Physics of Racing Series

Physics of Racing
Series
These articles were written by Brian Beckman
([email protected]) physicist, and member of
No Bucks Racing Club.
©Copyright 1991, Brian Beckman

Physics of Racing Series

Part 1: Weight Transfer
Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground
Part 3: Basic Calculations
Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force
Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line
Part 6: Speed and Horsepower
Part 7: The Traction Budget
Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program
Part 9: Straights
Part 10: Grip Angle
Part 11: Braking
Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?
Part 13: Transients
Part 14: Why Smoothness?
Part 15: Bumps In The Road
Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator
Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line
Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued
Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber
Part 20 : Four-Point Statics
Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version
Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version
Part 23: Trail Braking
Part 24: Combination Slip
Part 25: Combination Grip
Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

Physics of Racing Series, FAQ

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 Physics of Racing Series

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 1: Weight Transfer

Next: Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

Previous: Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

The Physics of Racing,

Part 1: Weight Transfer
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
Most autocrossers and race drivers learn early in their careers the importance of balancing a car. Learning to do
it consistently and automatically is one essential part of becoming a truly good driver. While the skills for
balancing a car are commonly taught in drivers' schools, the rationale behind them is not usually adequately
explained. That rationale comes from simple physics. Understanding the physics of driving not only helps one
be a better driver, but increases one's enjoyment of driving as well. If you know the deep reasons why you
ought to do certain things you will remember the things better and move faster toward complete internalization
of the skills.
Balancing a car is controlling weight transfer using throttle, brakes, and steering. This article explains the
physics of weight transfer. You will often hear instructors and drivers say that applying the brakes shifts weight
to the front of a car and can induce oversteer. Likewise, accelerating shifts weight to the rear, inducing
understeer, and cornering shifts weight to the opposite side, unloading the inside tires. But why does weight
shift during these maneuvers? How can weight shift when everything is in the car bolted in and strapped down?
Briefly, the reason is that inertia acts through the center of gravity (CG) of the car, which is above the ground,
but adhesive forces act at ground level through the tire contact patches. The effects of weight transfer are
proportional to the height of the CG off the ground. A flatter car, one with a lower CG, handles better and
quicker because weight transfer is not so drastic as it is in a high car.
The rest of this article explains how inertia and adhesive forces give rise to weight transfer through Newton's
laws. The article begins with the elements and works up to some simple equations that you can use to calculate
weight transfer in any car knowing only the wheelbase, the height of the CG, the static weight distribution, and
the track, or distance between the tires across the car. These numbers are reported in shop manuals and most
journalistic reviews of cars.
Most people remember Newton's laws from school physics. These are fundamental laws that apply to all large
things in the universe, such as cars. In the context of our racing application, they are:

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 1: Weight Transfer

The first law: a car in straight-line motion at a constant speed will keep such motion until acted on by an
external force. The only reason a car in neutral will not coast forever is that friction, an external force,
gradually slows the car down. Friction comes from the tires on the ground and the air flowing over the car. The
tendency of a car to keep moving the way it is moving is the inertia of the car, and this tendency is concentrated
at the CG point.
The second law: When a force is applied to a car, the change in motion is proportional to the force divided
by the mass of the car. This law is expressed by the famous equation , where is a force, is the
mass of the car, and is the acceleration, or change in motion, of the car. A larger force causes quicker changes
in motion, and a heavier car reacts more slowly to forces. Newton's second law explains why quick cars are
powerful and lightweight. The more and the less you have, the more you can get.
The third law: Every force on a car by another object, such as the ground, is matched by an equal and
opposite force on the object by the car. When you apply the brakes, you cause the tires to push forward
against the ground, and the ground pushes back. As long as the tires stay on the car, the ground pushing on
them slows the car down.
Let us continue analyzing braking. Weight transfer during accelerating and cornering are mere variations on the
theme. We won't consider subtleties such as suspension and tire deflection yet. These effects are very important,
but secondary. The figure shows a car and the forces on it during a ``one g'' braking maneuver. One g means
that the total braking force equals the weight of the car, say, in pounds.

In this figure, the black and white ``pie plate'' in the center is the CG. is the force of gravity that pulls the car
toward the center of the Earth. This is the weight of the car; weight is just another word for the force of gravity.
It is a fact of Nature, only fully explained by Albert Einstein, that gravitational forces act through the CG of an
object, just like inertia. This fact can be explained at deeper levels, but such an explanation would take us too
far off the subject of weight transfer.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 1: Weight Transfer

is the lift force exerted by the ground on the front tire, and is the lift force on the rear tire. These lift
forces are as real as the ones that keep an airplane in the air, and they keep the car from falling through the
ground to the center of the Earth.
We don't often notice the forces that the ground exerts on objects because they are so ordinary, but they are at
the essence of car dynamics. The reason is that the magnitude of these forces determine the ability of a tire to
stick, and imbalances between the front and rear lift forces account for understeer and oversteer. The figure
only shows forces on the car, not forces on the ground and the CG of the Earth. Newton's third law requires that
these equal and opposite forces exist, but we are only concerned about how the ground and the Earth's gravity
affect the car.

If the car were standing still or coasting, and its weight distribution were 50-50, then would be the same as
. It is always the case that plus equals , the weight of the car. Why? Because of Newton's first law.
The car is not changing its motion in the vertical direction, at least as long as it doesn't get airborne, so the total
sum of all forces in the vertical direction must be zero. points down and counteracts the sum of and ,
which point up.

Braking causes to be greater than . Literally, the ``rear end gets light,'' as one often hears racers say.
Consider the front and rear braking forces, and , in the diagram. They push backwards on the tires, which
push on the wheels, which push on the suspension parts, which push on the rest of the car, slowing it down. But
these forces are acting at ground level, not at the level of the CG. The braking forces are indirectly slowing
down the car by pushing at ground level, while the inertia of the car is `trying' to keep it moving forward as a
unit at the CG level.
The braking forces create a rotating tendency, or torque, about the CG. Imagine pulling a table cloth out from
under some glasses and candelabra. These objects would have a tendency to tip or rotate over, and the tendency
is greater for taller objects and is greater the harder you pull on the cloth. The rotational tendency of a car under
braking is due to identical physics.
The braking torque acts in such a way as to put the car up on its nose. Since the car does not actually go up on
its nose (we hope), some other forces must be counteracting that tendency, by Newton's first law. cannot be
doing it since it passes right through the cetner of gravity. The only forces that can counteract that tendency are
the lift forces, and the only way they can do so is for to become greater than . Literally, the ground pushes
up harder on the front tires during braking to try to keep the car from tipping forward.

By how much does exceed ? The braking torque is proportional to the sum of the braking forces and to
the height of the CG. Let's say that height is 20 inches. The counterbalancing torque resisting the braking torque
is proportional to and half the wheelbase (in a car with 50-50 weight distribution), minus times half the
wheelbase since is helping the braking forces upend the car. has a lot of work to do: it must resist the
torques of both the braking forces and the lift on the rear tires. Let's say the wheelbase is 100 inches. Since we
are braking at one g, the braking forces equal , say, 3200 pounds. All this is summarized in the following
equations:

With the help of a little algebra, we can find out that

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 1: Weight Transfer

Thus, by braking at one g in our example car, we add 640 pounds of load to the front tires and take 640 pounds
off the rears! This is very pronounced weight transfer.

By doing a similar analysis for a more general car with CG height of , wheelbase , weight , static weight
distribution expressed as a fraction of weight in the front, and braking with force , we can show that

These equations can be used to calculate weight transfer during acceleration by treating acceleration force as
negative braking force. If you have acceleration figures in gees, say from a G-analyst or other device, just
multiply them by the weight of the car to get acceleration forces (Newton's second law!). Weight transfer
during cornering can be analyzed in a similar way, where the track of the car replaces the wheelbase and is
always 50%(unless you account for the weight of the driver). Those of you with science or engineering
backgrounds may enjoy deriving these equations for yourselves. The equations for a car doing a combination of
braking and cornering, as in a trail braking maneuver, are much more complicated and require some
mathematical tricks to derive.
Now you know why weight transfer happens. The next topic that comes to mind is the physics of tire adhesion,
which explains how weight transfer can lead to understeer and oversteer conditions.

Next: Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

Previous: Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

Next: Part 3: Basic Calculations

Previous: Part 1: Weight Transfer

The Physics of Racing,

Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the
Ground
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
In last month's article, we explained the physics behind weight transfer. That is, we explained why
braking shifts weight to the front of the car, accelerating shifts weight to the rear, and cornering shifts
weight to the outside of a curve. Weight transfer is a side-effect of the tires keeping the car from flipping
over during maneuvers. We found out that a one braking maneuver in our 3200 pound example car
causes 640 pounds to transfer from the rear tires to the front tires. The explanations were given directly
in terms of Newton's fundamental laws of Nature.
This month, we investigate what causes tires to stay stuck and what causes them to break away and slide.
We will find out that you can make a tire slide either by pushing too hard on it or by causing weight to
transfer off the tire by your control inputs of throttle, brakes, and steering. Conversely, you can cause a
sliding tire to stick again by pushing less hard on it or by tranferring weight to it. The rest of this article
explains all this in term of (you guessed it) physics.
This knowledge, coupled with a good `instinct' for weight transfer, can help a driver predict the
consequences of all his or her actions and develop good instincts for staying out of trouble, getting out of
trouble when it comes, and driving consistently at ten tenths. It is said of Tazio Nuvolari, one of the
greatest racing drivers ever, that he knew at all times while driving the weight on each of the four tires to
within a few pounds. He could think, while driving, how the loads would change if he lifted off the
throttle or turned the wheel a little more, for example. His knowledge of the physics of racing enabled
him to make tiny, accurate adjustments to suit every circumstance, and perhaps to make these
adjustments better than his competitors. Of course, he had a very fast brain and phenomenal reflexes, too.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

I am going to ask you to do a few physics ``lab'' experiments with me to investigate tire adhesion. You
can actually do them, or you can just follow along in your imagination. First, get a tire and wheel off
your car. If you are a serious autocrosser, you probably have a few loose sets in your garage. You can do
the experiments with a heavy box or some object that is easier to handle than a tire, but the numbers you
get won't apply directly to tires, although the principles we investigate will apply.
Weigh yourself both holding the wheel and not holding it on a bathroom scale. The difference is the
weight of the tire and wheel assembly. In my case, it is 50 pounds (it would be a lot less if I had those
$3000Jongbloed wheels! Any sponsors reading?). Now put the wheel on the ground or on a table and
push sideways with your hand against the tire until it slides. When you push it, push down low near the
point where the tire touches the ground so it doesn't tip over.
The question is, how hard did you have to push to make the tire slide? You can find out by putting the
bathroom scale between your hand and the tire when you push. This procedure doesn't give a very
accurate reading of the force you need to make the tire slide, but it gives a rough estimate. In my case, on
the concrete walkway in front of my house, I had to push with 85 pounds of force (my neighbors don't
bother staring at me any more; they're used to my strange antics). On my linoleum kitchen floor, I only
had to push with 60 pounds (but my wife does stare at me when I do this stuff in the house). What do
these numbers mean?

They mean that, on concrete, my tire gave me gees of sideways resistance before sliding.
On a linoleum race course (ahem!), I would only be able to get . We have directly
experienced the physics of grip with our bare hands. The fact that the tire resists sliding, up to a point, is
called the grip phenomenon. If you could view the interface between the ground and the tire with a
microscope, you would see complex interactions between long-chain rubber molecules bending,
stretching, and locking into concrete molecules creating the grip. Tire researchers look into the detailed
workings of tires at these levels of detail.

Now, I'm not getting too excited about being able to achieve cornering in an autocross. Before I
performed this experiment, I frankly expected to see a number below . This rather unbelievable
number of would certainly not be attainable under driving conditions, but is still a testimony to
the rather unbelievable state of tire technology nowadays. Thirty years ago, engineers believed that one
was theoretically impossible from a tire. This had all kinds of consequences. It implied, for example,
that dragsters could not possibly go faster than 200 miles per hour in a quarter mile: you can go
if you can keep acceleration all the way down the track. Nowadays, drag
racing safety watchdogs are working hard to keep the cars under 300 mph; top fuel dragsters launch at
more than 3 gees.
For the second experiment, try weighing down your tire with some ballast. I used a couple of dumbells
slung through the center of the wheel with rope to give me a total weight of 90 pounds. Now, I had to
push with 150 pounds of force to move the tire sideways on concrete. Still about . We observe the
fundamental law of adhesion: the force required to slide a tire is proportional to the weight supported by
the tire. When your tire is on the car, weighed down with the car, you cannot push it sideways simply
because you can't push hard enough.
The force required to slide a tire is called the adhesive limit of the tire, or sometimes the stiction, which is

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

a slang combination of ``stick'' and ``friction.'' This law, in mathematical form, is where is
the force with which the tire resists sliding; is the coefficient of static friction or coefficient of
adhesion; and is the weight or vertical load on the tire contact patch. Both and have the units of
force (remember that weight is the force of gravity), so is just a number, a proportionality constant.
This equation states that the sideways force a tire can withstand before sliding is less than or equal to
times . Thus, is the maximum sideways force the tire can withstand and is equal to the stiction.
We often like to speak of the sideways acceleration the car can achieve, and we can convert the stiction
force into acceleration in gees by dividing by , the weight of the car. can thus be measured in gees.
The coefficient of static friction is not exactly a constant. Under driving conditions, many effects come
into play that reduce the stiction of a good autocross tire to somewhere around . These effects are
deflection of the tire, suspension movement, temperature, inflation pressure, and so on. But the
proportionality law still holds reasonably true under these conditions. Now you can see that if you are
cornering, braking, or accelerating at the limit, which means at the adhesive limit of the tires, any weight
transfer will cause the tires unloaded by the weight transfer to pass from sticking into sliding.
Actually, the transition from sticking `mode' to sliding mode should not be very abrupt in a
well-designed tire. When one speaks of a ``forgiving'' tire, one means a tire that breaks away slowly as it
gets more and more force or less and less weight, giving the driver time to correct. Old, hard tires are,
generally speaking, less forgiving than new, soft tires. Low-profile tires are less forgiving than
high-profile tires. Slicks are less forgiving than DOT tires. But these are very broad generalities and tires
must be judged individually, usually by getting some word-of-mouth recommendations or just by trying
them out in an autocross. Some tires are so unforgiving that they break away virtually without warning,
leading to driver dramatics usually resulting in a spin. Forgiving tires are much easier to control and
much more fun to drive with.
``Driving by the seat of your pants'' means sensing the slight changes in cornering, braking, and
acceleration forces that signal that one or more tires are about to slide. You can sense these change
literally in your seat, but you can also feel changes in steering resistance and in the sounds the tires make.
Generally, tires `squeak' when they are nearing the limit, `squeal' at the limit, and `squall' over the limit. I
find tire sounds very informative and always listen to them while driving.
So, to keep your tires stuck to the ground, be aware that accelerating gives the front tires less stiction and
the rear tires more, that braking gives the front tire more stiction and the rear tires less, and that cornering
gives the inside tires less stiction and the outside tires more. These facts are due to the combination of
weight transfer and the grip phenomenon. Finally, drive smoothly, that is, translate your awareness into
gentle control inputs that always keep appropriate tires stuck at the right times. This is the essential
knowledge required for car control, and, of course, is much easier said than done. Later articles will use
the knowledge we have accumulated so far to explain understeer, oversteer, and chassis set-up.

