Folks,
Just to let you know about a thread on the mid engined section of Locost builders.

http://www.locostbuilders.co.uk/viewthread.php?tid=10378

It's about LapSim a great little (well 16Mb!) piece of software from Bosch designed to let you see what sort of handling/times you will see from your car if you make changes to the set-up. It allows you to simulate a few different circuits - Donnington, Hockenhiem, Zandvort etc, a total of 9. Best thing about it is it's price - it's free!

http://www.bosch-motorsport.com/englisch/index.htm

Basically I've tried to make a car set up for an Indy Blade.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/alister667/Blade MK Indy.mat

Now before you all get too excited it isn't that accurate, the LapSim software only goes up to 10,000rpm, and a lot of the details are guesses! I've set it up so the engine hits max power at 10,000rpm to compensate.
Oddly my details seems to show a 0-100kph time of 4.8secs (a little slower than expected?), and a lap time for Donnington in the order of 1m45s. Has anyone taken a blade engined seven round any of the tracks listed? Are the times at all realistic? Items such as tire grip numbers are very arbitrary. I quickly converted the lbs/ft spring ratings into Nm/m ratings, so there could be big errors there too!
FYI My car has a 3.62 open diff, 195/60 R15 tires (about 303mm radius), I took the gearbox numbers from 'speedclac.xls' and gave the max power of a blade as 128bhp. I haven guessed at the torque and power curves to a large extent.
If anyone wants to play around with my set-up file I have it uploaded here feel free, and if anyone does any further work on the vehicle set-up I'd love to hear.
Good Luck
Ali

High 1minute 30s would be closer for a blade engine when we were timing them a couple of years back. My mates pinto powered car was doing 1min 47s till he spun off and slowed down a bit.

yours, Pete.

1.22 last season, on road legal tryes and no aero aids, Donnington.

Sorry, miss read it a bit, that was in a GT1 full body, fastest lap last season in a blade seven was high 1.24s again on road legal tyres

Thanks guys, I'll tinker with the model again.

Make sure you know which Donnington circuit you are talking about tho, the National circuit or the GP circuit with the Melbourne loop extra hairpin.

Good point. I'll try to get a picture of the circuit it's simulating.

Just downloaded it and its the GP circuit. Judging from the times that Jon is talking about, his times are from the National circuit which is a good 15-20 seconds quicker than the GP circuit, therefore the 1:45 time predicted isnt a mile out.

Chris

your rite chris, i dont have a time for GP circuit

That makes a little more sense, I was having to do some *serious* tweaking to the model to get it to lap in the 1.20s!

Now the next question is what kind of use is this software to a locoster??

I suspect Jon might find it interesting (for racing), but you'd really need the lap data captured from the car on the track to get the best out of it. With this info you could generate the track.
Well it's fun to play with anyhow, I can maybe get an idea of what might happen on a track if I go for an LSD for instance.

I might be able to get hold of some track log data from a Megablade if it would help. A mate has a Mychron3 in his Westy which does full logging and is able to map the track from G-sensors it uses. Im not sure if he was logging at Donington when we were there but if not Im sure he's got some data from a few other tracks.

Chris,
I wouldn't worry about it too much, goodness only knows what format it would be in. I get the impression that the Bosch software would read the output from some Bosch datalogging system, and use that to generate the circuit files, (DARAB files?) but I don't know.
Cheers
Ali