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      11-09-2020, 02:02 PM   #1
dradernh
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Video: Watkins Glen

This video shows a professional driver running three successively faster laps at the Glen in an E36 M3 race car I used to own.

(If necessary, tell YouTube that you want to see the video in HD by clicking on the Settings icon.)

If you can, I suggest watching this video in full-screen, high-definition, with headphones, and with the sound turned up. That will give you the best opportunity to experience what it was like inside the car, which was a very noisy and fairly violent environment.

We were at the track for two days with a shop owner and a mechanic for the purpose of dialing the car in after a significant upgrade to its aerodynamic capabilities. The shop owner had decades of racing experience as a mechanic, tire man, constructor, and driver. He and the driver were to work together to get the car set up to suit my driving style. That is, it wasn't being set up so the pro driver could drive it as fast as possible but so that I could do that to the best of my ability while doing it safely.

Just before coming to the track we'd added a front splitter adjustable from 3" to 9" and an SM203 wing from DJ Racecars in the UK. (See here for an image of the car: https://www.2addicts.com/forums/show....php?t=1772136.) The wing was anchored to the rear frame rails instead of the more common rear deck lid, and it produced a prodigious amount of downforce with a remarkably small decrease in top speed (~1 mph at the Bus Stop). The increased front and rear downforce made this hyper-responsive race car much easier for me to drive quickly. My confidence went way up once the basic adjustments to the splitter and wing had been made, and I dropped 5 seconds from my previous best lap time.

When we were done it was clear that the splitter, despite being very solid and firmly anchored, needed a set of sturdy turnbuckles to keep it flat at speed. The wing was anchored a bit too far back and needed additional fore-aft adjustability in its mounting to the rear frame rails. Neither issue was anything like a show-stopper, and the test ended with us having achieved our goals.

The session shown in the video was cut short when the camera's battery quit; the driver finished up with a 2:01 lap. The car itself was capable of a 1:58–1:59 lap that day but suffered from a host of moderately limiting factors, not the least of which was that near the end of the second day our last set of tires had 8 heat cycles on them. Also, the car was 75# overweight, only 30# of which (a passenger chair) were removeable.

While the video appears fairly tame (don't they all), this driver is quite aggressive in going to full throttle after corner apex. His confidence in his car control skills can be seen clearly as he smoothly brake-steers / trail-brakes well into the corners where that's beneficial. He's getting everything the tires have left to offer.

Although it's not easy to see in a video, it's in the braking zones that professionals excel. As this one said to me when we first met "That's where we make our money." What the throttle and brake bars show is just how little lag time there is between his coming off the throttle and getting onto the brakes.

What the data traces for those same channels show is how incredibly smoothly he makes that transition while lapping the track flat-out. The channel traces show exactly what he's doing; although I improved by studying that data, I found imitating or copying exactly the movements of his feet to be beyond my abilities, especially in higher-speed braking zones. I've broken this information down to share with other drivers and would be happy to send it to anyone who would like to see it. Please feel free to PM me.

Note: These laps were turned prior to the 2014 repave of the track.

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      12-28-2020, 08:50 PM   #2
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Great Vid Doug
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      12-28-2020, 10:12 PM   #3
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Pretty damn good!
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