Next: Part 3: Basic Calculations

Previous: Part 1: Weight Transfer

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 3: Basic Calculations

Next: Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

Previous: Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

The Physics of Racing,

Part 3: Basic Calculations
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
In the last two articles, we plunged right into some relatively complex issues, namely weight transfer and
tire adhesion. This month, we regroup and review some of the basic units and dimensions needed to do
dynamical calculations. Eventually, we can work up to equations sufficient for a full-blown computer
simulation of car dynamics. The equations can then be `doctored' so that the computer simulation will
run fast enough to be the core of an autocross computer game. Eventually, we might direct this series of
articles to show how to build such a game in a typical microcomputer programming language such as C
or BASIC, or perhaps even my personal favorite, LISP. All of this is in keeping with the spirit of the
series, the Physics of Racing, because so much of physics today involves computing. Software design
and programming are essential skills of the modern physicist, so much so that many of us become
involved in computing full time.
Physics is the science of measurement. Perhaps you have heard of highly abstract branches of physics
such as quantum mechanics and relativity, in which exotic mathematics is in the forefront. But when
theories are taken to the laboratory (or the race course) for testing, all the mathematics must boil down to
quantities that can be measured. In racing, the fundamental quantities are distance, time, and mass. This
month, we will review basic equations that will enable you to do quick calculations in your head while
cooling off between runs. It is very valuable to develop a skill for estimating quantities quickly, and I
will show you how.
Equations that don't involve mass are called kinematic. The first kinematic equation relates speed, time,
and distance. If a car is moving at a constant speed or velocity, , then the distance it travels in time
is or velocity times time. This equation really expresses nothing more than the definition of
velocity.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 3: Basic Calculations

If we are to do mental calculations, the first hurdle we must jump comes from the fact that we usually
measure speed in miles per hour (mph), but distance in feet and time in seconds. So, we must modify our

equation with a conversion factor, like this

If you ``cancel out'' the units parts of this equation, you will see that you get feet on both the left and
right hand sides, as is appropriate, since equality is required of any equation. The conversion factor is
5280/3600, which happens to equal 22/15. Let's do a few quick examples. How far does a car go in one
second (remember, say, ``one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand,'' etc. to yourself to count off seconds)?
At fifteen mph, we can see that we go or about
1 and a half car lengths for a 14 and 2/3 foot car like a late-model Corvette. So, at 30 mph, a second is
three car lengths and at 60 mph it is six. If you lose an autocross by 1 second (and you'll be pretty good if
you can do that with all the good drivers in our region), you're losing by somewhere between 3 and 6 car
lengths! This is because the average speed in an autocross is between 30 and 60 mph.
Everytime you plow a little or get a little sideways, just visualize your competition overtaking you by a
car length or so. One of the reasons autocross is such a difficult sport, but also such a pure sport, from the
driver's standpoint, is that you can't make up this time. If you blow a corner in a road race, you may have
a few laps in which to make it up. But to win an autocross against good competition, you must drive
nearly perfectly. The driver who makes the fewest mistakes usually wins!
The next kinematic equation involves acceleration. It so happens that the distance covered by a car at

constant acceleration from a standing start is given by or 1/2 times the acceleration times the
time, squared. What conversions will help us do mental calculations with this equation? Usually, we like
to measure acceleration in s. One happens to be 32.1 feet per second squared. Fortunately, we don't
have to deal with miles and hours here, so our equation becomes,
roughly. So, a car accelerating from a standing start at , which is a typical number for a good, stock
sports car, will go 8 feet in 1 second. Not very far! However, this picks up rapidly. In two seconds, the
car will go 32 feet, or over two car lengths.
Just to prove to you that this isn't crazy, let's answer the question ``How long will it take a car
accelerating at to do the quarter mile?'' We invert the equation above (recall your high school

algebra), to get and we plug in the numbers: the quarter mile equals 1320

feet, , and we get which is about 13 seconds. Not too unreasonable!

A real car will not be able to keep up full acceleration for a quarter mile due to air resistance and
reduced torque in the higher gears. This explains why real (stock) sports cars do the quarter mile in 14 or
15 seconds.
The more interesting result is the fact that it takes a full second to go the first 8 feet. So, we can see that
the launch is critical in an autocross. With excessive wheelspin, which robs you of acceleration, you can
lose a whole second right at the start. Just visualize your competition pulling 8 feet ahead instantly, and

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 3: Basic Calculations

that margin grows because they are `hooked up' better.

For doing these mental calculations, it is helpful to memorize a few squares. 8 squared is 64, 10 squared
is 100, 11 squared is 121, 12 squared is 144, 13 squared is 169, and so on. You can then estimate square
roots in your head with acceptable precision.
Finally, let's examine how engine torque becomes force at the drive wheels and finally acceleration. For
this examination, we will need to know the mass of the car. Any equation in physics that involves mass is
called dynamic, as opposed to kinematic. Let's say we have a Corvette that weighs 3200 pounds and
produces 330 foot-pounds of torque at the crankshaft. The Corvette's automatic transmission has a first
gear ratio of 3.06 (the auto is the trick set up for vettes-just ask Roger Johnson or Mark Thornton). A
transmission is nothing but a set of circular, rotating levers, and the gear ratio is the leverage, multiplying
the torque of the engine. So, at the output of the transmission, we have
of torque. The differential is a further lever-multiplier, in the case
of the Corvette by a factor of 3.07, yielding 3100 foot pounds at the center of the rear wheels (this is a lot
of torque!). The distance from the center of the wheel to the ground is about 13 inches, or 1.08 feet, so
the maximum force that the engine can put to the ground in a rearward direction (causing the ground to
push back forward-remember part 1 of this series!) in first gear is
Now, at rest, the car has about 50/50 weight
distribution, so there is about 1600 pounds of load on the rear tires. You will remember from last month's
article on tire adhesion that the tires cannot respond with a forward force much greater than the weight
that is on them, so they simply will spin if you stomp on the throttle, asking them to give you 2870
pounds of force.
We can now see why it is important to squeeeeeeeze the throttle gently when launching. In the very first
instant of a launch, your goal as a driver is to get the engine up to where it is pushing on the tire contact
patch at about 1600 pounds. The tires will squeal or hiss just a little when you get this right. Not so
coincidentally, this will give you a forward force of about 1600 pounds, for an (part 1)
acceleration of about , or half the weight of the car. The main reason a car will accelerate with only
to start with is that half of the weight is on the front wheels and is unavailable to increase the stiction
of the rear, driving tires. Immediately, however, there will be some weight transfer to the rear.
Remembering part 1 of this series again, you can estimate that about 320 pounds will be transferred to
the rear immediately. You can now ask the tires to give you a little more, and you can gently push on the
throttle. Within a second or so, you can be at full throttle, putting all that torque to work for a beautiful
hole shot!
In a rear drive car, weight transfer acts to make the driving wheels capable of withstanding greater
forward loads. In a front drive car, weight transfer works against acceleration, so you have to be even
more gentle on the throttle if you have a lot of power. An all-wheel drive car puts all the wheels to work
delivering force to the ground and is theoretically the best.
Technical people call this style of calculating ``back of the envelope,'' which is a somewhat picturesque
reference to the habit we have of writing equations and numbers on any piece of paper that happens to be
handy. You do it without calculators or slide rules or abacuses. You do it in the garage or the pits. It is
not exactly precise, but gives you a rough idea, say within 10 or 20 percent, of the forces and
accelerations at work. And now you know how to do back-of-the-envelope calculations, too.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 3: Basic Calculations

Next: Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

Previous: Part 2: Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

Next: Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

Previous: Part 3: Basic Calculations

The Physics of Racing,

Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as
Centrifugal Force
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
One often hears of ``centrifugal force.'' This is the apparent force that throws you to the outside of a turn
during cornering. If there is anything loose in the car, it will immediately slide to the right in a left hand
turn, and vice versa. Perhaps you have experienced what happened to me once. I had omitted to remove
an empty Pepsi can hidden under the passenger seat. During a particularly aggressive run (something for
which I am not unknown), this can came loose, fluttered around the cockpit for a while, and eventually
flew out the passenger window in the middle of a hard left hand corner.
I shall attempt to convince you, in this month's article, that centrifugal force is a fiction, and a
consequence of the fact first noticed just over three hundred years ago by Newton that objects tend to
continue moving in a straight line unless acted on by an external force.
When you turn the steering wheel, you are trying to get the front tires to push a little sideways on the
ground, which then pushes back, by Newton's third law. When the ground pushes back, it causes a little
sideways acceleration. This sideways acceleration is a change in the sideways velocity. The acceleration
is proportional to the sideways force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the car, by Newton's
second law. The sideways acceleration thus causes the car to veer a little sideways, which is what you
wanted when you turned the wheel. If you keep the steering and throttle at constant positions, you will
continue to go mostly forwards and a little sideways until you end up where you started. In other words,
you will go in a circle. When driving through a sweeper, you are going part way around a circle. If you
take skid pad lessons (highly recommended), you will go around in circles all day.
If you turn the steering wheel a little more, you will go in a tighter circle, and the sideways force needed

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

to keep you going is greater. If you go around the same circle but faster, the necessary force is greater. If
you try to go around too fast, the adhesive limit of the tires will be exceeded, they will slide, and you will
not stick to the circular path-you will not ``make it.''
From the discussion above, we can see that in order to turn right, for example, a force, pointing to the
right, must act on the car that veers it away from the straight line it naturally tries to follow. If the force
stays constant, the car will go in a circle. From the point of view of the car, the force always points to the
right. From a point of view outside the car, at rest with respect to the ground, however, the force points
toward the center of the circle. From this point of view, although the force is constant in magnitude, it
changes direction, going around and around as the car turns, always pointing at the geometrical center of
the circle. This force is called centripetal, from the Greek for ``center seeking.'' The point of view on the
ground is privileged, since objects at rest from this point of view feel no net forces. Physicists call this
special point of view an inertial frame of reference. The forces measured in an inertial frame are, in a
sense, more correct than those measured by a physicist riding in the car. Forces measured inside the car
are biased by the centripetal force.
Inside the car, all objects, such as the driver, feel the natural inertial tendency to continue moving in a
straight line. The driver receives a centripetal force from the car through the seat and the belts. If you
don't have good restraints, you may find yourself pushing with your knee against the door and tugging on
the controls in order to get the centripetal force you need to go in a circle with the car. It took me a long
time to overcome the habit of tugging on the car in order to stay put in it. I used to come home with
bruises on my left knee from pushing hard against the door during an autocross. I found that a tight five-
point harness helped me to overcome this unnecessary habit. With it, I no longer think about body
position while driving-I can concentrate on trying to be smooth and fast. As a result, I use the wheel and
the gearshift lever for steering and shifting rather than for helping me stay put in the car!
The `forces' that the driver and other objects inside the car feel are actually centripetal. The term
centrifugal, or ``center fleeing,'' refers to the inertial tendency to resist the centripetal force and to
continue going straight. If the centripetal force is constant in magnitude, the centrifugal tendency will be
constant. There is no such thing as centrifugal force (although it is a convenient fiction for the purpose of
some calculations).
Let's figure out exactly how much sideways acceleration is needed to keep a car going at speed in a
circle of radius . We can then convert this into force using Newton's second law, and then figure out
how fast we can go in a circle before exceeding the adhesive limit-in other words, we can derive
maximum cornering speed. For the following discussion, it will be helpful for you to draw little
back-of-the-envelope pictures (I'm leaving them out, giving our editor a rest from transcribing my
graphics into the newsletter).
Consider a very short interval of time, far less than a second. Call it ( stands for ``delta,'' a Greek
letter mathematicians use as shorthand for ``tiny increment''). In time , let us say we go forward a
distance and sideways a distance . The forward component of the velocity of the car is
approximately . At the beginning of the time interval , the car has no sideways velocity. At
the end, it has sideways velocity . In the time , the car has thus had a change in sideways
velocity of . Acceleration is, precisely, the change in velocity over a certain time, divided by the
time; just as velocity is the change in position over a certain time, divided by the time. Thus, the

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

sideways acceleration is How is related to , the radius of the circle? If we go forward by

a fraction of the radius of the circle, we must go sideways by exactly the same fraction of to stay on
the circle. This means that . The fraction is, however, nothing but . By this reasoning,

we get the relation We can substitute this expression for into the expression for , and

remembering that , we get the final result This equation

simply says quantitatively what we wrote before: that the acceleration (and the force) needed to keep to a
circular line increases with the velocity and increases as the radius gets smaller.
What was not appreciated before we went through this derivation is that the necessary acceleration
increases as the square of the velocity. This means that the centripetal force your tires must give you for
you to make it through a sweeper is very sensitive to your speed. If you go just a little bit too fast, you
might as well go much too fast-your're not going to make it. The following table shows the maximum
speed that can be achieved in turns of various radii for various sideways accelerations. This table shows

the value of the expression which is the solution of for , the

velocity. The conversion factor 15/22 converts from feet per second to miles per hour, and 32.1
converts from gees to feet per second squared. We covered these conversion factors in part 3 of this
series.

For autocrossing, the columns for 50 and 100 feet and the row for 1.00 are most germane. The table
tells us that to achieve 1.00 sideways acceleration in a corner of 50 foot radius (this kind of corner is
all too common in autocross), a driver must not go faster than 27.32 miles per hour. To go 30 mph, 1.25
is required, which is probably not within the capability of an autocross tire at this speed. There is not
much subjective difference between 27 and 30 mph, but the objective difference is usually between
making a controlled run and spinning badly.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

The absolute fastest way to go through a corner is to be just over the limit near the exit, in a controlled
slide. To do this, however, you must be pointed in just such a way that when the car breaks loose and
slides to the exit of the corner it will be pointed straight down the optimal racing line at the exit when it
``hooks up'' again. You can smoothly add throttle during this maneuver and be really moving out of the
corner. But you must do it smoothly. It takes a long time to learn this, and probably a lifetime to perfect
it, but it feels absolutely triumphal when done right. I have not figured out how to drive through a
sweeper, except for the exit, at anything greater than the limiting velocity because sweepers are just too
long to slide around. If anyone (Ayrton Senna, perhaps?) knows how, please tell me!
The chain of reasoning we have just gone through was first discovered by Newton and Leibniz, working
independently. It is, in fact, a derivation in differential calculus, the mathematics of very small quantities.
Newton keeps popping up. He was perhaps the greatest of all physicists, having discovered the laws of
motion, the law of gravity, and calculus, among other things such as the fact that white light is made up
of multiple colors mixed together.
It is an excellent diagnostic exercise to drive a car around a circle marked with cones or chalk and gently
to increase the speed until the car slides. If the front breaks away first, your car has natural understeer,
and if the rear slides first, it has natural oversteer. You can use this information for chassis tuning. Of
course, this is only to be done in safe circumstances, on a rented skid pad or your own private parking
lot. The police will gleefully give you a ticket if they catch you doing this in the wrong places.

