[WEC] BoP. Brilliant or Pants.

[Articus]

Originally Posted by Adam43

I’ll do the consistency lap time spread thing when I get back from holiday.

Thank you, I used a cheap, easy built in function in excel, but that makes it hard to show certain things in a single plot.

[Adam43]

I tried to show the spread. Then you can see cars that were faster for a few laps and those that won over longer periods. It was quite nice and then when Racecar Engineering did the same I was very happy!

[Articus]

Sector 3 (average, deficit, standard deviation), based on all S3 times below 99.0 seconds.







Unsurprisingly, S3 shows the largest standard deviation since traffic hurts laptime the most in S3.

[Articus]

The cutoff laptimes that I used for the dry laptimes in each sector are on the surface not obvious, but when looking at the laptime distribution in the histogram layout, it's obvious that this is where the bell curve ends for the dry laptimes and where the second "bell" begins for the wet laptimes.

As an example, for Toyota laptimes:




In theory, I could rewatch the race, mark the lap numbers where the rain was, and then filter based on lap number but this would be incredibly tedious. I prefer the easy way out...

[tomcug]

Originally Posted by Articus

The #4 Penske car looks like it was running less downforce than the #5 and the #6 Penske cars, but ultimately the #4 car was the slowest Penske car in the dry conditions which highlights the compromise that Penske had to make. Trimming their car out didn't make them faster overall. To chase top speed of the Ferrari and the Toyota, they would have made their cars slower overall. As a general observation, the LMDh cars have more tire wear than the LMH cars which is why it can be useful for them to run more downforce to better protect the tires.

Thanks a lot for more accurate approach that confirmed my visual observations for LMDh drag vs downforce vs laptimes. One might wonder if it looks any different for a car designed primarly for WEC competition which is the Alpine but if this year's race was an accurate representation of what this car can do (maybe next year it's different), then low downforce approach didn't do them much good either.

[Articus]

Originally Posted by tomcug

Thanks a lot for more accurate approach that confirmed my visual observations for LMDh drag vs downforce vs laptimes. One might wonder if it looks any different for a car designed primarly for WEC competition which is the Alpine but if this year's race was an accurate representation of what this car can do (maybe next year it's different), then low downforce approach didn't do them much good either.

The Alpine was an interesting approach this year. They had great top speed, as good as Ferrari and Toyota, but tended to be much slower in the final sector, relative. Also, riding onboards, they were losing a LOT of time in the dirty air of another car in the Porsche curves compared to other cars that I watched onboard. So they were low drag, but with great consequence, seemingly lacking downforce compared to Toyota and Ferrari.

This was also apparent because they were struggling on outlaps and with low front tire temperatures all weekend.

There's a lot to improve with that car for next year. In principle, this should be the best LMDh car on the grid, if you look how much the Acura has to be "slowed" in IMSA competition.

[tomcug]

Originally Posted by Articus

In principle, this should be the best LMDh car on the grid, if you look how much the Acura has to be "slowed" in IMSA competition.

Needs a reliable engine first.