Driver influence

[Thomas MuWe]

Hey FS-Folks,

I was watching F1 this afternoon (in Europe) and saw Luca Badoer in a red car which could go actually quite fast around the Valencia street track. But not with him. More than one second slower than the 19th in qualifying. Okay it is a 100 second laps which leads to something like 1% he is worse than the rest but he was ~2.6s slower than his teammates.
For professional racing this is quite a lot. (Sorry Luca)

Last weekend I was at the first austrian competition (no! not that country with the kangoroos) and watched the endurance there. Some really impressive drives there. 2 people were leading the crowd via mic through the race. They talked about the cars, the teams, and the drivers. As I heard who was driving there I was thinking, damn why in hell our team has not that good drivers. Kart champions, german Slalomchampions, Formula spec drivers, rallye drivers, in some sort they have or had been professional race drivers. But anyway we finished 4th in the endurance and 2nd overall so could not be that bad. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

Coming back to Luca and the driver influence in F1, I was thinking today:
boah how much could a good driver give us in FSAE.

Do you have any numbers? Did you compare different drivers - one experienced pro and one newbie who is talented (or not)?

Do not understand me wrong, I do not want to complain about other teams having experienced drivers but I was just thinking about:
Should the driver influence be reduced in FSAE?
Maybe a standard AutoX track with just 30s a lap?
Would that suit better for FSAE as an engineering competition?

Tell me your thoughts about it.

And please do not tell me:

A driver is just as good as the car blabla....
Or if the car is not setup correctly the driver could not get the best out of it..... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

Best regards,

Thomas

Alumni
joanneum racing graz
suspension jr08 / jr08evo

[Thomas MuWe]

Hey FS-Folks,

I was watching F1 this afternoon (in Europe) and saw Luca Badoer in a red car which could go actually quite fast around the Valencia street track. But not with him. More than one second slower than the 19th in qualifying. Okay it is a 100 second laps which leads to something like 1% he is worse than the rest but he was ~2.6s slower than his teammates.
For professional racing this is quite a lot. (Sorry Luca)

Last weekend I was at the first austrian competition (no! not that country with the kangoroos) and watched the endurance there. Some really impressive drives there. 2 people were leading the crowd via mic through the race. They talked about the cars, the teams, and the drivers. As I heard who was driving there I was thinking, damn why in hell our team has not that good drivers. Kart champions, german Slalomchampions, Formula spec drivers, rallye drivers, in some sort they have or had been professional race drivers. But anyway we finished 4th in the endurance and 2nd overall so could not be that bad. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

Coming back to Luca and the driver influence in F1, I was thinking today:
boah how much could a good driver give us in FSAE.

Do you have any numbers? Did you compare different drivers - one experienced pro and one newbie who is talented (or not)?

Do not understand me wrong, I do not want to complain about other teams having experienced drivers but I was just thinking about:
Should the driver influence be reduced in FSAE?
Maybe a standard AutoX track with just 30s a lap?
Would that suit better for FSAE as an engineering competition?

Tell me your thoughts about it.

And please do not tell me:

A driver is just as good as the car blabla....
Or if the car is not setup correctly the driver could not get the best out of it..... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

Best regards,

Thomas

Alumni
joanneum racing graz
suspension jr08 / jr08evo

[Fred G]

Hi Thomas,

I too believe that the driver is the biggest influence in FSAE. In saying so, the cars should therefore be designed so that the drivers can make the most of the tyres in an efficient and effective manner. This would be my design goal.

The car should be designed to be ergonomic, to reduce driver fatigue and provide driver confidence. The suspension should be driver friendly, provide good feedback, little to no bump steer and not solely to keep the tyres on the ground at the optimum orientation. The engine package should be useable. The list goes on, but the goal should ultimately return to the driver being able to exploit the tyres at an optimum level.

What that optimum level is will depend on your teams resources and your driver's ability.

This is an engineering competition. Engineering does not just encompass the technical issues, but also the managerial ones. How a team coordinates it's program to find the best drivers suited to FSAE is important.

A team's ability to find, teach and train a good driver is a good reflection on the team's ability to project manage.

If Michael Schumacher was at university, I'd go to great lengths to recruit him on our team. But then again, our team is only as good as the ability for the team to provide an engineering solution to meet Michael's needs.

Having said the above, we have found that seat time is valuable. We have had drives from all walks of life - amateur go karters, rally drivers, dirt bikers to people who do not have their car licence. With seat time and some patience and coaching, they were able to get within 1/100ths of a sec to our experienced drivers.