Next: Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

Previous: Part 3: Basic Calculations

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

Next: Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

Previous: Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

The Physics of Racing,

Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
This month, we analyze the best way to go through a corner. ``Best'' means in the least time, at the greatest average speed. We
ask ``what is the shape of the driving line through the corner that gives the best time?'' and ``what are the times for some other
lines, say hugging the outside or the inside of the corner?'' Given the answers to these questions, we go on to ask ``what shape
does a corner have to be before the driving line I choose doesn't make any time difference?'' The answer is a little surprising.
The analysis presented here is the simplest I could come up with, and yet is still quite complicated. My calculations went through
about thirty steps before I got the answer. Don't worry, I won't drag you through the mathematics; I just sketch out the analysis,
trying to focus on the basic principles. Anyone who would read through thirty formulas would probably just as soon derive them
for him or herself.
There are several simplifying assumptions I make to get through the analysis. First of all, I consider the corner in isolation; as an
abstract entity lifted out of the rest of a course. The actual best driving line through a corner depends on what comes before it
and after it. You usually want to optimize exit speed if the corner leads onto a straight. You might not apex if another corner is
coming up. You may be forced into an unfavorable entrance by a prior curve or slalom.
Speaking of road courses, you will hear drivers say things like ``you have to do such-and-such in turn six to be on line for turn
ten and the front straight.'' In other words, actions in any one spot carry consequences pretty much all the way around. The
ultimate drivers figure out the line for the entire course and drive it as a unit, taking a Zen-like approach. When learning, it is
probably best to start out optimizing each kind of corner in isolation, then work up to combinations of two corners, three corners,
and so on. In my own driving, there are certain kinds of three corner combinations I know, but mostly I work in twos. I have a
long way to go.
It is not feasible to analyze an actual course in an exact, mathematical way. In other words, although science can provide general
principles and hints, finding the line is, in practice, an art. For me, it is one of the most fun parts of racing.
Other simplifying assumptions I make are that the car can either accelerate, brake, or corner at constant speed, with abrupt
transitions between behaviors. Thus, the lines I analyze are splices of accelerating, braking, and cornering phases. A real car can,
must, and should do these things in combination and with smooth transitions between phases. It is, in fact, possible to do an
exact, mathematical analysis with a more realistic car that transitions smoothly, but it is much more difficult than the splice-type
analysis and does not provide enough more quantitative insight to justify its extra complexity for this article.
Our corner is the following ninety-degree right-hander:

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

}
This figure actually represents a family of corners with any constant width, any radius, and short straights before and after. First,
we go through the entire analysis with a particular corner of 75 foot radius and 30 foot width, then we end up with times for
corners of various radii and widths.
Let us define the following parameters:

radius of corner center line feet

width of course = 30 feet

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

radius of outer edge feet

radius of inner edge feet

Now, when we drive this corner, we must keep the tires on the course, otherwise we get a lot of cone penalties (or go into the
weeds). It is easiest (though not so realistic) to do the analysis considering the path of the center of gravity of the car rather than
the paths of each wheel. So, we define an effective course, narrower than the real course, down which we may drive the center of
the car.

width of car feet

effective outer radius feet

effective inner radius feet

effective width of course feet

This course is indicated by the labels and the thick radius lines in the figure.
From last month's article, we know that for a fixed centripetal acceleration, the maximum driving speed increases as the square
root of the radius. So, if we drive the largest possible circle through the effective corner, starting at the outside of the entrance
straight, going all the way to the inside in the middle of the corner (the apex), and ending up at the outside of the exit straight, we
can corner at the maximum speed. Such a line is shown in the figure as the thick circle labeled ``line .'' This is a simplified
version of the classic racing line through the corner. Line reaches the apex at the geometrical center of the circle, whereas the
classic racing line reaches an apex after the geometrical center-a late apex-because it assumes we are accelerating out of the
corner and must therefore have a continuously increasing radius in the second half and a slightly tighter radius in the first half to
prepare for the acceleration. But, we continue analyzing the geometrically perfect line because it is relatively easy. The figure
shows also Line , the inside line, which come up the inside of the entrance straight, corners on the inside, and goes down the
inside of the exit straight; and Line , the outside line, which comes up the outside, corners on the outside, and exits on the
outside.
One might argue that there are certain advantages of line over line . Line is considerably shorter than Line , and although
we have to go slower through the corner part, we have less total distance to cover and might get through faster. Also, we can
accelerate on part of the entrance chute and all the way on the exit chute, while we have to drive line at constant speed. Let's
find out how much time it takes to get through lines and . We include line for completeness, even though it looks bad
because it is both slower and longer than .
If we assume a maximum centripetal acceleration of 1.10g, which is just within the capability of autocross tires, we get the
following speeds for the cornering phases of Lines , , and :

Line is all cornering, so we can easily calculate the time to drive it once we know the radius, labeled in the figure. A
geometrical analysis results in and the time is

For line , we accelerate for a bit, brake until we reach 32.16 mph, corner at that speed, and then accelerate on the exit. Let's
assume, to keep the comparison fair, that we have timing lights at the beginning and end of line and that we can begin driving

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

line at 48.78 mph, the same speed that we can drive line . Let us also assume that the car can accelerate at g and brake at 1g.
Our driving plan for line results in the following velocity profile:

}
Because we can begin by accelerating, we start beating line a little. We have to brake hard to make the corner. Finally,
although we accelerate on the exit, we don't quite come up to 48.78 mph, the exit speed for line . But, we don't care about exit
speed, only time through the corner. Using the velocity profile above, we can calculate the time for line , call it , to be 4.08
seconds. Line loses by 9/10ths of a second. It is a fair margin to lose an autocross by this much over a whole course, but this
analysis shows we can lose it in just one typical corner! In this case, line is a catastrophic mistake. Incidentally, line takes
4.24 seconds .
What if the corner were tighter or of greater radius? The following table shows some times for 30 foot wide corners of various
radii:

Line never beats line even though that as the radius increases, the margin of loss decreases. The trend is intuitive because
corners of greater radius are also longer and the extra speed in line over line is less. The margin is greatest for tight corners
because the width is a greater fraction of the length and the speed differential is greater.
How about for various widths? The following table shows times for a 75 foot radius corner of several widths:

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

The wider the course, the greater the margin of loss. This is, again, intuitive since on a wide course, line is a really large circle
through even a very tight corner. Note that line becomes better than line for wide courses. This is because the speed
differential between lines and is very great for wide courses. The most notable fact is that line beats line by 0.16 seconds
even on a course that is only four feet wider than the car! You really must ``use up the whole course.''
So, the answer is, under the assumptions made, that the inside line is never better than the classic racing line. For the splice-type
car behavior assumed, I conjecture that no line is faster than line .
We have gone through a simplified kind of variational analysis. Variational analysis is used in all branches of physics,
especially mechanics and optics. It is possible, in fact, to express all theories of physics, even the most arcane, in variational
form, and many physicists find this form very appealing. It is also possible to use variational analysis to write a computer
program that finds an approximately perfect line through a complete, realistic course.

Next: Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

Previous: Part 4: There Is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

Next: Part 7: The Traction Budget

Previous: Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

The Physics of Racing,

Part 6: Speed and Horsepower
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
The title of this month's article consists of two words dear to every racer's heart. This month, we do some
``back of the envelope'' calculations to investigate the basic physics of speed and horsepower (the ``back
of the envelope'' style of calculating was covered in part 3 of this series).
How much horsepower does it take to go a certain speed? At first blush, a physicist might be tempted to
say ``none,'' because he or she remembers Newton's first law, by which an object moving at a constant
speed in a straight line continues so moving forever, even to the end of the Universe, unless acted on by
an external force. Everyone knows, however, that it is necessary to keep your foot on the gas to keep a
car moving at a constant speed. Keeping your foot on the gas means that you are making the engine
apply a backward force to the ground, which applies a reaction force forward on the car, to keep the car
moving. In fact, we know a few numbers from our car's shop manual. A late model Corvette, for
example, has a top speed of about 150 miles per hour and about 240 hp. This means that if you keep your
foot all the way down, using up all 240 hp, you can eventually go 150 mph. It takes a while to get there.
In this car, you can get to 60 mph in about 6 seconds (if you don't spin the drive wheels), to 100 mph in
about 15 seconds, and 150 in about a minute.
All this seems to contradict Newton's first law. What is going on? An automobile moving at constant
speed in a straight line on level ground is, in fact, acted on by a number of external forces that tend to
slow it down. Without these forces, the car would coast forever as guaranteed by Newton's first law. You
must counteract these forces with the engine, which indirectly creates a reaction force that keeps the car
going. When the car is going at a constant speed, the net force on the car, that is, the speeding-up forces
minus the slowing-down forces, is zero.
The most important external, slowing-down force is air resistance or drag. The second most important

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

force is friction between the tires and the ground, the so-called rolling resistance. Both these forces are
called resistance because they always act to oppose the forward motion of the car in whatever direction it
is going. Another physical effect that slows a car down is internal friction in the drive train and wheel
bearings. Acting internally, these forces cannot slow the car. However, they push backwards on the tires,
which push forward on the ground, which pushes back by Newton's third law, slowing the car down. The
internal friction forces are opposed by external reaction forces, which act as slight braking forces,
slowing the car. So, Newton and the Universe are safe; everything is working as it should.
How big are the resistance forces, and what role does horsepower play? The physics of air resistance is
very complex and an area of vigorous research today. Most of this research is done by the aerospace
industry, which is technologically very closely related to the automobile industry, especially when it
comes to racing. We'll slog through some arithmetic here to come up with a table that shows how much
horsepower it takes to sustain speed. Those who don't have the stomach to go through the math can skim
the next few paragraphs.
We cannot derive equations for air resistance here. We'll just look them up. My source is Fluid
Mechanics, by L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, two eminent Russian physicists. They give the following

approximate formula: The factors in this equation are the following:

coefficient of friction, a factor depending on the shape of a car and determined by experiment; for
a late model Corvette it is about 0.30;

frontal area of the car; for a Corvette, it is about 20 square feet;

Greek letter rho, density of air, which we calculate below;

speed of the car.

Let us calculate the density of air using ``back of the envelope'' methods. We know that air is about
79%Nitrogen and 21%Oxygen. We can look up the fact that Nitrogen has a molecular weight of about 28
and Oxygen has a molecular weight of about 32. What is molecular weight? It is the mass (not the
weight, despite the name) of 22.4 liters of gas. It is a number of historical convention, just like feet and
inches, and doesn't have any real science behind it. So, we figure that air has an average molecular

weight of I admit to using a calculator to

do this calculation, against the spirit of the ``back of the envelope'' style. So sue me.

We need to convert to pounds of mass per cubic foot so that we can do the force calculations
in familiar, if not convenient, units. It is worthwhile to note, as an aside, that a great deal of the difficulty
of doing calculations in the physics of racing has to do with the traditional units of feet, miles, and
pounds we use. The metric system makes all such calculations vastly simpler. Napoleon Bonaparte
wanted to convert the world the metric system (mostly so his own soldiers could do artillery calculations
quickly in their heads) but it is still not in common use in America nearly 200 years later!

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

Again, we look up the conversion factors. My source is Engineering Formulas by Kurt Gieck, but they
can be looked up in almost any encyclopedia or dictionary. There are 1000 liters in a cubic meter, which
in turn contains 35.51 cubic feet. Also, a pound-mass contains 453.6 grams. These figures give us, for the

density of air
This says that a cubic foot of air weighs 8 hundredths of a pound, and so it does! Air is much more
massive than it seems, until you are moving quickly through it, that is.
Let's finish off our equation for air resistance. We want to fill in all the numbers except for speed, ,
using the Corvette as an example car so that we can calculate the force of air resistance for a variety of
speeds. We get

We want, at
the end, to have in miles per hour, but we need in feet per seconds for the calculations to come out
right. We recall that there are 22 feet per second for every 15 miles per hour, giving us

Now (this gets confusing, and it wouldn't be if we were using the metric system), a pound mass is a
phony unit. A lb-mass is concocted to have a weight of 1 pound under the action of the Earth's gravity.
Pounds are a unit of force or weight, not of mass. We want our force of air resistance in pounds of force,
so we have to divide by 32.1, numerically equal to the acceleration of Earth's gravity
in , to get pounds of force. You just have to know these things. This was a lot of work, but it's

over now. We finally get

Let's calculate a few numbers. The following table gives the force of air resistance for a number of
interesting speeds:

We can see that the force of air resistance goes up rapidly with speed, until we need over 350 pounds of
constant force just to overcome drag at 150 miles per hour. We can now show where horsepower comes
in.
Horsepower is a measure of power, which is a technical term in physics. It measures the amount of work
that a force does as it acts over time. Work is another technical term in physics. It measures the actual
effect of a force in moving an object over a distance. If we move an object one foot by applying a force

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

of one pound, we are said to be doing one foot-pound of work. If it takes us one second to move the
object, we have exerted one foot-pound per second of power. A horsepower is 550 foot-pounds per
second. It is another one of those historical units that Napoleon hated and that has no reasonable origin in
science.
We can expend one horsepower by exerting 550 pounds of force to move an object 1 foot in 1 second, or
by exerting 1 pound of force to move an object 550 feet in 1 second, or by exerting 1 pound of force to
move an object 1 foot in 0.001818 seconds, and so on. All these actions take the same amount of power.
Incidentally, a horsepower happens to be equal also to 745 watts. So, if you burn about 8 light bulbs in
your house, someone somewhere is expending at least one horsepower (and probably more like four or
five) in electrical forces to keep all that going for you, and you pay for the service at the end of the
month!.
All this means that to find out how much horsepower it takes to overcome air resistance at any speed, we
need to multiply the force of air resistance by speed (in feet per second, converted from miles per hour),
and divide by 550, to convert foot-lb/sec to horsepower. The formula is

and we get the following numbers

from the formula for a few interesting speeds.

