>> not too many people short of the aptitude of Ayrton Senna can possibly recall after the session every lap detail of what caused you to go slower/faster...
You are showing your age Greg
Read this.
http://www.tracc5.com/News%20stories%202006/9-27-2006a.htm
Most 14 year old kids who spend ALL day long driving could do this IF they have the basic "driver's gene". Man I hate reading stuff like this. Makes me wish I had a shifter cart at age 10.
My favorite quote:
The back-yard training sessions nonetheless continued. “In go-karts,” says Jeff, “there’s no aero, no downforce. It’s all about that contact patch and how well the driver feels it. When Colin came in, I’d say,
‘What was each tire doing? Describe it to me exactly.’ Man, he got good at that.”
“There was one drill,” Colin remembers, “where I’d go out for 15 laps and work the right-front tire real hard but save the left front. Or they’d put on one crappy tire, and it was my job to figure out which it was.”
>> with nothing more than frangbile memory in a high-stress situation to recall exactly what that was.
This is what large amounts track time will correct. I've been lucky enough to have a race track (BeaveRun) built 15 minutes from my house. Its North Course is a small simple track. I have 100's of laps on it by now. I cant do what Colin can do, but I'm at the point where I can not think about my driving much if I'm under "95%" and can instead really focus on the car's dynamics (slip angle vs. steering input, yaw, pitch and dive under braking etc etc) If I had one of those predictive lap timing displays (want an RT Dash 2!) I think I could definitely utilize "on the fly" it without losing the ability to drive fast laps.
>> that NOT having DA is a significant DISadvantage these days.
Yup, agreed. But you have to be the type pf person that can use it. It wont tell you to brake later or turn in sooner, you have to derive that from the data. So if graphs and numbers and charts are not how you can internalize data then you are not going to get much out of it.
We're in the digital age, analog guys to the back of the line please
>> requires a 1K laptop to have any real value
Sure, How else do you reprogram your ECU at the track ??
I remember reading and article in RaceTech or someplace about Andy Priaulx. They we talking about data. And the fact that his team does not put a lot of emphasis on it. Instead they are lucky enough to have Andy's brain for use as a data recorder. He can, for an entire session recall what the car is doing on corner entry, mid corner and exit, and recount it for the engineers at the end of the session. He can tell you this for every corner, and for early, mid and late session. For the rest of us, there are data recorders
http://www.andypriaulx.com
I just got a "Special Discount card" from Dell that looks like they are going to send me a laptop and money to boot(No pun intended) t weaver 