This is my long winded way of saying, it's unreasonable to reduce further, the driver influence on these race cars. In fact, that's what the static events are in place to do.

Comments?

Regards
Fred

[Hector]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Thomas Müller-Werth:

Do you have any numbers? Did you compare different drivers - one experienced pro and one newbie who is talented (or not)? </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'll keep it short and sweet - we do compare drivers (how else do you find who is fast?) and there noticeable differences between them.

Should driver influence be reduced? I don't think you can. As Fred mentioned, there are static events in place that help balance the dynamic events.

Cheers,

Hector

[Thomas MuWe]

With numbers I mean seconds between them on a standard course you drive with your car or something like that.

Do you think it is enough to have the static events and acc. and skidpad? Worth not the half of the points!
With a standard AutoX track the driver influence would be still there (at least with the setup), but it would the cars would be much more comparitive!

I think there is too much driver influence on the overall result.

Before the Detroit comp this year I made a analysis with our two endurance driver and they were within 1/10ths of a second but the eclectic time would had been ~2 seconds faster. (50s lap)

When I drove our car the first time in an Auto-X/Endutrack (I drove Skidpad and Acc. in MIS) I was 2 seconds slower than one of our endu driver. (45s lap)

[D Collins Jr]

I (we) definitely believe that the driver has an enormous influence on how well you do at competition. In fact, we've experienced it both ways, and don't think that skidpad and accel aren't driving events! Driver skill in those plays a huge role. But, like Fred pointed out, engineering isn't just about technical details. This is an exercise in project management, and part of that is how do you attack this problem? At Oklahoma, we believe the answer to that is increasing seat time. This is helpful in so many ways...even if you have an experienced driver, they aren't familiar with your particular car yet (although I've seen great drivers hop in FSAE cars and blow away the competition, even just old FSAE guys who are out of practice can still do this). IMO, if you want to decrease driver influence on the event, don't go out recruiting experienced drivers at your school (necessarily. Don't run them off either), but get your car done early and test the hell out of it. Your drivers will get faster, your car will be set up better, and the things that are going to break will break in practice, not comp.

I also think that its next to impossible to provide comparative data. Aside from the fact that we're all testing on different surfaces/conditions/etc, the generic problem with amateur drivers is inconsistency. Maybe on Monday, I'm the fastest driver on the team...then maybe after a long drinking night Friday, my Chief Engineer is faster than me. I've seen it vary between laps for some guys...we just don't have the consistency as amateurs to lay down the same lap times over and over again.

[Dash]

Drivers definitely influence the race.
At Michigan, we got black flagged, and then booted out of the endurance race because of our driver.... http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_frown.gif

[exFSAE]

In this series, driver variability is absolutely enormous. One of the biggest of all things. Even for stuff as "simple" as skipad and accel.

[Silente]

As D collins Jr says, the best solution is to get the car ready as soon as possible and have lot of kilometers of practice with it.

Anyway, in any field of motorsport Drivers have a huge huge influence. Not only for performance itself, but also because a driver with good skill can drive you through your setup adjustment.

So, i agree with the fact that a good driver should be also "build" by the team, driving him for example with data logging.

I think the only solution to keep driver importance away would be to make all the cars to be driven by the same person. Maybe a professional driver. But just one guy driving 80 cars!! It would take a month for the competition! And it would take away a lot of fun to teams members!

[Mark TMV]

I have a potential solution for the reduction of the "ringer factor" for the endurance event...
How about having FSAE officials pick two endurance drivers at random (out of the four drivers that each team is required to have)? Statistical probability of any team having four ringers is rather low.

Just my .02$ CAD

[jrickert]

A middle of the pack car with a top of the pack driver will do better than a top of the pack car with a middle of the pack driver. Formula SAE is racing and there is no reason for it to pretend not to be.

[Yellow Ranger]

If you want to see what car is the fastest, without having to take into consideration who has the better drivers, there's only one way to do it:

http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn210/alle2911/1024.jpg

But seriously, a good driver makes all the difference for you dynamic events - ALL dynamic events. Remember the team that had Pedro Lamy drive their car? They said he was just 'taking it easy' in their car and was still 2 seconds a lap faster than their fastest driver.

A great way to get your team to not suck at competition is to get plenty of drive time for your better drivers, but I now believe this can only get you so far. If you're truly serious about trying to WIN one of these competitions, I think you need to recruit actual good drivers. Hopefully you're lucky enough have these drivers on your team, but a couple of guys that have raced around a circle two or three times, don't count.