I put 55 mph and 65 mph in this table to show why some people think that the 55 mph national speed
limit saves gasoline. It only requires about 7 hp to overcome drag at 55 mph, while it requires almost 12
hp to overcome drag at 65. Fuel consumption is approximately proportional to horsepower expended.
More interesting to the racer is the fact that it takes 145 hp to overcome drag at 150 mph. We know that
our Corvette example car has about 240 hp, so about 95 hp must be going into overcoming rolling
resistance and the slight braking forces arising from internal friction in the drive train and wheel
bearings. Race cars capable of going 200 mph usually have at least 650 hp, about 350 of which goes into
overcoming air resistance. It is probably possible to go 200 mph with a car in the 450-500 hp range, but
such a car would have very good aerodynamics; expensive, low-friction internal parts; and low rolling
resistance tires, which are designed to have the smallest possible contact patch like high performance
bicycle tires, and are therefore not good for handling.

Next: Part 7: The Traction Budget

Previous: Part 5: Introduction to the Racing Line

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

Next: Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

Previous: Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

The Physics of Racing,

Part 7: The Traction Budget
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
This month, we introduce the traction budget. This is a way of thinking about the traction available for car control
under various conditions. It can help you make decisions about driving style, the right line around a course, and
diagnosing handling problems. We introduce a diagramming technique for visualizing the traction budget and
combine this with a well-known visualization tool, the ``circle of traction,'' also known as the circle of friction. So this
month's article is about tools, conceptual and visual, for thinking about some aspects of the physics of racing.
To introduce the traction budget, we first need to visualize a tire in contact with the ground. Figure 1 shows how
the bottom surface of a tire might look if we could see that surface by looking down from above. In other words, this
figure shows an imaginary ``X-ray'' view of the bottom surface of a tire. For the rest of the discussion, we will always
imagine that we view the tire this way. From this point of view, ``up'' on the diagram corresponds to forward forces
and motion of the tire and the car, ``down'' corresponds to backward forces and motion, ``left'' corresponds to leftward
forces and motion, and ``right'' on the diagram corresponds to rightward forces and motion.
The bottom surface of a tire viewed from the top as though with ``X-ray vision.''

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

The figure shows a shaded, elliptical region, where the tire presses against the ground. All the interaction between the
tire and the ground takes place in this contact patch: that part of the tire that touches the ground. As the tire rolls, one
bunch of tire molecules after another move into the contact patch. But the patch itself more-or-less keeps the same
shape, size, and position relative to the axis of rotation of the tire and the car as a whole. We can use this fact to
develop a simplified view of the interaction between tire and ground. This simplified view lets us quickly and easily
do approximate calculations good within a few percent. (A full-blown, mathematical analysis requires tire coordinates
that roll with the tire, ground coordinates fixed on the ground, car coordinates fixed to the car, and many complicated
equations relating these coordinate systems; the last few percent of accuracy in a mathematical model of tire-ground
interaction involves a great deal more complexity.)
You will recall that forces on the tire from the ground are required to make a car change either its speed of motion or
its direction of motion. Thinking of the X-ray vision picture, forces pointing up are required to make the car
accelerate, forces pointing down are required to make it brake, and forces pointing right and left are required to make
the car turn. Consider forward acceleration, for a moment. The engine applies a torque to the axle. This torque
becomes a force, pointing backwards (down, on the diagram), that the tire applies to the ground. By Newton's third
law, the ground applies an equal and opposite force, therefore pointing forward (up), on the contact patch. This force
is transmitted back to the car, accelerating it forward. It is easy to get confused with all this backward and forward

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

action and reaction. Remember to think only about the forces on the tire and to ignore the forces on the ground, which
point the opposite way.
You will also recall that a tire has a limited ability to stick to the ground. Apply a force that is too large, and the tire
slides. The maximum force that a tire can take depends on the weight applied to the tire: where is the
force on the tire, is the coefficient of adhesion (and depends on tire compound, ground characteristics, temperature,
humidity, phase of the moon, etc.), and is the weight or load on the tire.
By Newton's second law, the weight on the tire depends on the fraction of the car's mass that the tire must support and
the acceleration of gravity, . The fraction of the car's mass that the tire must support depends on
geometrical factors such as the wheelbase and the height of the center of gravity. It also depends on the acceleration
of the car, which completely accounts for weight transfer.
It is critical to separate the geometrical, or kinematic, aspects of weight transfer from the mass of the car. Imagine two
cars with the same geometry but different masses (weights). In a one braking maneuver, the same fraction of each
car's total weight will be transferred to the front. In the example of Part 1 of this series, we calculated a 20%weight
transfer during one braking because the height of the CG was 20%of the wheelbase. This weight transfer will be the
same 20%in a 3500 pound, stock Corvette as in a 2200 pound, tube-frame, Trans-Am Corvette so long as the
geometry (wheelbase, CG height, etc.) of the two cars is the same. Although the actual weight, in pounds, will be
different in the two cases, the fractions of the cars' total weight will be equal.

Separating kinematics from mass, then, we have for the weight where is the fraction of the
car's mass the tire must support and also accounts for weight transfer, is the car's mass, and is the acceleration of
gravity.

Finally, by Newton's second law again, the acceleration of the tire due to the force applied to it is
We can now combine the expressions above to discover a fascinating fact:

The maximum acceleration a tire can take is , a constant, independent of

the mass of the car! While the maximum force a tire can take depends very much on the current vertical load or
weight on the tire, the acceleration of that tire does not depend on the current weight. If a tire can take one before
sliding, it can take it on a lightweight car as well as on a heavy car, and it can take it under load as well as when
lightly loaded. We hinted at this fact in Part 2, but the analysis above hopefully gives some deeper insight into it. We
note that being constant is only approximately true, because changes slightly as tire load varies, but this is a
second-order effect (covered in a later article).
So, in an approximate way, we can consider the available acceleration from a tire independently of details of weight
transfer. The tire will give you so many gees and that's that. This is the essential idea of the traction budget. What you
do with your budget is your affair. If you have a tire that will give you one , you can use it for accelerating, braking,
cornering, or some combination, but you cannot use more than your budget or you will slide. The front-back
component of the budget measures accelerating and braking, and the right-left component measures cornering
acceleration. The front-back component, call it , combines with the left-right component, , not by adding, but by

the Pythagorean formula:

Rather than trying to deal with this formula, there is a convenient, visual representation of the traction budget in the
circle of traction. Figure 2 shows the circle. It is oriented in the same way as the X-ray view of the contact patch,
Figure 1 , so that up is forward and right is rightward. The circular boundary represents the limits of the traction
budget, and every point inside the circle represents a particular choice of how you spend your budget. A point near the
top of the circle represents pure, forward acceleration, a point near the bottom represents pure braking. A point near

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

the right boundary, with no up or down component, represents pure rightward cornering acceleration. Other points
represent Pythagorean combinations of cornering and forward or backward acceleration.
The beauty of this representation is that the effects of weight transfer are factored out. So the circle remains
approximately the same no matter what the load on a tire.
The Circle of Traction.

In racing, of course, we try to spend our budget so as to stay as close to the limit, i.e. , the circular boundary, as
possible. In street driving, we try to stay well inside the limit so that we have lots of traction available to react to
unforeseen circumstances.
I have emphasized that the circle is only an approximate representation of the truth. It is probably close enough to
make a computer driving simulation that feels right (I'm pretty sure that ``Hard Drivin' '' and other such games use it).
As mentioned, tire loads do cause slight, dynamic variations. Car characteristics also give rise to variations. Imagine a
car with slippery tires in the back and sticky tires in the front. Such a car will tend to oversteer by sliding. Its traction
budget will not look like a circle. Figure 3 gives an indication of what the traction budget for the whole car might
look like (we have been discussing the budget of a single tire up to this point, but the same notions apply to the whole

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

car). In Figure 3 , there is a large traction circle for the sticky front tires and a small circle for the slippery rear
tires. Under acceleration, the slippery rears dominate the combined traction budget because of weight transfer. Under
braking, the sticky fronts dominate. The combined traction budget looks something like an egg, flattened at top and
wide in the middle. Under braking, the traction available for cornering is considerably greater than the traction
available during acceleration because the sticky fronts are working. So, although this poorly handling car tends to
oversteer by sliding the rear, it also tends to understeer during acceleration because the slippery rears will not follow
the steering front tires very effectively.
A traction budget diagram for a poorly handling car.

The traction budget is a versatile and simple technique for analyzing and visualizing car handling. The same
technique can be applied to developing driver's skills, planning the line around a course, and diagnosing handling
problems.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 7: The Traction Budget

Next: Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

Previous: Part 6: Speed and Horsepower

converted by: [email protected]

Thu Sep 29 14:11:06 PDT 1994

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

Next: Part 9: Straights

Previous: Part 7: The Traction Budget

The Physics of Racing,

Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a
Computer Program
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
This month, we begin writing a computer program to simulate the physics of racing. Such a program is
quite an ambitious one. A simple racing video game, such as ``Pole Position,'' probably took an expert
programmer several months to write. A big, realistic game like ``Hard Drivin''' probably took three to
five people more than a year to create. The point is that the topic of writing a racing simulation is one
that we will have to revisit many times in these articles, assuming your patience holds out. There are
many `just physics' topics still to cover too, such as springs and dampers, transients, and
thermodynamics. Your author hopes you will find the computer programming topic an enjoyable sideline
and is interested, as always, in your feedback.
We will use a computer programming language called Scheme. You have probably encountered BASIC,
a language that is very common on personal computers. Scheme is like BASIC in that it is interactive.
An interactive computer language is the right kind to use when inventing a program as you go along.
Scheme is better than BASIC, however, because it is a good deal simpler and also more powerful and
modern. Scheme is available for most PCs at very modest cost (MIT Press has published a book and
diskette with Scheme for IBM compatibles for about $40; I have a free version for Macintoshes). I will
explain everything we need to know about Scheme as we go along. Although I assume little or no
knowledge about computer programming on your part, we will ultimately learn some very advanced
things.
The first thing we need to do is create a data structure that contains the mathematical state of the car at
any time. This data structure is a block of computer memory. As simulated time progresses,

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

mathematical operations performed on the data structure simulate the physics. We create a new instance
of this data structure by typing the following on the computer keyboard at the Scheme prompt:

(new-race-car)
This is an example of an expression. The expression includes the parentheses. When it is typed in, it is
evaluated immediately. When we say that Scheme is an interactive programming language, we mean
that it evaluates expressions immediately. Later on, I show how we define this expression. It is by
defining such expressions that we write our simulation program.
Everything in Scheme is an expression (that's why Scheme is simple). Every expression has a value. The
value of the expression above is the new data structure itself. We need to give the new data structure a
name so we can refer to it in later expressions:

(define car-161 (new-race-car))

This expression illustrates two Scheme features. The first is that expressions can contain sub-expressions
inside them. The inside expressions are called nested. Scheme figures out which expressions are nested
by counting parentheses. It is partly by nesting expressions that we build up the complexity needed to
simulate racing. The second feature is the use of the special Scheme word define. This causes the
immediately following word to become a stand-in synonym for the value just after. The technical name
for such a stand-in synonym is variable. Thus, the expression car-161, wherever it appears after the
define expression, is a synonym for the data structure created by the nested expression
(new-race-car).
We will have another data structure (with the same format) for car-240, another for car-70, and so
on. We get to choose these names to be almost anything we like . So, we would create all the data
structures for the cars in our simulation with expressions like the following:

(define car-161 (new-race-car))

(define car-240 (new-race-car))
(define car-70 (new-race-car))
The state of a race car consists of several numbers describing the physics of the car. First, there is the
car's position. Imagine a map of the course. Every position on the map is denoted by a pair of
coordinates, and . For elevation changes, we add a height coordinate, . The position of the center of
gravity of a car at any time is denoted with expressions such as the following:

(race-car-x car-161)
(race-car-y car-161)
(race-car-z car-161)
Each of these expressions performs data retrieval on the data structure car-161. The value of the first
expression is the coordinate of the car, etc. Normally, when running the Scheme interpreter, typing an
expression simply causes its value to be printed, so we would see the car position coordinates printed out
as we typed. We could also store these positions in another block of computer memory for further

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

manipulations, or we could specify various mathematical operations to be performed on them.

The next pieces of state information are the three components of the car's velocity. When the car is going
in any direction on the course, we can ask ``how fast is it going in the direction, ignoring its motion in
the and directions?'' Similarly, we want to know how fast it is going in the direction, ignoring the
and directions, and so on. Decomposing an object's velocity into separate components along the
principal coordinate directions is necessary for computation. The technique was originated by the French
mathematician Descartes, and Newton found that the motion in each direction can be analyzed
independently of the motions in the other directions at right angles to the first direction.
The velocity of our race car is retrieved via the following expressions:

(race-car-vx car-161)
(race-car-vy car-161)
(race-car-vz car-161)
To end this month's article, we show how velocity is computed. Suppose we retrieve the position of the
car at simulated time and save it in some variables, as follows:

(define x1 (race-car-x car-161))

(define y1 (race-car-y car-161))
(define z1 (race-car-z car-161))

and again, at a slightly later instant of simulated time, :

(define x2 (race-car-x car-161))

(define y2 (race-car-y car-161))
(define z2 (race-car-z car-161))
We have used define to create some new variables that now have the values of the car's positions at
two times. To calculate the average velocity of the car between the two times and store it in some more
variables, we evaluate the following expressions:

(define vx (/ (- x2 x1) (- t2 t1)))

(define vy (/ (- y2 y1) (- t2 t1)))
(define vz (/ (- z2 z1) (- t2 t1)))
The nesting of expressions is one level deeper than we have seen heretofore, but these expressions can be
easily analyzed. Since they all have the same form, it suffices to explain just one of them. First of all, the
define operation works as before, just creating the variable vx and assigning it the value of the
following expression. This expression is

(/ (- x2 x1) (- t2 t1))

In normal mathematical notation, this expression would read and in most computer languages,

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

it would look like this:

(x2 - x1) / (t2 - t1)

We can immediately see this is the velocity in the direction: a change in position divided by the
corresponding change in time. The Scheme version of this expression looks a little strange, but there is a
good reason for it: consistency. Scheme requires that all operations, including everyday mathematical
ones, appear in the first position in a parenthesized expression, immediately after the left parenthesis.
Although consistency makes mathematical expressions look strange, the payback is simplicity: all
expressions have the same form. If Scheme had one notation for mathematical expressions and another
notation for non-mathematical expressions, like most computer languages, it would be more complicated.
Incidentally, Scheme's notation is called Polish notation. Perhaps you have been exposed to
Hewlett-Packard calculators, which use reverse Polish, in in which the operator always appears in the
last position. Same idea, and advantages, as Scheme, only reversed.
So, to analyze the expression completely, it is a division expression

