rec.autos.simulators

For a long time I had the suspicion that changing the gear ratio's in GP did
not have that much effect. After receiving the teriffic black box utility
GpPerf from Trevor Kellaway (good job!) and the equally perfect GPAnalyser
from Steve Pritchard (ditto!) I thought I'd give it a try last saturday.

I took Hockenheim with the long straight following the first turn after
start/finish. I came to a full stop at segment 88 (the number is not so
important as long as it is the same each time, and nr 88 happens to be at the
end of the continuus yellow line) then go on the accelerator using auto
gearshifts to eliminate driver influence.
I did this three times with three rather different gear setups:
1) Low gears long, high gears short;
2) No. 1 the other way around;
3) All gears equally spaced.
It turned out that my suspicion was right: on analysys all acceleration curves
were identical! This means that the gear ratio is not used in their model to
calculate the acceleration, just HP. The gear ration is just in to calculate
the revs at a speed giving you something to look at (this is not perfectly
true: the do calculate wheelspin using the gears, for people with traction
help on there is still some sense in changing the ratio's).

My advice: keep traction help on, avoid extremes in gear ration's and you'll
be fine. Only wings and brakes left to adjust!

Greetings and Happy racing,

Erwin Zweers

Delft University of Technology

...

HOWEVER, having traction help off enables times that are not posssible otherwise,
as it enables you to turn in to corners very early, sliding through for faster
turns (especially on tight 1st and 2nd gear corners where changing down a gear,
and spinning the back wheels can be used to do this).
Most of the best times in the HOF were obtained with no traction help, and,
having just made the change myself, I can tell you it makes a lot of difference.

Cheers, Paul.

--
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|Paul Smyth, Dept of Medical BioPhysics, University of Manchester.|

|Telephone: work: (061) 275 5157, 275 5141                        |
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