Data from Wakefield Park

Following on from the brake pad thread, I've attached some screen dumps of the data from my fastest lap at Wakefield Park (a tight technical circuit located in Goulburn NSW Australia), showing traces of the lateral and longitudinal readings. The single crosses show the location of the car. The other crosses define sectors of the track. To provide some context, quick EVOs M3s and WRXs etc get around in 1:10s, V8 Supercars in under a minute, and a professional race car driver took a standard GTA selspeed around in 1:14.5 in a road test. My GTA has DBA 305 mm slotted rotors, DS2500 pads and a Quaife torque sensing diff. Everything else is as it left the factory. The tyres are Falken RT-615. The third screen dump also includes the speed trace.
Comments welcome.

Very Interesting - thanks for posting

BTW Is it a clockwise circuit?

Do you have a video lap of the circuit?

Is it possible to determine the max values for the various traces displayed, it might be displayed on the screen but not certain

Looking at the braking trace it seems that on one stop you are really able to dip into much greater decelleration than the other stops.
Is that because its at the end of the main straight (with a wall at the end of it ) and you really are standing on the pedal ?
Or were you rationing your braking effort over the lap to stop fade?

i.e. on the other stops, did you you feel you have to save the brakes or was the braking zone just trickier? (downhill, slippy, off camber etc)

I certainly had to ration out the use of the OEM 305mm pads myself whenever I have used them!
I could only press them to the max for three stops, but they would last 4 laps at 75% effort.
Generally if I actually used up my alloctaion of the "3 heavy stops" it would result in comedy-value heavily smoking pads in the paddock even after a cooldown lap.
DS2500 pads are way better, but can expose the small discs more, and at my track would surely have warped them very quickly given the standard pads warped two sets on me.

Looking at your trace it seems there is a reasonable recovery time for the disks on a lap. Decent gaps between the biggest stops.

Will be very interesting when you get a chance to use your 330mm upgrade and overlay the results - I would expect they would drop your laptime by a second or two once you get to really trust them and max them out.

It also makes overtaking much easier since with the 305mm's I was always afraid of chasing a guy hard into the braking zone since many cars at my track days had way better brakes than the 305mm's and they could back right into you if they really stood on the pedal.

It is a clockwise circuit.
I don't have any in-car video, but have some video of an earlier session I did. The video is available at Movie.

There are three hard stops on the circuit. The data shows that I'm not braking hard enough into turn 2, (turn 1) is the right hand kink on the straight. There are plenty of run off areas at Wakefield, but in this case, going through turn one unsettles the car for braking into turn 2, coupled with me struggling to perfect the heel and toe from 4th into 3rd for that turn and slow from 150 kmh to 60 or 70 kmh. Never did get it right...

The next big braking point is at the "fish hook" which is the section in the middle of the circuit. It is down hill into a off camber double apex corner which is quite tricky.

The next braking point is at the end of the back straight, which is where I'm generating the highest braking effort. Mainly because its a straight piece of road and I'm slowing from around 130 kmh to about 60 kmh for the last turn onto the main straight.

I tried to do some slow laps in between just to be easier on the car. However, I have still warped these discs, hence my desire to upgrade. Having said that, I have never felt I was lacking in braking and have regularly out braked other cars on the circuit, as can be seen in the movie (the car was completely standard then, although I did have the Falken tyres on). The diff seems to have been worth around 2 seconds a lap.

The values are shown on the boxes on the left of the screen. But if you are really interested, you can download the chart software from http://www.maxqdata.com/MaxQData%2027a%20PC%20Chart.exe and I'm happy to send the original files to you.

I've also got from data from a AROCA driver training day at Oran Park near Sydney. Oran Park is more flowing than Wakefield and suits the GTA better, although because it was a traing day, speed was limited to 110 kmh, which slowed possible lap times, but didn't make much difference in the twisty parts of the circuit. The intersting thing is my instructor drove the car for a couple of laps, so I can compare his data to mine. His traces were much smoother.

Cool track for spectators, you can see everything so clearly

A lot of elevation changes which always makes things interesting

Getting data from a pro is worth its weight in gold, overlaying the turn-in points and the points where they hit and leave the apex can be very educational..
..as is how quickly they are looking to let lock off after making the apex due to the car being balanced at the appropriate speed.

I learned more with a few pax lap sessions in different cars with different race drivers over the last year than I did with a few thousand laps bumbling along by myslef!