(/ ...)
whose two arguments are nested subtraction expressions

(- ...) (- ...)
The whole expression has the form

(/ (- ...) (- ...))
which, when the variables are filled in, is

(/ (- x2 x1) (- t2 t1))
After a little practice, Scheme's style for mathematics becomes second nature and the advantages of
consistent notation pay off in the long run.
Finally, we should like to store the velocity values in our data structure. We do so as follows:

(set-race-car-vx! car-161 vx)

(set-race-car-vy! car-161 vy)
(set-race-car-vz! car-161 vz)
The set operations change the values in the data structure named car-161. The exclamation point at
the end of the names of these operations doesn't do anything special. It's just a Scheme idiom for
operations that change data structures.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

Next: Part 9: Straights

Previous: Part 7: The Traction Budget

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Thu Sep 29 14:10:24 PDT 1994

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

Next: Part 10: Grip Angle

Previous: Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

The Physics of Racing,

Part 9: Straights
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
We found in part 5 of this series, ``Introduction to the Racing Line,'' that a driver can lose a shocking amount of
time by taking a bad line in a corner. With a six-foot-wide car on a ten-foot-wide course, one can lose sixteen
hundredths by `blowing' a single right-angle turn. This month, we extend the analysis of the racing line by
following our example car down a straight. It is often said that the most critical corner in a course is the one
before the longest straight. Let's find out how critical it is. We calculate how much time it takes to go down a
straight as a function of the speed entering the straight. The results, which are given at the end, are not terribly
dramatic, but we make several, key improvements in the mathematical model that is under continuing
development in this series of articles. These improvements will be used as we proceed designing the computer
program begun in Part 8.
The mathematical model for traveling down a straight follows from Newton's second law:

where is the force on the car, is the mass of the car, and is the acceleration of the car. We want to solve
this equation to get time as a function of distance down the straight. Basically, we want a table of numbers so
that we can look up the time it takes to go any distance. We can build this table using accountants' columnar
paper, or we can use the modern version of the columnar pad: the electronic spreadsheet program.
To solve equation 1 , we first invert it:

Now , the acceleration, is the rate of change of velocity with time. Rate of change is simply the ratio of a small
change in velocity to a small change in time. Let us assume that we have filled in a column of times on our table.
The times start with and go up by the same, small amount, say sec. Physicists call this small time the
integration step. It is standard practice to begin solving an equation with a fixed integration step. There are

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

sometimes good reasons to vary the integration step, but those reasons do not arise in this problem. Let us call
the integration step . If we call the time in the -th row , then for every row except the first,

We label another column velocity, and we'll call the velocity in the -th row . For every row except the first,
equation 2 becomes:

We want to fill in velocities as we go down the columns, so we need to solve equation 4 for . This will
give us a formula for computing given for every row except the first. In the first row, we put the speed
with which we enter the straight, which is an input to the problem. We get:

We label another column distance, and we call the distance value in the -th row . Just as acceleration is the
rate of change of velocity, so velocity is the rate of change of distance over time. Just as before, then, we may
write:

Solved for , this is:

Equation 7 gives us a formula for calculating the distance for any time given the previous distance and the
velocity calculated by equation 5 . Physicists would say that we have a scheme for integrating the equations
of motion.
A small detail is missing: what is the force, ? Everything to this point is kinematic. The real modeling starts
now with formulas for calculating the force. For this, we will draw on all the previous articles in this series. Let's
label another column force, and a few more with drag, rolling resistance, engine torque, engine rpm, wheel rpm,
trans gear ratio, drive ratio, wheel torque, and drive force. As you can see, we are going to derive a fairly
complete, if not accurate, model of accelerating down the straight. We need a few constants:

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

and a few variables:

All the example values are for a late model Corvette. Slugs are the English unit of mass, and 1 slug weighs about
32.1 lbs at sea level (another manifestation of , with in lbs, in slugs, and being the acceleration
of gravity, 32.1 ft/sec ).
The most basic modeling equation is that the force we can use for forward acceleration is the propelling force
transmitted through the wheels minus drag and rolling resistance:

The force of drag we get from Part 6:

Note that to calculate the force at step , we can use the velocity at step . This force goes into calculating the
acceleration at step , which is used to calculate the velocity and distance at step by equations 5 and 7
. Those two equations represent the only `backward references' we need. Thus, the only inputs to the
integration are the initial distance, 0, and the entrance velocity, .
The rolling resistance is approximately proportional to the velocity:

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

This approximation is probably the weakest one in the model. I derived it by noting from a Corvette book that
8.2 hp were needed to overcome rolling resistance at 55 mph. I have nothing else but intuition to go on for this
equation, so take it with a grain of salt.
Finally, we must calculate the forward force delivered by the ground to the car by reaction to the rearward force
delivered to the ground via the engine and drive train:

This equation simply states that we take the engine torque multiplied by the rear axle ratio and the transmission
drive ratio in the -th gear, which is the torque at the drive wheels, , and divide it by the radius of the wheel,
which is half the diameter of the wheel, .
To calculate the forward force, we must decide what gear to be in. The logic we use to do this is the following:
from the velocity, we can calculate the wheel rpm:

From this, we know the engine rpm:

At each step of integration, we look at the current engine rpm and ask ``is it past the torque peak of the engine?''
If so, we shift to the next highest gear, if possible. Somewhat arbitrarily, we assume that the torque peak is at
4200 rpm. To keep things simple, we also make the optimistic assumption that the engine puts out a constant
torque of 330 ft-lbs. To make the model more realistic, we need merely look up a torque curve for our engine,
usually expressed as a function of rpm, and read the torque off the curve at each step of the integration. The
current approximation is not terrible however; it merely gives us artificially good times and speeds. Another
important improvement on the logic would be to check whether the wheels are spinning, i.e., that acceleration is
less than about , and to `lift off the gas' in that case.
We have all the ingredients necessary to calculate how much time it takes to cover a straight given an initial
speed. You can imagine doing the calculations outlined above by hand on columnar paper, or you can check my
results (below) by programming them up in a spreadsheet program like Lotus 1-2-3 or Microsoft Excel.
Eventually, of course, if you follow this series, you will see these equations again as we write our Scheme
program for simulating car dynamics. Integrating the equations of motion by hand will take you many hours.
Using a spreadsheet will take several hours, too, but many less than integrating by hand.
To illustrate the process, we show below the times and exit speeds for a 200 foot straight, which is a fairly long
one in autocrossing, and a 500 foot straight, which you should only see on race tracks. We show times and
speeds for a variety of speeds entering the straight from 25 to 50 mph in Table 1 . The results are also
summarized in the two plots, Figures 1 and 2 .

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

The notable facts arising in this analysis are the following. The time difference resulting from entering the 200'
straight at 27 mph rather than 25 mph is about 6 hundredths. Frankly, not as much as I expected. The time
difference between entering at 31 mph over 25 mph is about 2 tenths, again less than I would have guessed. The
speed difference at the end of the straight between entering at 25 mph and 50 mph is only 8 mph, a result of the
fact that the car labors against friction and higher gear ratios at high speeds. It is also a consequence of the fact
that there is so much torque available at 25 mph in low gear that the car can almost make up the difference over
the relatively short 200' straight. In fact, on the longer 500' straight, the exit speed difference between entering at
25 mph and 50 mph is not even 5 mph, though the time difference is nearly a full second.
This analysis would most likely be much more dramatic for a car with less torque than a Corvette. In a Corvette,
with 330 ft-lbs of torque on tap, the penalty for entering a straight slower than necessary is not so great as it
would be in a more typical car, where recovering speed lost through timidity or bad cornering is much more
difficult.
Again, the analysis can be improved by using a real torque curve and by checking whether the wheels are
spinning in lower gears.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 9: Straights

Next: Part 10: Grip Angle

Previous: Part 8: Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

converted by: [email protected]

Thu Sep 29 14:11:00 PDT 1994

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 10: Grip Angle

Next: Part 11: Braking

Previous: Part 9: Straights

The Physics of Racing,

Part 10: Grip Angle
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
In many ways, tire mechanics is an unpleasant topic. It is shrouded in uncertainty, controversy, and trade
secrecy. Both theoretical and experimental studies are extremely difficult and expensive. It is probably
the most uncontrollable variable in racing today. As such, it is the source of many highs and lows. An
improvement in modeling or design, even if it is found by lucky accident, can lead to several years of
domination by one tire company, as with BFGoodrich in autocrossing now. An unfortunate choice of tire
by a competitor can lead to frustration and a disastrous hole in the budget.
This month, we investigate the physics of tire adhesion a little more deeply than in the past. In Parts 2, 4,
and 7, we used the simple friction model given by , where is the maximum traction force
available from a tire; , assumed constant, is the coefficient of friction; and is the instantaneous
vertical load, or weight, on a tire. While this model is adequate for a rough, intuitive feel for tire
behavior, it is grossly inadequate for quantitative use, say, for the computer program we began in Part 8
or for race car engineering and set up.
I am not a tire engineer. As always, I try to give a fresh look at any topic from a physicist's point of view.
I may write things that are heretical or even wrong, especially on such a difficult topic as tire mechanics.
I invite debate and corrections from those more knowledgeable than I. Such interaction is part of the fun
of these articles for me.
I call this month's topic `grip angle.' The grip angle is a quantity that captures, for many purposes, the
complex and subtle mechanics of a tire. Most writers call this quantity `slip angle.' I think this name is
misleading because it suggests that a tire works by slipping and sliding. The truth is more complicated.
Near maximum loads, the contact patch is partly gripping and partly slipping. The maximum net force a
tire can yield occurs at the threshold where the tire is still gripping but is just about to give way to total

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 10: Grip Angle

slipping. Also, I have some difficulties with the analyses of slip angle in the literature. I will present
these difficulties in these articles, unfortunately, probably without resolution. For these reasons, I give
the quantity a new name.
A tire is an elastic or deformable body. It delivers forces to the car by stretching, compressing, and
twisting. It is thus a very complex sort of spring with several different ways, or modes, of deformation.
The hypothetical tire implied by with constant would be a non-elastic tire. Anyone who has
driven hard tires on ice knows that non-elastic tires are basically uncontrollable, not just because is
small but because regular tires on ice do not twist appreciably.
The first and most obvious mode of derformation is radial. This deformation is along the radius of the
tire, the line from the center to the tread. It is easily visible as a bulge in the sidewall near the contact
patch, where the tire touches the ground. Thus, radial compression varies around the circumference.
Second is circumferential deformation. This is most easily visble as wrinkling of the sidewalls of drag
tires. These tires are intentionally set up to deform dramatically in the circumferential direction.
Third is axial deformation. This is a deflection that tends to pull the tire off the (non-elastic) wheel or
rim.
Last, and most important for cornering, is torsional deformation. This is a difference in axial deflection
from the front to the back of the contact patch. Fundamentally, radial, circumferential, and axial
deformation furnish a complete description of a tire. But it is very useful to consider the differencesin
these deflections around the circumference.
Let us examine exactly how a tire delivers cornering force to the car. We can get a good intuition into the
physics with a pencil eraser. Get a block eraser, of the rectangular kind like `Pink Pearl' or `Magic Rub.'
Stand it up on a table or desk and think of it as a little segment of the circumference of a tire. Think of
the part touching the desk as the contact patch. Grab the top of the eraser and think of your hand as the
wheel or rim, which is going to push, pull, and twist on the segment of tire circumference as we go along
the following analysis.
Consider a car traveling at speed in a straight line. Let us turn the steering wheel slightly to the right
(twist the top of the eraser to the right). At the instant we begin turning, the rim (your hand on the eraser),
at a circumferential position just behind the contact patch, pushes slightly leftward on the bead of the tire.
Just ahead of the contact patch, likewise, the rim pulls the bead a little to the right. The push and pull
together are called a force couple. This couple delivers a torsional, clockwise stress to the inner part of
the tire carcass, near the bead. This stress is communicated to the contact patch by the elastic material in
the sidewalls (or the main body of the eraser). As a result of turning the steering wheel, therefore, the rim
twists the contact patch clockwise.
The car is still going straight, just for an instant. How are we going to explain a net rightward force from
the road on the contact patch? This net force mustbe there, otherwise the tire and the car would continue
in a straight line by Newton's First Law.
Consider the piece of road just under the contact patch at the instant the turn begins. The rubber particles
on the left side of the patch are going a little bit faster with respect to the road than the rest of the car and
the rubber particles on the right side of the patch are going a little bit slower than the rest of the car. As a

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 10: Grip Angle

result, the left side of the patch grips a little bit less than the right. The rubber particles on the left are
more likely to slide and the ones on the right are more likely to grip. Thus, the left edge of the patch
`walks' a little bit upward, resulting in a net clockwise twisting motion of the patch. The torsional stress
becomes a torsional motion. As this motion is repeated from one instant to the next, the tire (and the
eraser-I hope you are still following along with the eraser) walks continuosly to the right.
The better grip on the right hand side of the contact patch adds up to a net rightward force on the tire,
which is transmitted back through the sidewall to the car. The chassis of the car begins to yaw to the
right, changing the direction of the rear wheels. A torsional stress on the rear contact patches results, and
the rear tires commence a similar `walking' motion.
The wheel (your hand) is twisted more away from the direction of the car than is the contact patch. The
angular difference between the direction the wheel is pointed and the direction the tire walks is the grip
angle. All quantities of interest in tire mechanics-forces, friction coefficients, etc., are conventionally
expressed as functions of grip angle.
In steady state cornering, as in sweepers, an understeering car has larger grip angles in front, and an
oversteering car has larger grip angles in the rear. How to control grip angles statically with wheel
alignment and dynamically with four-wheel steering are subjects for later treatment.
The greater the grip angle, the larger the cornering force becomes, up to a point. After this point, greater
grip angle delivers less force. This point is analogous to the idealized adhesive limit mentioned earlier in
this series. Thus, a real tire behaves qualitativelylike an ideal tire, which grips until the adhesive limit is
exceeded and then slides. A real tire, however, grips gradually better as cornering force increases, and
then grips gradually worse as the limit is exceeded.
The walking motion of the contact patch is not entirely smooth, or in otherwords, somewhat discrete.
Individual blocks of rubber alternately grip and slide at high frequency, thousands of times per second.
Under hard cornering, the rubber blocks vibrating on the road make an audible squaling sound. Beyond
the adhesive limit, squealing becomes a lower frequency sound, `squalling,' as the point of optimum
efficiency of the walking process is bypassed.
There is a lot more to say on this subject, and I admit that my first attempts at a mathematical analysis of
grip angle and contact patch mechanics got bogged down. However, I think we now have an intuitive,
conceptual basis for better modeling in the future.
Speaking of the future, summarize briefly the past of and plans for the Physics of Racingseries. The
following overlapping threads run through it:
Tire Physics
concerns adhesion, grip angle, and elastic modeling. This has been covered in Parts 2, 4, 7, and 10,
and will be covered in several later parts.
Car Dynamics
concerns handling, suspension movement, and motion of a car around a course; has been covered
in Parts 1, 4, 5, and 8 and will continue.
Drive Line Physics
concerns modeling of engine performance and acceleration. Has been covered in Parts 3, 6, and 9
and will also continue.

