Postby Hasbeen » 01 Apr 2015 03:33
Nick with all due respect, you are probably not getting close enough to the limit for the cars natural handling to show.
Using the tenths system properly, 10.000001 tenths is the speed at which the car, with the perfect driver flies off the track. I always discount any narrative where people talk about 11 tenths as garbage.
Now I have set more than a few lap records, including one Bathurst F2 record I still hold 40 years later, & I would not have exceeded 9 tenths setting it. Most of the races I won I would have been driving at about 8.5 tenth. Very few people can drive even that close to the limit for more than a lap or 2 without making a mistake which is at least time costly, if not disastrous. Good drivers always practice quicker than they race.
So having established what I mean when talking 10Ths I reckon my racing was usually at about 7.5 to 8.5, with the occasional effort at 8.5 to 9.5 in the first couple of laps after the start, passing manoeuvres, & perhaps the last few laps in a tight finish. My hard road driving is at 5 to 6 tenths. Even with pace notes I doubt I ever got to 7 tenths on the road, except by accident.
In my younger days, in cars with much lower limits, MG TC, Singer 9 Simca Around & other such on cross ply tyres I probably drove at 7 tenths regularly.
It is only at above 6.5 tenths that a cars natural handling characteristics appear. Up to that most drivers are using the slow in, fast out, where a car with adequate power will power slide the rear, & those with less power will push the front out in understeer.
Much as we would like to believe we can feel all these things, we would often make changes greater than your weight distribution change, & I subjectively could not tell if it were an improvement or not. It was only when we looked at the stop watch we could tell if the car was quicker.
There were times when a chance made the car nicer to drive, & I thought improved, but the lap times were slower. This is why I separate handling from grip & corner speed. For road driving, handling is more important than cornering speed for an enjoyable drive.
In my blog I mention driving Mike Champion's Brabham for him in the last round of the Oz drivers championship in 67. The car was so badly set up that in the wet first practice session, I brought it in as I could not drive it at the low speeds. In the second dry practice despite being only a little better set up, I drove it at proper racing speeds. The natural handling character of the Brabham came through, & the car was quick. I made second fastest time, then won it's class the next day.
Even with it very wrong, it still had it's Brabham characteristics. This is the same with our cars. The 7 & the 8 are quite differently modified, & "improved". However, even blindfolded you could not fail to tell they are very much blood brothers.
Don't beat your self up over not being able to feel a few extra pounds over the front axle, very few, if any of us could, particularly on the public road.
Hasbeen
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