I grew up an Air Force brat. Whenever dad was stationed in the U.S., I spent summer school breaks with my grandparents on their dairy farm. My grandfather was incredibly competitive with a depression era extreme poverty chip on his shoulder that no amount of success could knock off. He told me “I hope you never have to work, but by God if I have anything to do with it, you’re gonna know how.” He, and my uncles, taught me to work hard and smart. I spent long days milking cows, fixing fences, working on tractors, building barns, planting corn, hauling hay, cutting silage, or anything else that needed doing. Those were lessons in working hard. But, I also had lessons in working smart. Papa’s knowledge belied his eighth grade formal education. If we were in the woods, he’d ask how many cord of wood were in the stand and how much is saw or pulp and what it would bring. Things you need to know when you’re buying farm land. When we were in the pasture, he’d point out a heifer and ask how much she weighed and what she’d bring at the sale. They have scales at the sale barn, but you need to know in the field because not all business is done in the sale barn. He taught me compound interest and the rule of 72. Sometimes borrowed money can earn you more than it costs, that’s a good debt. But, everything you “buy on time” costs you more, that’s usually a bad debt. If you want to get rich “save while you’re young”. He always wanted me to give him solid answers with numbers because having the right numbers is the difference between profit and loss. Working hard will usually outdo working smart, but working hard and smart almost always beats either working hard or working smart.
I often quote William Thomson (aka; Lord Kelvin):
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.
Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin and my grandfathers lessons influence my approach to learning. Science is our best understanding of how things work. Math is the language of science. I learn how machines work by describing them with numbers. Creating a computer program forces me to write the numbers down in a very organized way. If I can account for the main things that influence a car’s performance, then I can predict with reasonable accuracy what it will do as conditions change. I test my understanding by comparing the program’s results to the car’s actual performance. If I cannot do a good job of predicting what happens, then I’m missing something. My programs usually become increasingly complex as more things that might impact the performance are accounted for. Then the programs begin to simplify as the few things that really matter become apparent. The goal is not a perfect model that accounts for every factor. It’s to figure out which factors are important, and which changes will have the biggest performance gains.
Throughout this website there are snippets of code, spreadsheets, and full blown simulations that I have created. But, the programs are not what I do. I am not a professional programmer and I’m not particularly good at it. Programs are just tools I use to get the job done. The job is figuring out how things work so that development efforts can focus on the things that give the greatest gains. The job is not to avoid hard work, it’s to give hard work the biggest chance to pay off. A PhD chemist once told me in reference to reaction rates that “if you find someone drowning in the pool, dipping out the water with a spoon is in the right direction, but throwing them a float is often more effective.” I’m looking for the floats, so the race team doesn’t spend a lot of time spooning water. Because, as Lord Kelvin explained it;
Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and fancy women.
Lord Kelvin
I introduce myself to teams with “I am not a racer and never will be. But hopefully, I can show a racer things that can help them become a better racer.” I don’t go into pits to tune their cars. Typically a tuner doesn’t want the customer to know too much about what he’s doing because he doesn’t want the competition or even his customer knowing. But, I’m actually trying to work myself out of a job by teaching the racer as much as I can while he’s tuning his own car. My approach is usually seen as so different from the norm that it’s hard to catch on. Experience has shown that it takes about two full seasons for a racer to see the picture. I guess I’m not a good teacher. There are lots of people that can look at a run that has just been made and give a cogent explanation of what happened. The real test is when you can give a clear explanation of what is going to happen before the run occurs. I try to get a racer to explain what they see in the last run, what setup changes they are making, and what they expect to see happen in the next run based on those changes. I try to point out that if the changes they are making are not having the expected results, maybe they are not changing the right things, or things don’t actually work the way they think they do. The hard part is having a racer with enough patience to see it through. But, I have the racer’s need to improve working on my side. Most racers know that any race team that is standing still is falling behind.
An inalterable feature of nature is that all living things are either growing or dying.
Me and many others
One of the obstacles I have to overcome is the doubt that most people have in any calculated result. But, all calculations are not created equal. For example, if you stand a car’s “200 lb” front spring on the work bench and balance 200 lbs on top of it, then it should shorten 1 inch. If it does, then you have verified that it is in fact a 200 lb spring. If you squeeze it into the car’s spring purchase, and it shortens 2 inches, do you believe that it is being compressed with 400 lbs? What if I write that down in a program using a formula like;
Spring Force = inches compressed * 200
then do you believe the calculated results? When I tell a racer that if he makes these changes to the car, then it will pick up 0.03 seconds of E.T. and he makes the changes and it picks up 0.03 seconds, then he starts to believe. These calculations are not “theoretical exercises” or curve fits. They are based on first principles wherever possible and verified by real world measurements.
Automobiles might be the most studied machines ever built by man. Motorsports applications are no longer at the bleeding edge of automotive technology. Sanctions use rules to limit racing applications to mostly very well understood “old tech”. Most street cars are using technology that can’t be used on race cars because the rules prohibit it. Don’t get me wrong, racing pushes the parts well beyond anything that street car parts can withstand, but the actual way the parts work is no different than the studied to death street car versions of the same parts. You don’t have to figure out how cars work from scratch. That’s pretty much been done. Check out Heywood’s book on engines, or the Milliken brother’s book on chassis and see how much they left out. There are very detailed simulation programs that cover every imaginable aspect of engines and chassis. But if you want to learn for yourself, you have to do the grunt work of gathering the information and combining it in a way that applies to your specific racing application. I try to translate the very technical jargon used in the engineering texts into easier to understand information that addresses the racers specific needs.
My simulation programs are never finished. They are adapted to specialty situations like an engine boosted with nitrous oxide or a screw blower, or a drivetrain using a converter or a clutch. The simulation models get “prettified” and converted into teaching tools to help explain what’s actually going on. They often become tuning aides used at the track during competition. They calculate things like engine fueling and ignition timing changes based on weather. Or car weight moves based on anticipated track conditions. What if there’s a new engine making more power? What changes are needed to compensate. What if the sanction changes the weight rule and you can get lighter, where should the weight be taken off. Or heavier, where should weight be added. And how should the power be changed to compensate? I’ll try to include as many of these tuning aide calculators as I can on this site.
I will introduce information mostly “backwards”. By that I mean the big picture overview will come first. Then the layers of detail will be increased. If I start with details, then readers can get bogged down and never reach the perspective needed to understand how the details fit in the overall puzzle. In other words I’ll try to show the forest and then zoom in on the trees.
I can’t be sure how all of this will come together, but I hope to document as much of my motorsports work as I can on this site. I plan to have three main areas of discussion: The Drag Racing specific area where a spreadsheet I call RunSim1 and a Web App called RunSim2 are the primary simulations. In the Engine specific area, my Web App called EngineSim will help describe how engines work. And in the Chassis area a spreadsheet called Suspension is the primary model. Each area will contain the supporting information in quite a bit of detail and a bibliography where some of the reference materials I use and consider valuable resources will be listed.