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 10: Grip Angle

Computer Simulation
concerns the design of a working program that captures all the physics. This is the ultimate goal of
the series. It was begun in Part 8 and will eventually dominate discussion.
The following is a list of articles that have appeared so far:
1. Weight Transfer

2. Keeping Your Tires Stuck to the Ground

3. Basic Calculations

4. There is No Such Thing as Centrifugal Force

5. Introduction to the Racing Line

6. Speed and Horsepower

7. The Circle of Traction

8. Simulating Car Dynamics with a Computer Program

9. Straights

10. Grip Angle

and the following is a tentativelist of articles I have planned for the near future (naturally, this list is
`subject to change without notice'):
Springs and Dampers,
presenting a detailed model of suspension movement (suggested by Bob Mosso)
Transients,
presenting the dynamics of entering and leaving corners, chicanes, and slaloms (this one suggested
by Karen Babb)
Stability,
explaining why spins and other losses of control occur
Smoothness,
exploring what, exactly, is meant by smoothness
Modeling Car Data

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 10: Grip Angle

in a computer program; in several articles

Modeling Course Data
in a computer program; also in several articles
In practice, I try to keep the lengths of articles about the same, so if a topic is getting too long (and grip
angle definitely did), I break it up in to several articles.

Next: Part 11: Braking

Previous: Part 9: Straights

converted by: [email protected]

Thu Sep 29 14:12:20 PDT 1994

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 11: Braking

Next: Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

Previous: Part 10: Grip Angle

The Physics of Racing,

Part 11: Braking
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991
I was recently helping to crew Mark Thornton's effort at the Silver State Grand Prix in Nevada. Mark had
built a beautiful car with a theoretical top speed of over 200 miles per hour for the 92 mile time trial from
Lund to Hiko. Mark had no experience driving at these speeds and asked me as a physicist if I could
predict what braking at 200 mph would be like. This month I report on the back-of-the-envelope
calculations on braking I did there in the field.
There are a couple of ways of looking at this problem. Brakes work by converting the energy of motion,
kineticenergy, into the energy of heat in the brakes. Converting energy from useful forms (motion,
electrical, chemical, etc.) to heat is generally called dissipatingthe energy, because there is no easy way
to get it back from heat. If we assume that brakes dissipate energy at a constant rate, then we can
immediately conclude that it takes four times as much time to stop from 200 mph as from 100 mph. The
reason is that kinetic energy goes up as the square of the speed. Going at twice the speed means you have
four times the kinetic energy because . The exact formula for kinetic energy is , where is
the mass of an object and is its speed. This was useful to Mark because braking from 100 mph was
within the range of familiar driving experience.
That's pretty simple, but is it right? Do brakes dissipate energy at a constant rate? My guess as a physicist
is `probably not.' The efficiency of the braking process, dissipation, will depend on details of the friction
interaction between the brake pads and disks. That interaction is likely to vary with temperature. Most
brake pads are formulated to grip harder when hot, but only up to a point. Brake fade occurs when the
pads and rotors are overheated. If you continue braking, heating the system even more, the brake fluid
will eventually boil and there will be no braking at all. Brake fluid has the function of transmitting the
pressure of your foot on the pedal to the brake pads by hydrostatics. If the fluid boils, then the pressure of

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 11: Braking

your foot on the pedal goes into crushing little bubbles of gaseous brake fluid in the brake lines rather
than into crushing the pads against the disks. Hence, no brakes.
We now arrive at the second way of looking at this problem. Let us assume that we have good brakes, so
that the braking process is limited notby the interaction between the pads and disks but by the interaction
between the tires and the ground. In other words, let us assume that our brakes are better than our tires.
To keep things simple and back-of-the-envelope, assume that our tires will give us a constant

deceleration of The time required for braking from speed can be calculated
from: which simply follows from the definition of constant acceleration. Given the time for
braking, we can calculate the distance , again from the definitions of acceleration and velocity:

Remembering to be careful about converting miles per hour to feet per second, we
arrive at the numbers in Table 1.

We can immediately see from this table (and, indeed, from the formulas) that it is the distance, not the
time, that varies as the square of the starting speed v. The braking time only goes up linearly with speed,
that is, in simple proportion.
The numbers in the table are in the ballpark of the braking figures one reads in published tests of high
performance cars, so I am inclined to believe that the second way of looking at the problem is the right
way. In other words, the assumption that the brakes are better than the tires, so long as they are not
overheated, is probably right, and the assumption that brakes dissipate energy at a constant rate is
probably wrong because it leads to the conclusion that braking takes more time than it actually does.
My final advice to Mark was to leave lots of room. You can see from the table that stopping from 210
mph takes well over a quarter mile of very hard, precise, threshold braking at 1 !

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 11: Braking

Next: Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

Previous: Part 10: Grip Angle

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

Next: Part 1: Weight Transfer

Previous: Part 11: Braking

The Physics of Racing,

Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM
Car?
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1991

The cybernetic DWIM car is coming. DWIM stands for ``Do What I Mean.'' It is a commonplace
term in the field of Human-machine Interfaces, and refers to systems that automatically interpret the
user's intent from his or her inputs.
Cybernetics (or at least one aspect of it) is the science of unifying humans and machines. The objective
of cybernetics is usually to amplify human capability with `intelligent' machines, but sometimes the
objective is the reverse. Most of the work in cybernetics has been under the aegis of defense, for building
advanced tanks and aircraft. There is a modest amount of cybernetics in the automotive industry, as well.
Anti-lock Braking (ABS), Acceleration Slip Reduction (ASR), Electronic Engine Management, and
Automatic Traction Control (ATC) are cybernetic DWIM systems---of a kind---already in production.
They all make `corrections' on the driver's input based on an assumed intention. Steer-by-wire,
Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT), and active suspensions are on the immediate horizon. All
these features are part of a distinct trend to automate the driving experience. This month, we take a break
from hard physics to look at the better and the worse of increased automation, and we look at one
concept of the ultimate result, CyberCar.
Among the research directions in cybernetics are advanced sensors for human inputs. One of the more
incredible is a system that reads brain waves and figures out what a fighter pilot wants to do directly
from patterns in the waves.
A major challenge in the fighter cockpit is information overload. Pilots have far too many instruments,

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

displays, horns, buzzers, radio channels, and idiot lights competing for their attention. In stressful
situations, such as high speed dogfights, the pilot's brain simply ignores inputs beyond its capacity, so the
pilot may not hear a critical buzzer or see a critical warning light. In the `intelligent cockpit,' however,
the pilot consciously suppresses certain displays and auditory channels, thus reducing sensory clutter. By
the same token, the intelligent cockpit must be able to override the pilot's choices and to put up critical
displays and to sound alarms in emergencies. In the reduced clutter of the cockpit, then, it is much less
likely that a pilot will miss critical information.

How does the pilot select the displays that he wants to see? The pilot cannot afford the time to scroll
through menus like those on a personal computer screen or hunt-and-peck on a button panel like that on
an automatic bank teller machine.
There are already sensors that can read a pilot's brain waves and anticipate what he wants to look at next.
Before the pilot even consciously knows that he wants to look at a weapon status display, for example,
the cybernetic system can infer the intention from his brain waves and pop up the display. If he thinks it
is time to look at the radar, before he could speak the command, the system reads his brain waves, pops
up the radar display, and puts away the weapon status display.
How does it work? During a training phase, the system reads brain waves and gets explicit commands
through a button panel. The system analyzes the brain waves, looking for certain unique features that it
can associate with the intention (inferred from the command from the button panel) to see the radar
display, and other unique features to associate with the intention to look at weapon status, and so on. The
system must be trained individually for each pilot. Later, during operation, whenever the system sees the
unique brain wave patterns, it `knows' what the pilot wants to do.
The implications of technology like this for automobiles is amazing. Already, things like ABS are a kind
of rudimentary cybernetics. When a driver stands all over the brake pedal, it is assumed that his intention
is to stop, not to skid. The ABS system `knows,' in a manner of speaking, the driver's intention and
manages the physical system of the car to accomplish that goal. So, instead of being a mere mechanical
linkage between your foot and the brakes, the brake pedal becomes a kind of intentional, DWIM control.
Same goes for traction control and ASR. When the driver is on the gas, the system `knows' that he wants
to go forward, not to spin out or do doughnuts. In the case of TC, the system regulates the torque split to
the drive wheels, whether there be two or four. In the case of ASR, the system backs off the throttle when
there is wheel spin. Cybernetics again.
ABS, TC, and ASR exist now. What about the future? Consider steer-by-wire. CyberCar, the total
cybernetic car, infers the driver's intended direction from the steering wheel position. It makes
corrections to the actual direction of the steered wheels and to the throttle and brakes much more quickly
and smoothly than any driver can do. Coupled with slip angle sensors [1] and inertial guidance
systems, perhaps based on miniaturized laser/fiber optic gyros (no moving parts), cybernetic steering,
throttle, and brake controls will make up a formidable racing car that could drive a course in practically
optimal fashion given only the driver's desired racing line.
In an understeering situation, when a car is not turning as much as desired, a common driver mistake is to
turn the steering wheel more. That is a mistake, however, only because the driver is treating the steering
wheel as an intentional control rather than the physical control it actually is. In CyberCar, however, the
steering wheel is an intentional control. When the driver adds more lock in a corner, CyberCar `knows'

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

that the driver just wants more steering. Near the limits of adhesion, CyberCar knows that the appropriate
physical reaction is, in fact, some weight transfer to the front, either by trailing throttle or a little braking,
and a little less steering wheel lock. When the fronts hook up again, CyberCar can immediately get back
into the throttle and add a little more steering lock, all the while tracking the driver's desires through the
intentional steering wheel in the cockpit. Similarly, in an oversteer situation, when the driver gives
opposite steering lock, CyberCar knows what to do. First, CyberCar determines whether the condition is
trailing throttle oversteer (TTO) or power oversteer (PO). It can do this by monitoring tire loads through
suspension deflection and engine torque output over time. In TTO, CyberCar adds a little throttle and
countersteers. When the drive wheels hook up again, it modulates the throttle and dials in a little forward
lock. In PO, CyberCar gently trails off the throttle and countersteers. All the while, CyberCar monitors
driver's intentional inputs and the physical status of the car at the rate of several kilohertz (thousands of
times per second).
The very terms `understeer' and `oversteer' carry cybernetic implication, for these are terms of intent.
Understeer means the car is not steering as much as wanted, and oversteer means it is steering too much.
The above description is within current technology. What if we get really fantastic? How about doing
away with the steering wheel altogether? CyberCar, version II, knows where the driver wants to go by
watching his eyes, and it knows whether to accelerate or brake by watching brain waves. With Virtual
Reality and teleoperation, the driver does not even have to be inside the car. The driver, wearing
binocular video displays that control in-car cameras (or even synthetic computer graphics) via head
position, sits in a virtual cockpit in the pits.
Now we must ask how much cybernetics is desirable? Autocrossing is, largely, a pure driver skill
contest. Wheel-to-wheel racing adds racecraft---drafting, passing, deception, etc. ---to car control skills.
Does it not seem that cybernetics eliminates driver skill as a factor by automating it? Is it not just another
way for the `haves' to beat the `have-nots' by out-spending them? Drivers who do not have ABS have
already complained that it gives their competition an unfair advantage. On the other hand, drivers who do
have it have complained that it reduces their feel of control and their options while braking. I think they
doth protest too much.
In the highest forms of racing, where money is literally no object, cybernetics is already playing a critical
role. The clutch-less seven speed transmissions of the Williams/Renault team dominated the latter half of
the 1991 Formula 1 season. But for some unattributable bad luck, they would have won the driver's
championship and the constructor's cup. Carrol Smith, noted racing engineer, has been predicting for
years that ABS will show up in Formula 1 as soon as systems can be made small and light enough [2]. It
seems inevitable to me that cybernetic systems will give the unfair advantage to those teams most awash
in money. However, autocrossers, club racers, and other grass roots competitors will be spared the
expense, and the experience of being relieved of the enjoyment of car control, for at least another decade
or two.
Acknowledgements
References

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 The Physics of Racing, Part 12: CyberCar, Every Racer's DWIM Car?