[Thomas MuWe]

FSAE = Motorsport is not valid! :-)

Did you ever hear Pat Clarke telling you to use the "racing" thing in your team name?
It is a design competition, however the cars are proofed on track.
I just wanted to raise a discussion. My 2 cents are that is it not better to drive a standasized track (for the AutoX) which also would enable to compare different events around the world.....

[Bemo]

As long as we are building race cars and drive against each other there will be a big driver influence.
Also things like a standardized Autocross track wouldn't change that much. A good driver will still be much faster there than a less experienced (a good driver would improve too!). And you really shouldn't forget how much an experienced driver can help you during testing.

[Luniz]

Getting back to the original topic...

We had one experiences driver this year, who has been racing karts quite successfully in the past, and we had three "beginners" who had never driven a race car before, me being one of them. the three of us managed to get equally quick and quite consistent after some training, but no matter what we did, the experienced driver always managed to be at least one second faster on a 50s track.

[Thomas MuWe]

@Luniz:

Let's say we take your example and the FSG rules 2009. Some Excel - brain- hurting calcs and I come up with this (hope everything is right - I made it sometime last year):

Tmax 1999,50
Tmin 1500,00
Tyour 1560,00
Tbestfuel 1590,00
Number of laps 30
Time per lap first 50,00
Loss per lap 2,00
Time per lap you 52,00
Time per lap best fuel 53,00
Tmax AutoX 62,50
Endurance
Points for you 282,66
Points first 325,00
Autocross
Points for you 81,63
Point first 100,00
Points overall
Points you 364,30
Points first 425,00

Difference 60,70

I give one second per lap to the pro driver and 1 second per lap to the pro driver because he can setup the car better.
Now there are two possible scenarios:
There is a small little single cylinder which is 3 seconds slower than the best but consumpts a 1iter less fuel or it does not finish. Then the best in terms of time is the best in terms of fuel. But the engine guys of your team are as good as the engine guys of the first team and you reach the same fuel consumption: 3,5l. the worst car is that with a max. allowed time and the max. allowed fuel.
Fuel economy
Fuel used best 2,5
Fuel used you 3,5
Fuel used first 3,5
Fuel used worst 5,7
Fuel efficency factor you
without single cyl. 0,961538462
with single cyl. 0,686813187
Fuel efficiency factor first
without single cyl. 1
with single cyl. 0,714285714
Fuel efficiency factor best fuel
0,943396226
Fuel efficiency factor worst fuel
without single cyl. 0,460641476
0,329029626
Fuel efficiency score you
with single cyl. 79,99232028
without single cyl. 61,05512311 (!!!!!!)

Fuel efficiency score best fuel 100

Fuel efficiency score first
with single cyl. 82,82168913
without single cyl. 100

Points overall driver influenced you
with single cyl 444,29
without single cyl. 425,35
Points overall driver influenced first
with single cyl. 507,82
without single cyl. 525,00
Difference
with single cyl 63,53
without single cyl. 99,65

I believe that this is a huge driver influence there. 2 seconds per lap for a good driver is not unusual.

[Hector]

Pretending that FS isn't a race series is dumb. Yes, it's an engineering competition. But yes, it's a race series, too. And in racing, better drivers win.

Good luck recruiting ringers.

[Rex]

I have observed gaps in the same FSAE car on the same course as follows:

Best driver I personally know (team alumni): baseline, 45 second course
Other more-recent team alumni who are still "decent" drivers by our team's standards: +1-2 seconds
Me, 5+ yrs removed from routine FSAE driving experience: +2-3 seconds
Most current team members with minimal in-car experience and no prior race experience: +3-6 seconds

And this is all relative within our team - there are plenty of folks out there who can probably beat our fastest team alumni driver. So I would say it's a huge difference in terms of laptime, and in terms of points. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. But I think we can all agree that the difference can be staggering, and certainly tells you one area where you need to devote some time and attention if your goal is winning competition - driver recruitment.

[Philipp Bachmann]

At the FSG competition we suffered a lot from different drivers and their performance. After managing a 56 second lap in the autocross we started late (11th place in autocross). Our first driver, who drove the sprinttime, was driving consistently average 57,0 second times (from 56.35 best to 57.7 the worst). The second driver, who had less experience with older cars of our team, but drove a lot more in our actual car had an average laptime of: 65,7 seconds !!!
especially because of beeing overtaken from other cars at FSG was the reason, but even his best lap was about 5.5 seconds slower than our first driver. (place 13 in FSG-endurance)

After the event i looked for our performance if the second driver would have been as fast as our first one: Place 4 in endurance, about 70-85 more points and instead of place 15 overall we got a top10 result.

