then improve on it.
One example of a "fix" that would be illogical to a European engineer, but which works in the heavily regulated NASCAR world.