Next: Part 1: Weight Transfer

Previous: Part 11: Braking

converted by: [email protected] Tue Feb 14 09:38:08 PST 1995

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 Part 13: Transients

prev home next

The Physics of Racing,

Part 13: Transients
Brian Beckman

physicist and member of

No Bucks Racing Club

P.O. Box 662

Burbank, CA 91503

©Copyright 1992
Obviously, handling is extremely important in any racing car. In an autocross car, it is critical. A poorly
handling car with lots of power will not do well at all on the typical autocross course. A Miata or CRX
can usually beat a 60's muscle car like a Pontiac GTO even though the Goat may have four or five times
the power. Those cars, while magnificently powerful, were designed for straight-line acceleration at the
expense of cornering.
This month, we examine one aspect of handling, that of handling transient or short-lived forces. Usually,
in motor sports contexts, the word "transient" means short-lived cornering forces as opposed to braking
and accelerating forces. In broader contexts, it means any short-lived forces.
Transients figure prominently in autocross. Perhaps the epitome of a transient-producing autocross
feature is slalom, which requires a car and driver to flick quickly from left to right and back again. Many
courses also feature esses, lane changes, chicanes (dual lane changes), alternating gates, and other
variations on the theme. All of these require quick cornering response to transients. Some sports cars,
like Elans, MR2's and X1/9's, are designed specifically to have such quick response. The general rule is
that these kinds of cars get you into a corner more quickly than do other kinds. They achieve their
response with low weight and low polar moment of inertia (PMI). A chief goal of this article is to explain
PMI.
Most engineering designs are trade-offs, and designing for quick transient response is no exception. Light
weight means, generally, a small engine. Low PMI means, generally, placing the engine as close as
possible to the centre of mass (CM) as possible. So, many quick response cars are mid-engined, further
constraining engine size. With engine size, we get into another trade-off area: cost versus power. Smaller
engines are, generally, less powerful. The cheapest way to get engine power is with size. A big, sloppy,
over-the-counter American V8 can cheaply give you 300-400 ft-lb of torque. Getting the same torque
from a 1.6 litre four-banger can be very expensive and will put you firmly in the Prepared or Modified
ranks. But, a bigger engine is a heavier engine, and that means a beefier (heavier) frame and suspension
to support it. Therefore, the cheap way to high torque requires sacrificing some transient response for

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 Part 13: Transients

power. This design approach is typified by Corvettes and Camaros. The general rule is that these kinds of
cars get you out of a corner more quickly because of engine torque.
So, we can divide the sports car universe into the lightweight, quick-response-style camp and the
ground-thumping, stump-pulling-style camp. Some cars straddle the boundary and try to be lightweight,
with low PMI, and powerful. These cars are usually very expensive because the fundamental design
compromises are pushed with exotic materials and great amounts of engineer time. Ordinary cars are
usually mostly one or the other. No one can say which style is "better." Both kinds of car are great fun to
drive. There are some courses on which quick-response type cars will have top times and others on which
the V8's will be unbeatable. Fortunately, these two styles of cars are usually in different classes.
Let's back up that discussion with some physics. What is transient response and how does it relate to
polar moment of inertia?
Any object resists a change in its state of motion. If it is not moving, it resists moving. If it is moving, it
resists stopping or changing direction. The resistance is generally called inertia. With straight line
motion, inertia has only one aspect: mass. Handling is mostly about cornering, however, not about
straight-line motion.
Cornering is a change in the direction of motion of a car. In order to change the direction of motion, we
must change the direction in which the car is pointing. To do that, we must rotate or yaw the car.
However, the car will resist yawing because the various parts of the car will resist changing their states of
motion. Let's say we are cornering to the right, hence yawing clockwise. The suspension parts and frame
and cables and engine etc. etc. in the front part of the car will resist veering to the right off their prior
straight-line course and the suspension parts and frame and differential and gas tank etc. etc. in the rear
will resist veering to the left off their prior straight-line course. From this observation, we can 'package'
the inertial resistance to yawing of any car into a convenient quantity, the PMI. What follows is a
simplified, two dimensional analysis. The full, three-dimensional case is conceptually similar though
more complicated mathematically.
It turns out that the general motion of any large object can be broken up into the motion of the centre of
mass, treated as a small particle, and the rotation of the object about its centre of mass. This means that to
do dynamical calculations that account for cornering, we must apply Newton's Second Law, F = ma,
twice. First, we apply the law to all masses in the car taken as an aggregate with their positions measured
with respect to a fixed point on the ground. Second, we apply the law individually to the massive parts of
the car with their positions measured from the CM in the car while it moves.
Let's make a list of all the N parts in the car. Let the variable i run over all the limits in the list; let the
masses of the parts mi, their positions on the X axis of the ground coordinate grid be xi and their positions
on the Y axis of the ground coordinate grid be yi. We summarise the position information with vector
notation, writing a bold character, ri, for the position of the i-th part. Vector notation saves us from
having to write two (or three) sets of equations, one for each coordinate direction on the grid. For many
purposes, a vector can be treated like a number in symbolic arithmetic. We must break a vector equation
apart into its constituent component equations when it's time to do number-crunching.
The (vector) position R of the CM with respect to the ground is just the mass weighted average over all
the parts of the car:

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 Part 13: Transients

(1)

The external forces on the car are also vectors: they have X components and Y components. So, we write
the sum of all the forces on the car with a bold F. Similarly, the velocity of the CM is a vector. It is the
change in R over a small time, dt, divided by the time. This is written

(2)

The d/dt notation is called a derivative. In turn, the acceleration is a small change in the velocity divided
by the time:

(3)

The d2/dt2 notation is called a second derivative and results from two derivatives in succession.
Newton's Second Law for the CM of the car is then

(4)

where M is the total mass of all parts in the car. Simple, eh? This is a differential equation, and
theoretical physics is overwhelmingly concerned with the solutions of such things. In this case, a solution
is finding R given M and F. We can also simplify the writing of the equations in general by replacing
time-derivative notations with dots: one dot for one time derivative and two dots for two derivatives. We
get
(5)

Now, we consider the parts of the car separately as they yaw (and pitch and roll) about the CM while
remaining firmly attached to the car. Let's write all position variables measured with respect to the
coordinate grid fixed in the car with overbars, so the vector position of the i-th mass in our list is ri.

However, we don't need to use vectors (in two dimensions), because in pure yawing motion about the
CM of the car, the radial distance of each car part from the CM remains fixed and each part has the same
yaw angle as the whole car.
Let the yaw angle of the car and its coordinate grid measured against the ground-based, inertial
coordinates be . As each part is affected by forces, it moves in a yaw-arc around the CM. A small
amount of yaw is written d . Each part moves perpendicularly to a line drawn from the part to the CM of
the car, and the distance it moves is equal to its radial distance from the CM, ri (non-bold: a number, not
a vector), times the little amount of yaw d . Divide by the little time over which the motions are
measured, and you have the velocity of each car part:

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 Part 13: Transients

(6)

Now, it's easy to apply Newton's second law. Equate the force on the i-th part Fi, to the mass of the part
times the acceleration of the part:
(7)

We're almost done with the math, so hang in there. If we multiply equation (7) by ri on both sides, the
left-hand side becomes the torque of the forces on the i-th part about the CM:
(8)

Now, if we sum this equation up over all the parts in our list, we can drop the i subscript:

(9)

remembering that all parts have the same . The reason for doing this is that resulting equation looks

like Newton's Second Law, equation (5). If you replace with a symbol, I, the equation is
identical in form:
(10)

Physicists like to find formal equivalences amongst equations because they can use the same
mathematical techniques to solve all of them. The equivalences also hints at deeper insights into
similarities in the Universe.

OK, if you haven't already guessed it, is the polar moment of inertia. To compute it for a
given car, we take all the parts in the car, measure their masses and their distances from the CM, square,
multiply and add. In practice, this is very difficult. I doubt if PIMs are measured very often, but when
they are, it is probably done experimentally: by subjecting the car to known torques and measuring how
quickly yaw angle accumulates.
We can also see that, for a given rotational torque, the acceleration of yaw angle is inversely proportional
to I. Thus, we have backed up, from first principles, our statement that cars with low PMI respond more
quickly, by yawing, to transient cornering forces than do cars with large PMI. A car with a low PMI is
designed so that the heavy parts - primarily the engine - are as close to the CM as possible. Moving the
engine even a couple of inches closer to the CM can dramatically decrease the PMI because it varies as
the square of the distance of parts from the CM. Since equation (10) is formally equivalent to Newton's
Second Law, an analogous insight applies to that law. A car with low mass responds more quickly to
forces with straight-line changes in motion just as a car with low PMI responds more quickly to torques
with rotational changes in motion.

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 Part 13: Transients

Why would one design a car with a high PMI? Only to get a big, powerful engine into it that might have
to be placed in the front or the rear, far from the CM. So, take your pick. Choose a car with a low PMI
that yaws very quickly and give up on some engine power. Or, choose a car with colossal engine and
give up on some handling quickness.

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 14: Why Smoothness?
Brian Beckman PhD

©Copyright April 2000

I'm back after a hiatus of nine years. Time does fly, doesn't it? For those counting articles, the last one
published was part 12; there is no Part 13.
After such a long time away, it might be worthwhile to repeat the motivation and goals of this "Physics
of Racing" series. I am a physicist (the "PhD" after my name is from my Union card). I'm also an active
participant in motorsports. It would be almost impossible for me not to use my professional training to
analyse my hobby. So, I've been thinking for some time about the physics of racing cars.
Part of the fun for me is to do totally original analyses. As such, they won't have the specifics of a
hardcore engineering analysis. You can look that up in books by Fred Puhn, William Milliken, and
Carrol Smith, amongst many others. I want to find the bare-bones physics behind the engineering--at the
risk of bypassing some detail. In sum, I analyse things completely from scratch because:
● I want the depth of understanding that can only come only from figuring things out from first
principles,
● "peeking at the answer" from someone else's work would spoil the fun for me,

● I hope to give a somewhat fresh outlook on things.

In 1990, one of my fellow autocrossers asked me to write a monthly column for the SCCA CalClub
newsletter. After receiving lots of encouragement, I released the columns to the Internet via Team Dot
Net. Back then, the Internet was really small, so I was just sharing the articles in a convenient way with
other autocrossers. Since then, the Internet got big and my articles have acquired a life of their own. I
have received thousands of happy-customer emails from all over the world, plus a few hate mails (mostly
about article #4, in case you're wondering).
So, here we go again. This month, I'd like to understand, from first principles, why it's so important to be
smooth on the controls of a racing car. To me, "smooth" means avoiding jerkiness when applying or
releasing the brakes, the gas, or steering. Most of the time, you want to roll on and off the gas, squeeze
on and off the brakes, slither in and out of steering. It's just as important to avoid jerkiness at the end of a
manoeuvre as at the beginning. For example, when steering, not only should you start turning the
steering wheel with a gradual, smooth push, but you want to complete the wind-up with a gradual,
smooth slowing of the push. Likewise, when you unwind the wheel, you want to start and stop the
unwinding smoothly. Thus, a complete steering manoeuvre consists of four gradual, slithery
start-and-stop mini-manoeuvres. A complete braking event has four little mini-slithers: one each for the
start and stop of the application and the releasing of the pedal. Same for the throttle.

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

Ok, great, but why? At first blush, it seems one would be able to get back on the gas more quickly by
snapping the throttle on or get into a corner more quickly by whipping the wheel. Furthermore,
supposing we can justify smoothness, are there exceptions to the rule? Are there times when it is best to
snap, whip, or jerk? And exactly how smooth should one be? Smoothing means slowing the control
inputs down, in a particular way, so it's obviously possible to be too smooth, as in not quick enough, as in
not getting as much out of the car as it's capable of delivering.
Let's tackle "why", first. As usual, physics has technical meanings for everyday words. One of the
"physically correct" meanings of "smooth" is sinusoidal. A sinusoid is a curve that looks like this:

If we think of, say, steering-wheel winding angle as proportional to the vertical axis and time in seconds
along the horizontal axis, then this picture describes a really smooth windup taking one second followed
immediately by a really smooth unwinding taking another second. In fact, you can easily see the four
mini-slithers discussed above as the head-and-tail-sections of the bumps and valleys of the curves. So,
the question "why", in technical terms, amounts to asking why such a curve represents better steering
input than a curve like the following, "upside-down-hat" curve:

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

Now, here's the reason: sinusoidal inputs are better because they match the natural response of the car!
The suspension and tyres perform, approximately, as damped harmonic oscillators, or DHOs. A DHO
can be in one of three conditions: underdamped, critically damped, or overdamped. In the underdamped
condition, a DHO doesn't have a strong damper, which is another term for shock absorber. An
underdamped DHO responds sinusoidally. We've all seen cars with broken shocks bouncing up and
down on the springs. In the critically damped and overdamped conditions, the car bounces just once,
because the damper provides some friction to quiet down continued bouncing. However, even in these
conditions, the one bounce has an approximate sinusoidal shape.
The most important parameter of any DHO is its frequency. In the underdamped condition, the frequency
corresponds to the number of bounces per second the DHO performs. In the critically damped and
overdamped conditions--as well as in the underdamped condition, the frequency corresponds to the
resonance frequency or natural frequency of the system! In other words, if you provide so many inputs
per second, back and forth, as in a slalom, at the resonance frequency, the car will have maximal
response. If the inputs are faster, they will be too fast for the DHO to catch up and rebound before you've
reversed the inputs. If the inputs are slower, the DHO will have caught up and started either to bounce
the other way or to settle, depending on condition, when the reverse input comes in.
So here's the bottom line: to maximize the response of a car, you want to provide steering, braking, and
throttle inputs with sinusoidal shapes at the resonance frequency of the DHOs that constitute the
suspension and tyre systems. Inputs that are more jerky just dump high-frequency energy into the system
that it must dissipate at lower frequencies. In other words, jerky inputs upset the car, which what drivers
say all the time. By matching the shape and frequency of your control inputs to the car's natural response
curve, you're telling the car to do something it can actually do. By giving the car an "instruction" like the
upside-down hat, you're telling it to do something it can't physically do, so it responds by flopping and
bouncing around some approximation of your input. Flopping and bouncing means not getting optimum
traction; means wasting energy in suspension oscillation; means going slower. Now, there is an

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

exception: if the front tyres are already sliding, a driver may benefit from quickly steering them into line,
hoping to "catch" the car. Likewise, a jerky blip on the throttle with the clutch engaged to bring up the
revs to match the gears on a downshift is usually the right thing to do. But, when the car is hooked up,
getting the most out of the car means simulating the response of the various DHOs in the system with
steering, braking, and throttle inputs.
Now we know the physics behind it. Let's do some math!

The frequency turns out to be , as we show below. k is the spring constant, typically
measured in pounds per inch, and m is the mass of the sprung weight, typically measured in
pound-masses. Suppose our springs were 1,000 lb/in, supporting about 800 lb of weight on one corner of
the car. First, we note that a pound force is roughly (1/32) slug - ft/s2 and that a pound weight is (1/32)
slug. So, we're looking at

Notice that we've used the back-of-the-envelope style of computation discussed in part 3 of this series.
We've found that the resonance frequency of one corner of a car is about 4 bounces per second! This
matches our intuitions and experiences: if one pushes down on the corner of a car with broken shocks, it
will bounce up and down a few times a second, not very quickly, not very slowly. We can also see that
the frequency varies as the square root of the spring constant. That means that to double the frequency,
say, to 8 bounces per second, we must quadruple the spring strength to 4,000 lb/in or quarter the sprung
weight to 200 lb. [Note added in proof: My friend, Brad Haase, has pointed out that 4 Hz, while in the
"ballpark", is much too fast for a real car. Now, this series of articles is only about fundamental theory
and ballpark estimates. Nonetheless, he wrote convincingly "can you imagine a 4-Hz slalom?" I have to
admit that 4 Hz seemed too fast to me when I first wrote this article, but I was unable to account for the
discrepancy. Brad pointed out that the suspension linkages supply leverage that reduces the effective
spring rate and cited the topic "installation ratio" in Milliken's book Race Car Vehicle Dynamics. Since I
have not peeked at that book, on purpose, as stated in the opening of this entire series and reiterated in
this article, I can only confidently refer you there. Nonetheless, intuition says that 1 Hz is more like it,
which would argue for an effective spring rate of 1000 / 16 = 62 lb/in.]
How do we derive the frequency formula? Let's work up a sequence of approximations in stages. By
improving the approximations gradually, we can check the more advanced approximations for mistakes:
they shouldn't be too far off the simple approximations. In the first approximation, ignore the damper,
giving us a mass block of sprung weight resting on a spring. This model should act like a corner of a car
with a broken shock.

