Well currently my life is making it so I am unable to race with my own team on the weekends. Due to other commitments I spend most weekends away from my rig (if it can be called that). So I am very much in team manager mode and also taken on the role of test driver. It's an underappreciated role by the history books. If its not qualifying or a race result then usually all the hard work behind the scenes is an un-celebrated work horse. Building setups with all the drivers on the team providing input is hard work, the best place to start is get a good baseline setup and that starts away from the online track...testing the default settings on the car, usually these are good but there is always so much potential to unlock. So this is where you have to have a technical brain setting. Every minute change to a spring or damper needs testing. So, you make that change, run laps out on track, analysing how the car feels for better or for worse. More oversteer, or the gearing is holding the car back on accleration or maybe running the curbs unsettles the car...Each time you need to find hat solution and test every cause and effect. Being the test driver isn't about setting fast times either, I have barely been in the top 10 at Imola, but I have been running up the curbs and bumps and attacking corners, this is enough to know how to build the setup, you can feel how the car handles and you look at the sector times more so than the overall lap. Then you get analytical, checking out the data traces of your team mates and other drivers looking at the telemetry. This is usually the least exciting part of testing and as you hone the setup, each time you look at the data it can feel more like a game of spot the difference as the telemetry can sometimes be nearly identicle. But also testing is helpful to run some race simulations and get an idea of tyre life and fuel limits and average lap times. I know my team are extremely talented bunch and together we seem to get the setups we all like. Each driver likes a slightly different feeling in the car, so it's a real challenge some times to get all of us 100% happy, but with a lot of teamwork we move forward and up the time sheets. Testing isn't tedious it's rewarding in it's own way. To see your team mates up the top of the timesheets, loving the handling, is worth doing more laps than anyone else on the online server. Ultimately the team is grateful but all the hard work, dedication amd laps done to perfect the setups, will be (to quote my favourite film) lost in time, like tears... in rain. I would rather be racing, but supporting my team with 100's of laps in testing and all of us working together to get to the top is worth missing a season. Team Vermin is gunning for both championships hard in Fomula Trout. Tippet |
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AuthorR.T. Driver for Vermin Racing Archives
January 2019
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