Natural science

When attempting to balance vehicles, what we are really doing is manipulating the ability of a vehicle to generate longitudinal and lateral forces

In previous issues of Racecar Engineering (V29N12 and V30N3) we have discussed several key concepts regarding Balance of Performance (BoP). First, it was identified that BoP decisions should not be politically based, and we should not forget about first principles of engineering when analysing the performance of vehicles. Second, we discussed the myriad things that make BoP decision making difficult, with the trickiest issue of all being sandbagging, or performance management (see RE V30N7).

With the knowledge of this background information, we can move on to discussing the act of making changes to the Balance of Performance for a group of vehicles. But first, again keeping first principles in mind, we need to ensure we understand the physics problem we are dealing with. Once we understand this, we will move on to look at what options are available for making changes to BoP tables, and how these influence vehicle performance.

Equations of motion

At the very highest level, the performance of a vehicle around any circuit is subject to Newton’s Second Law, F = ma, coupled with some equations of motion. The description that follows is basically how vehicle dynamics simulations work.

Starting with the equations of motion, the motion of a vehicle around a circuit is dynamic, where the vehicle is travelling through three-dimensional space over time. If we break this motion through space into smaller and smaller time intervals, we can start to think about the state of the vehicle for each of those time intervals as having a set of initial conditions, and a set of final conditions. When the time intervals are reasonably small, it is possible to approximate the change in the vehicle state from initial to final condition as a constant acceleration problem. Using this approximation, we can apply the SUVAT equations of motion from physics to get from the initial vehicle state to the final vehicle state. SUVAT is an acronym where s = displacement, u = initial velocity, v = final velocity, a = acceleration, and t = time.

For now, we will assume we already know the vehicle’s . In addition, we can apply the first SUVAT equation, v = u + at, to calculate the final velocity of the vehicle at the end of the time step. For the following time step, the initial velocity is the final velocity from the previous time step, and from there we can proceed to evaluate each time step sequentially. However, we cannot accurately do this until we know what the vehicle’s acceleration is for each time step.