Race Setup – Chassis and Engine Adjustments

August 16, 2015 RaceCloud Team Leave a comment

In pursuit of every possible option for improvement, analyzing driver and machine behavior and their performance is inevitable. And, considering how crucial are all the chassis adjustments in order to give you the best possible grip and handling, how important is the engine setup and the perfect tire type and pressures, we all know how substantial is to keep track on every single setting you make and how even the slightest change can result in a huge improvement or deterioration. But what’s the proper way to keep under control all those adjustments and fine tuning? Well, we believe that we have found the right way to do it!

Adding the option to enter each and every adjustment you make on the kart for every single session is a feature that makes your life a lot easier, saves time and gives you a lot of information and data for comparison and a starting point for improvement.

Get inside the “Race Setup” and easily enter all the parameters that have been adjusted in pursuit of grip and handling and they will be stored for you and available whenever you need them. Make a session with this setup and then upgrade it and make another one. Then you have the option to easily compare sessions made with different setups and see how they reflect on your lap times, kart behavior and overall performance.

And to take the tuning to another level in terms of engine setup, we have done some magic again, thanks to RaceCloud’s innovative concept. Being able to receive Live data from the WEATHER station included in the BUNDLE, our system’s advanced computing is taking into consideration the ambient air temperature, atmospheric pressure and humidity and the kart’s altitude and picking from our database the recommended values for the carburetor’s jet and needle setup. The best possible starting point for fine tuning your engine, right?!

Having all this, you are once again a step ahead, taking advantage of a simple, useful and time saving feature that will not let you leave anything to chance! Keep following us for more of this!

Chasing the clock

Lap Time Consistency

August 12, 2015 RaceCloud Team Leave a comment

We’re always talking about the best lap times, but being super-fast in one single lap is never enough in motorsport. You want to win races right?! So you have to be as fast as possible in every corner, on every straight, in every lap, in every session on track. Consistency is the key to become a winner! But how to find out if everything is ok with your driving stints’ consistency? All you need to do is to take a sneak peek at RaceCloud’s session overview and find the laps progress during your drive.

Well, it’s a simple sequence of bars with lap times, but what does it tell us? Actually it can give you more information than you might think. Can you imagine that it can give you clues on how your go-kart is performing, how the tires are working, how the driver is building his pace and using his physical resources.

We all know that it’s easier to search first for weaknesses in the technology and blame it for poor results, but we should never forget the driver’s behavior and his dedication in achieving consistency. So in the first place the list with all the lap times is giving us a clue where we should start searching for and after we examine the driving we can go forward investigating the go-kart’s behavior.

If for example the best lap is a lot better than the others in the session this could be due to chassis setup which is allowing the driver to complete just one perfect lap but struggle to keep it consistent.

Lap times are gradually but slowly improving but yet you cannot reach the desired target? The reason could be insufficient tire temperature due to improper tire pressure or compound, or simply because of an incorrect chassis setup, resulting in lower grip levels.

Experiencing the opposite – best lap time in the first few laps and then gradually becoming worse? Well, possible the tires are overheating and grip levels drop.

These are just a few basic examples on how just a simple list of lap and sector times could help us build our consistency and improve driver and go-kart. It is your turn to take advantage thanks to it and continue growing as a winner!

Stay tuned for more of our moments of “revelation” on our blog!

Chasing the clock

Theoretical best lap time

August 6, 2015 RaceCloud Team 1 Comment

When you’re pushing the limit it’s not always possible to complete a whole lap making every bend and straight at 100%. Once for example you’re perfect in turn number 3 but a missed braking point ruin the whole lap. Next time sector one and two are brilliant but traffic prevents you from keeping the pace. And you are always wondering what will be the result if you manage to complete a lap that has all your best in it!

The theoretical best lap is the feature that automatically calculates the sum of the best sector times in your session and gives you a clue of what is possible if you manage to get them inside one single lap. What’s more is that you can find exactly what you have done in you fastest sector in order to get the clock showing as short interval as possible.

A closer look into the lap times list in the session overview is showing you a detailed list of all the sector times as well and all you have to do is to find in which lap was your fastest sector one, two, three etc.

When you have that information all you have to do is to get back to the comparison mode and find what have been done in order to achieve those sector times and push harder to repeat those actions as consistently as possible. As we can see on the image shown, our driver managed to drive the fastest sectors 1 and 3 in his best lap, but has a 3 tenths faster sector 2 in his 5th lap and thus he needs to find what mistake have been made there.

If you want to go even further you can manually divide the track (creating a manual track configuration) making every single corner a separate sector and thus you’ll be able to get the ultimate best lap and examine the fastest way through every corner.

And if you dare to go further don’t forget to follow our blog.

Chasing the clock

RPM Analysis & Gears

August 5, 2015 RaceCloud Team Leave a comment

Speed is everything in motorsports. Ask any man on earth and he’ll confirm that he can be as fast as hell, but is it so simple?! Despite the fact that it sounds very simple to most people, and as discussed in our previous topics, keeping the speed as high as possible isn’t a simple task and there are a lot of factors that have serious influence over it. Being fast means that you have to consider a huge number of factors, no matter if we talk about acceleration, max speed or turning speed. We have mentioned some things considering the speed into the twists, but what about the acceleration and speed between them and on the straights?

In terms of catalog data it is so simple – you have power, you have certain weight, and there we go. But the equation is a lot more complex. When you have the restrictions and the equalized forces in all the championships everything scales down to the finest details. This is why being able to make a proper RPM range analysis and adapt your gearing accordingly is crucial in getting the best speed on every specific track and conditions. Finding the best combo between max speed and acceleration is a complex of fine driver perception and careful assessment over the data. In other words, the proper tool helping you to find the best gear ratio will be a huge relief and time saver.

