Drift

[Tony]

Sam@tdi what have you started?... Dynamic Considerations in new areas like Drifting are more or less totally unproven, from your experience do you feel it is possible to explore these new requirements with the Pro-drive experience understood... We know Drift commands much from the theoretical requirement bank and is somewhat detached from the normal racing formats. Do you feel chassis dynamics is still relevant if taken from the old school (proven) to the new school Drift commands today?

[Sam@TDi]

Tony firstly I think drifting is to chassis dynamics, what drag racing is to power tuning!

 

The single most amazing thing I've found whilst studying chassis dynamics is that although much of the subject isn’t naturally intuitive it IS all actually an exact science and it IS all totally provable more over calculatable. The problem as I see it is that few brilliant people who harbour the required knowledge and or talents are busy earning a very good living off of the back of this knowledge and are therefore (understandably) reluctant to share there secrets with up and coming generations of engineers.

 

Can you give me an example of what you mean by "new school Drift command" it's just I fail to see what people are doing in drift cars now that drivers weren’t doing in pre-war F1 cars during the 30's

[Tony]

Tony firstly I think drifting is to chassis dynamics, what drag racing is to power tuning!

 

The single most amazing thing I've found whilst studying chassis dynamics is that although much of the subject isn’t naturally intuitive it IS all actually an exact science and it IS all totally provable more over calculatable. The problem as I see it is that few brilliant people who harbour the required knowledge and or talents are busy earning a very good living off of the back of this knowledge and are therefore (understandably) reluctant to share there secrets with up and coming generations of engineers.

 

Can you give me an example of what you mean by "new school Drift command" it's just I fail to see what people are doing in drift cars now that drivers weren’t doing in pre-war F1 cars during the 30's

 

The question relates to the fact Drifting belays most commands modern race cars desire today. As you say knowledgeable engineers in chassis dynamics are reluctant to divulge information and 'gift' a competitive edge but there is nothing wrong with inviting discussion on the topic for people interested in Drifting or even developing their chassis now.

 

I feel we could agree today's Drift cars are drag cars albeit sideways! The combination of horsepower and chassis demands a different level of understanding since Drift is far detached from the normal racing formula.

 

Some years ago wim was invited to set the led car for a Drift driving school, after much research we set the car and got it very wrong The reason was 'miss-information' relating to the chassis resulting in wim setting the car 'to safe' although the car did Drift it was obviously to tight restricting the drivers opportunity... on reflection i am quite embarrassed but also silently proud since i learned by the experience positively.

 

What i wonder is. Is it really possible as a chassis dynamisist to encompass the Drift chassis on paper... although we are on different plato's regarding knowledge i fail to understand how on paper a vision could exceed the real world in the new art of Drift.

[Sam@TDi]

A major thorn in the side of a chassis dynamasist is the human element, the driver (even if it happens to be the dynamisist themselves). Often you'll hear people say things like "handling is a very personal thing" it’s true!. But the fact of the matter is that humans are often quite unreliable when it comes to actually assessing a chassis's performance. Often drivers will base there assessment purely on emotion "it felt nervous" or "it doesn't give me confidence" competitive racing cars often feel near on un-drivable and snappy at the limit to an amateur, but does that mean the chassis is bad?

 

The way I understand it is that the idea behind a good drift car is to be as linear as possible on and around the grip limit, to saturate it's rear tires before the front to create an oversteer departure and most importantly to be able to create and decay huge body slip angles without greatly influencing the direction of travel.

 

So with that in mind I'd say that when we talk about the practice of drifting this human feedback problem will be amplified, because whilst we can data-log every other aspect of chassis's dynamic movement in order for us to check up on and/or verify what a driver might be reporting the one thing we can't easily measure is body slip angle. We can guess at it by looking at yaw rate gain vs. wheel speeds vs. steering wheel angle vs. estimated surface grip co-efficient, but we can’t easily measure it.

 

So whilst with the right experience I think you could build a technically brilliant drift chassis on paper purely through hardcore math, making a car which your driver can really exploit and one that they can control instinctively will invariably require some track time, if for no other reason than that there are no mathematical equations that I know of (no matter how long) that can predict human emotional responses

[Tony]

The we agree

[Sam@TDi]

Yeah

[Tony]

Yeah

Permission to wobble head...

[Sam@TDi]

Go right ahead

[Tony]

Go right ahead

One minute wobble starting... now!

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All done cheers

 

Feeling a little dizzy the reason for the request is i feel very pleased that we can communicate efficiently in this type of complicated area.... this is good for everyone and elevates wim's Plato.