Talent show
One of the most hotly debated questions in all of motor racing is how do you pick the drivers with talent? This is not just confined to the vehicle dynamics community. Everyone involved in motor racing, whether they are a punter watching on TV or an F1 team principal, has a view on this.
Well, lately I have been working on some projects that bring these matters into very sharp relief so, with the help of a bit of vehicle dynamics knowledge and simulation, let’s take a dive into the key elements that define a driver with genuine talent, and how we can quantify this.
To kick things off in this discussion, it’s worth reviewing the force vs slip angle curve and self-aligning torque vs slip angle as the relationship between these two is where the adventure starts. This is shown in Figure 1.
The blue trace is the slip angle curve, and the purple trace is the self-aligning torque curve. Note the gap between the peaks of both. The ability to operate within this zone of, when he presented the graphic shown in .