RaceCloud’s automated RPM analysis is that tool! Adding the most effective RPM range according your engine’s power curve into the Kart’s setup is allowing you to precisely determine how efficient is your final gear – how much time you match this range on track and if you need to search for shorter or longer gearing. Combine this data with the min/max RPM and SPEED values in the session overview and the task is becoming a piece of cake! If you think you’re spending too much time in the blue zone bellow the optimal range – pick a shorter gear ratio. And the opposite – you’re revving too high – change to longer final gear. As simple as that!

Want more speed and driving “secrets”? Keep on following our Blog!

Chasing the clock

G-Forces & Steering Wheel Angle

July 30, 2015 RaceCloud Team Leave a comment

Well, welcome again in our pursuit of happiness… oops, sorry, pursuit for best lap times, which is motorsport’s joy factor and the way of measuring happiness. Remember that in the last two blog posts we’ve found the proper way around turns 5 to 8 for our driver on Lucas Guerrero track during the Rotax Grand Finals 2014. Unfortunately something went wrong in the second half of lap 7 in session 3 and we should now find out what have happened that caused the loss of those 2 tenths gained before that section.

How should you find such a weak spot within all the numbers and data?! Well, that’s easy with RaceCloud, since we have already thought about making it simpler, easier and faster for anyone to get “into” the in-depth analysis and to do so we made it visual! See the blue and orange lines over the racing line? You’ve already guessing what they are, right? It’s so much easier to understand what’s happening at every centimeter of the driving line with such a visualization of the lateral G-Forces and the Steering Wheel Angle. The pieces of the puzzle are finally getting on their places one by one and we start noticing a lot of details.

And this is how the “something wrong” went out on focus! Something is really wrong with Steering Wheel Angle and G-Force graph in turn 10, right? What we see is that a huge drop in the G-Forces is generated, combined with “opposite lock” with the steering, done by the driver in order to compensate the grip loss and get everything back under control. This however, as everyone in motorsport is aware, is a time killer and despite the higher speed it immediately started “eating” what was gained in the last few turns. Removing the other lap from the comparison clearly shows what have happened and that it was the first reason for losing time.

So the mystery is solved and RaceCloud once again showed us, that even being as close as possible in the matter of lap times, two laps can be a lot different to each other and we can learn a lot from them, being able to understand what the data is trying to tell us!

Follow us for more, since we’re impatient to help you easily understand what’s happening at every centimeter of the track!

Chasing the clock

Speed vs Brake / Turn-in points & Racing line

July 28, 2015 RaceCloud Team 2 Comments

This week we continue chasing the clock and it is now time to unveil the mystery that appeared in our previous post. Following the Time VS Time graph we discovered that our driver did some magic in the second sector gaining a lot of advantage in his second best lap.

Let’s examine the Speed graph and find out if it’ll help us determine what happened. What the blue line is showing you is that the driver is keeping higher speed through turn 6, resulting in higher speed before turn 7. A later turn-in for turn 7 on the other side allows earlier acceleration and thus – higher speed in the next section despite the little lower apex speed.

How do we know about the later turn-in? Well, RaceCloud is automatically detecting the braking and turn-in points and displaying them for easier and faster analysis. According the World Champion Mikko Laine, that’s the best feature that we have created so far and he also says that “It’s really useful for all the drivers including rookies and pros“.

If you take a closer look at this section and the points over the racing line you’ll see that in the “blue” lap the driver initiated the braking and started turning at one and the same point, while on the other lap the points are different and the turn-in is earlier. A turn-in point in the middle of turn 5 in the red lap on the other side suggests a possible reason for the lower speed through turn 6, mentioned above. The later braking and more inside racing line caused the driver to work harder and struggle for grip and speed into the next turn and all this resulted in time and speed loss through the whole next section which is faster and thus more important for taking advantage.

In the final section of the track, the “red” lap is “back in the game” carrying more speed into turns 15 and 16 and that helps it to finally make it with a negligible advantage of 0.03 sec. But what caused the loss of 2 tenths of a second in just a few turns? Keep following us so we can find the secret together, next time on RaceCloud Blog.

Chasing the clock

Time VS Time Comparison

July 23, 2015 RaceCloud Team Leave a comment

In motorsports time is precious and comparing times is the way winners are determined! And let’s be honest – no one has found the “perfect lap” yet! Some are faster in the more technical sections on track, others in the faster turns, some are counting on a technical advantage to get with a tenth ahead of the competition. Have you ever wondered how to define the weakest sections of your driving or kart’s behavior? Well, this is the starting point to get fast lap times and this is why RaceCloud is emphasizing even the smallest detail in order to help you easily and effectively improve your driving and kart’s setup.

So, the time vs time graph in RaceCloud’s analysis screen is the fastest and easiest way to detect where you’re losing or gaining time.

Picking a referent lap as a starting point and with another one for comparison you’ll be able to define if you can improve even your fastest lap of the day and which is the section that needs adjustment.

Fox example your best lap may not include all the best sector times achieved, so you might pick it as a reference lap and compare it with another lap, in which one of the sectors have been faster, see which one this is and find the exact spot on track that it became better, thus, finding the details causing such effect.

What you should do? All we have done is to select the two best laps of our driver on the Rotax Grand Finals 2014 and get them into Time VS Time comparison and find the obvious – as simple as that! What is the obvious? After the apex of turn 7 in the fastest lap of session 3 our driver is gradually gaining time (the blue line) up to almost 2 tenths of a second (until turn 10) and it could have been by far the fastest of all his laps on this track during the weekend if he didn’t lose this advantage after turn 14.