I don´t know, how much other teams suffer from driver performance but this is a good example...

[Frank "Ruska" Roeske]

As long as we will not have any Robotic Drivers (compare Dubai Camel Race) there will be a driver influence. This is normal.

But i have a suggestion:
Finish the car a couple of weeks earlier and use the additional time for testing the car. This allows you to set up the car right.

A good setup is more worth than reduce the weight of the shifting cable by 20 gramms.
Design the car, understand the car, drive the car and make it faster....

In the meanwhile we will work on the robotic driver...

[Mike Cook]

Not much to add to this other than I don't think teams should be penalized for having good drivers; maybe they spent years developing that drivers skills and they aren't just a 'ringer'.

I have noticed that our less experienced drivers can run a lot closer to our best drivers times on our test course which we all know like the back of our hand. However, when we get on a long, fast autox course the less experienced drivers really fall off like 3-6 seconds. Driving autox kind of consists of two parts: 1) being able to drive a car at the very edge of its performance, and 2) being able to read a course and drive the correct line at the right speed right away.

I have thought a lot about what would happen if the autox event was eliminated and instead, each teams fastest endurance lap was used instead for that score. This would at least eliminate to some extent my point 2) above. The downside to this is most teams don't finish endurance so their best driver might not get to drive and they won't have as much heat into their tires as a team that runs the whole endurance. Also, some teams really work to improve their 'cold' tire setups and this would be not really as important.

[J. Vinella]

Ringer or no ringer the car must still finish the race and be fundamentally fast to win.

That is where the design and race engineers come in.

[Essayee]

This is a very interesting topic that you can't help but speculate about. The thing is... does it really matter?

Driver influence is clearly a factor, but the thing is how often does it make one competitor flat-out unapproachable. How many schools do you think have ringers? Maybe 10%? So there should be about 1 ringer among the top 10 teams in design, and this driver, far better than the competition, in a car that's far better than the rest, should do very well in autocross and endurance.

The rest of the ringers though will simply elevate poorly designed cars to good, but not excellent rankings in those events. I'm sure a very well designed car in the hands of an amateur drivers will at the very least perform as well as a bad car in the hands of a great driver. Otherwise, I don't think you'd get these long periods of dominance by teams like UTA, Cornell, UWA, etc. Unless their ringers are doing three majors, coming back for their Masters, and then going for the PhD, there's no reason a team should dominate for say... an entire decade based on driver skill alone.

[exFSAE]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Essayee:
This is a very interesting topic that you can't help but speculate about. The thing is... does it really matter?

Driver influence is clearly a factor, but the thing is how often does it make one competitor flat-out unapproachable. How many schools do you think have ringers? Maybe 10%? So there should be about 1 ringer among the top 10 teams in design, and this driver, far better than the competition, in a car that's far better than the rest, should do very well in autocross and endurance.

The rest of the ringers though will simply elevate poorly designed cars to good, but not excellent rankings in those events. I'm sure a very well designed car in the hands of an amateur drivers will at the very least perform as well as a bad car in the hands of a great driver. Otherwise, I don't think you'd get these long periods of dominance by teams like UTA, Cornell, UWA, etc. Unless their ringers are doing three majors, coming back for their Masters, and then going for the PhD, there's no reason a team should dominate for say... an entire decade based on driver skill alone. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>

You must not know Pete http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

[Moke]

What do you class as a ringer? To compete they'll have to be a student at your uni just like anybody else in the team, so you can't head out and pick up a guy at the local track. So they are a specialist driver, are there not specialists for every part of the design? Should judges pick the team member to design the suspension, chassis or electrics at random too?

Part of engineering is management of human resources and designing systems to take advantage of the resources you have. The driver is another system in the car that needs to be designed for.

Put in place a uni wide driver selection/recruitment program, find and develop the drivers that will get the most out of your product. Some of our drivers in the past have been just a driver one year and a driver/engineer the next and they provided better feedback and performance as just drivers as they could focus just driving (and get a good nights sleep while we changed things).

Frank has the right advice: Finish the car a couple of weeks earlier and use the additional time for testing the car.