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

Let the mass of the block be m. The force of gravitation acts downwards on the block with a magnitude
mg, where g = 32.1 ft/s2 is the acceleration of Earth's gravity. The force of the spring acts upward on the
mass with a magnitude k( y0 - y), where k is the spring constant and (y - y0) is the height of the spring
above its resting height y0 (the force term is positive--that is, upward--when y - y0 is negative--that is,
when the mass has compressed the spring and the spring pushes back upwards). We can avoid schlepping
y0 around our math by simply defining our coordinate system so that y0 = 0. This sort of trick is very
useful in all kinds of physics, even the most advanced.
It's worth noting that the model so far ignores not only the damper, but the weight of the wheel and tyre
and the spring itself. The weight of the wheel and tyre is called the unsprung weight. The weight of the
spring itself is partially sprung. We don't add these effects in the current article. Today, we stop with just
adding the damper back in, below.
Newton's first law guides us from this point on. The total force on the mass is -ky - mg. The mass times
the acceleration is m(dvy / dt) = m(d2y / dt2), where vy is the up-and-down velocity of the mass and
dvy / dt is the rate of change of that velocity. That velocity is, in turn, the rate of change of the y
coordinate of the mass block, that is, vy = (dy / dt). So, the acceleration is the second rate of change of y,
and we write it as d2y / dt2 because that's the way Newton and Leibniz first wrote it 350 years ago. We
have the following dynamic equation for the motion of our mass block.

Let's divide the entire equation by m and rearrange it so all the terms are on the left:

If we're careful about units, in particular about slugs and lbs (see article 1), then we can note that k/m has
the dimensions of 1/sec2, which is a frequency squared. Let's define

yielding

We need to solve this equation for y(t) as a function of time t. To follow the rest of this, you'll need to
know a little freshman calculus. Take, as ansatz,

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

then

and

therefore

So, we see there are two solutions, and . In fact, the

time-dependent parts of these solutions can operate simultaneously, so we must write

in all generality. The values of the two unknowns B1 and B2 are

determined by two initial conditions, that is, the value of y0 = A + B1 + B2 and

.
Let's get out of the complex domain by writing

This definition makes our initial conditions simpler, too:

It's easy, now, to add the damper. Damping forces are proportional to the velocity; that is, there is no
damping force when things aren't moving. Each corner approximately obeys the equation

where is the damper response in lb - force / (ft / s). The three rightmost terms represent forces, and

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

they are all negative when y and dy / dt are positive. That is, if you pull the sprung weight up, the spring
tends to pull it down. Likewise, if the sprung weight is moving up, the damper tends to pull it down. The
force of gravitation always pulls the weight down. Let's rewrite, as before:

where and . If, as before,

then

and

therefore

You may remember the little high-school formula for the solution of a
quadratic equation. This gives us the answer for C:

and I'll leave the simple arithmetic for A and the initial conditions to the reader. The critically damped
condition obtains when , overdamped when , and underdamped when . In the
underdamped condition, C has an imaginary component and the exponentials oscillate. Otherwise, they
just take one bounce and then settle down.
It will be fun and easy for anyone who has followed along this far to plot out some curves and check out
my math. If you find a mistake, please do let me know (I just wrote this off the top of my head, as I

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 Part 14: Why Smoothness?

always do with these articles).

We could improve the approximation by writing down the coupled equations, that is, treating all four
corners of the car together, but that would just be a lot more math without changing the basic physics that
the car responds more predictably to smooth inputs and less predictably to jerky inputs. Another
improvement would be to add in the effect of the unsprung and partially sprung weight.

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 15: Bumps In The Road
Brian Beckman PhD,
and Jerry Kuch

©Copyright 2000
This month, we investigate how the effects of road bumps vary with speed. Everyone has experienced
that bumps are more punchy as speed increases. A bump that you barely notice at 50 mph can sting at
100 mph. But what about at 200 mph? Will it just smack a little harder, or will it knock your teeth out or,
worse, cause you to lose control? Could a bump be the limiting factor in cornering speed? In an
aerodynamic car, could a bump cause a sudden and catastrophic loss of downforce and adhesion? To
analyse such things, we need an understanding of the variation of bump violence with speed.
At the expense of a little storytelling, let's explain how this topic came up. In particular, where is an
amateur motorhead going to have to worry about bumps at 200 mph? At autocrosses, speeds are low, by
design, to give everyone a safe venue to challenge the limits. If you're going to spin out, an autocross is
the place to do it. Low speed also means, though, that bumps, unless very severe, aren't dominant. On a
road course, speeds are higher, as are the consequences of losing control. But speeds are not higher
everywhere, not for extended times, and seldom approach 200 mph. There are two commonplace
scenarios with extended time at high speeds: oval courses and open-road racing. High-speed oval racing
is a specialized sport not often encountered by amateurs. Since the focus of this series is on grassroots,
amateur hijinks, we'll look at open-road racing.
In Part 11 of this series, we took a scenario for braking from 200 mph from the Silver-State Challenge
(SSC) in Nevada. My co-author, Jerry Kuch, and I just ran the 2000 Nevada Open Road Challenge
(NORC). This is the May version of the SSC, which is held in September. In all other regards, the NORC
and the SCC are the same. For most of the 230 cars entered, these are high-speed, time-speed-distance
(TSD) rallies. In each of the sixteen TSD classes, the car running as close as possible to the target speed,
over or under, wins. There are TSD classes every five mph from 95 to 170 inclusive, with high and low
breakout speeds set by safety concerns. There is also an Unlimited, non-TSD class, in which fastest car
wins. This May, the winner of Unlimited averaged 207 mph over a ninety-mile distance and another
Unlimited car posted a top speed of 227 mph. Jerry and I ran in the 130-mph class with a top speed of
165 mph.
The SCC and NORC run on a ninety-mile stretch of highway 318 from Lund to Hiko in the Nevada
outback, roughly along the shortest path from Twin Falls, ID to Las Vegas. The course runs from north
to south, and the road is fabulously stark and beautiful in the unique way of remote desert roads. One is
humbled by the realization that if stranded, one would surely perish, probably in a few hours' time, from
heat exhaustion, exposure, and dehydration. It's great.

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

Hwy 318 events have been run continuously on since 1988. In 1990 and 1991, Mark Thornton, a fellow
autocrosser, built up his 1986 Super Stock corvette into a Nevada car. Mark and I had nearly identical SS
'vettes, and we often swapped cars at autocrosses. These cars happened to be almost the same as the
famous yellow 'vette that Roger Johnson, of multiple SCCA National Championships, still runs in SS, if
I'm not mistaken. I know that Roger has driven my car, and I can't recall whether he ever drove Mark's,
but I did, many times.
Mark, now deceased, was a bit of a bad boy, and Hwy 318 had just the kind of cachet that appealed to
him. The legend goes that the events had been organized by the survivors of the old, illegal 'cannonball'
runs. Of course, the NORC and SCC are properly sanctioned and completely legal, despite the fact that
they use temporarily closed public highways rather than dedicated race courses.
Not content to play in the TSD classes, Mark decided to convert the black car into an Unlimited machine.
I was with Mark when he handed his car off to Dick Guldstrand for blank-check suspension work, and I
was in the loop when it went to John Lingenfelter for a reliable engine capable of 200 mph. I met up with
Mark in Las Vegas to help with the final preparation of the car. I took a few, tyre-warming hops in the
car, and, with nearly 600 HP, I can tell you it was seriously fast. Feel free to check out the car's specs at
http://www.angelfire.com/wa/brianbec/foober.htm.

Unfortunately, on race day, the car had an oil fire in the first, six-mile straightaway, due to the headers'
being a bit too close to the oil-filter canister. The required, on-board halon system saved the car and
Mark and I saved what residual fun we could putting it back together and trailering it home. Later that
year, Mark won a Triathlon of Motorsports hosted by a hotrodding magazine in the car, and, if I'm not
mistaken, repeated the feat in '92. I have been told the car was featured on the cover of the magazine
somewhere in those two years, but I have not checked that myself.
I moved to Washington State and lost touch with Mark, who had a non-motorsports accident and passed
away. Mark was not uniformly liked, but even his detractors will grant that he was a truly gifted driver
and an engaging, entertaining, complex character. Many, currently active autocrossers will remember
him.
By sheer, stupid luck, I stumbled across Mark's Nevada car for sale in Florida in 1999. This is about as
far away from Seattle as one can get, but the kismet was too much to ignore. I had driven this car many
times in anger, had crewed it, was friends with its creator. It just had to come home to me, didn't it?
Furthermore, it just HAD to run again in Nevada, didn't it?
I bought the car and began the complex job of preparing it for NORC. One does not contemplate running
200 mph without giving a car a complete check-up. The energy available for destruction at 200 mph is
four times the energy available at 100 mph, and sixteen times that available at 50 mph. Furthermore, the
car had had an active, open-track life in the intervening years and it was time to tear it down and check it
all out. You do NOT want an engine to seize or a suspension part to break at 100 mph, let alone at 200
mph.
With two months to spare, it became obvious that the car would not be ready in time. Better safe than
sorry, I asked the mechanics not to hurry and to make sure the car is done right. The standards for
mechanical work on high-speed cars must be significantly higher than it is for road-going and autocross
vehicles, for safety. The standards should be comparable to those in aviation. Hurrying is a recognized
no-no in aviation, and I applied the same logic to the car work. As I write, I have an ultimate goal of

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

running it in SCC and NORC in '01 and '02.

I had already committed to run the '00 NORC, so I slapped a roll cage in my '98 Mallett 435 and went on
down. This is another fabulous vehicle, but I hadn't intended to run it in high-speed events until the last
minute. It was quite a hustle to get the required safety gear properly installed in time. In hindsight, I don't
regret the decision. The car really came to life at NORC and I've run it in several high-speed events since
then.
Our flight plan called for holding speeds up to 165 for minutes at a time. As part of planning, we did a
survey and calibration run of the course at legal, highway speeds. On the survey run, we noticed several
bumpy spots. Driving over them at 70 mph, they were not frightening. But, we had to figure out what to
expect at 165. So, right there in the middle of nowhere, we whipped out some envelopes, turned them
over, pulled multicolour pens from our pocket protectors, and started scribbling. Geek racing at its best.
Let us take a moment to review the goals and methods of the "back-of-the-envelope" (BOE) style of
analysis introduced in Part 3 of this series. Frequently, one simply needs a ballpark estimate or a trend.
These are often much easier to get than are detailed, precise answers. In fact, they are often easy enough
that they can be literally scribbled out on the backs of envelopes in the field. And that's the key point: we
needed a rough idea of how the violence of the bumps varies with speed, and we needed it right then and
there in the field.
Another benefit of the BOE style is that it can give one a quick plausibility check on numerical data back
at the lab. Thoroughgoing engineering analysis usually entails dozens of interlocking equations solved on
a computer resulting in tables, plots, and charts. The intuition gets lost in the complexity. It's sometimes
impossible to say, just by looking at a table or chart, whether the results are correct. On the other hand, to
get our BOEs, we often make very gross approximations, such as treating the car as a rigid body; or
ignoring its track width, that is, treating it as infinitely thin; or ignoring the suspension altogether; or
even treating the whole car as a point mass, that is, as if all its mass were concentrated at a single point.
Even so, the results are often not wildly off the numerical data, and the discrepancies can usually be
explained via non-quantitative arguments. If the BOE and numerical results are wildly different, then
some detective work is indicated: one or both of them is probably wrong.
BOE is really a semi-quantitative oracle to the physics. These articles are about the physics of racing as
opposed to the engineering of racing. We're primarily interested in the fundamental, theoretical reasons
for the behaviour of racing cars. The trends and ballpark estimates we get from BOEs often do the job.
Of course, this doesn't mean we won't get into more detailed treatments and computer simulation. It's just
that we will always be focusing on the physics.
All that said, as usual for BOE, we start with a simplistic model we can solve easily. Think of a bump in
the road as a pair of matched triangles, one leading and one trailing.

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

Let the width of each triangle be w and the height be h . Suppose a car approaches the bump with
horizontal speed v . To assess the violence of the bump, let's ask what vertical acceleration the car will
experience? If we assume a simplistic model of the car as a rigid body, we get an instantaneous, infinite
acceleration right at the instant the car contacts the rising edge. We get further infinite, vertical
accelerations at the two other cusps of bump the geometry. However, we know that the tyres and
suspension will smooth out these sudden impulses. Calculating the effects of tyre and suspension flex is
too time-consuming to do in the field even if we had data and computers on hand. However, we can get a
useful approximation by assuming that the acceleration is distributed over the entire bump.
If the bump is shallow (h « w) and the car is fast, then the horizontal speed doesn't change very much and
the car goes up the leading edge of the bump in time t = w / v. In that time, the car goes upward a
distance h, thereby acquiring a vertical speed of vy = h / t = vh / w. Since it acquires that velocity, very
roughly, in time t, we can estimate the vertical acceleration to be

Uh oh. BOE says that the severity of a bump goes up as the square of the speed. A bump you can feel at
50 mph is going to be sixteen times worse at 200 mph and will most definitely get your attention. The
little whoopdeedoos we were noticing at 70 mph would feel (165/70)2 = 5.5 times worse at our planned
speed: definitely something to anticipate on-course before we hit them. This BOE also says that the
nastiness varies inversely as the width. The wider the bump, the less nasty, linearly. This is plausible.
Now, let's refine the analysis a little. Conservation of energy dictates that the horizontal speed of the car

must change. In our simplified, two-dimensional BOE, the velocity vector, , consists of two
components, horizontal speed, vx, and vertical speed, vy. These quantities obey the equation

whether on the flat or on the bump, that is, no matter what the inclination of the road. We've
presupposed, here, that vertical always means "in the direction of Earth's gravitation." If we do not
change the kinetic energy of the moving car, then ½ mv2 stays constant, therefore v2 stays constant. On
the leading-edge ramp of the bump, remembering trigonometry,

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

Define, as shorthand, , yielding vx = vw / r, vy = vh / r. Using the same approximation as

above, we assume that we acquire a vertical velocity of vy in time t = w / vx = wr / vw = r / v, for a
vertical acceleration of

This still varies as the square of the speed, we just take a little more time to go over the bump. The only
difference to the prior formula, v2h / w, is the appearance of h2 in the denominator.
Consider the case of a high, narrow bump. This case was not covered by our first BOE, which assumed

that h « w. Now, with a high bump, h2 » w2 and , meaning that the severity of the bump will
go down linearly with increasing height. Within the confines of our model, this makes sense, because a
higher bump gives the car a greater vertical distance in which to suffer its increased vertical velocity, but
this doesn't seem intuitively correct. A higher bump should be nastier, shouldn't it?
Furthermore, of course, at constant throttle, the kinetic energy of the car will change because the force of
gravitation will attenuate the vertical velocity. So, in our next consultation of the BOE oracle, we must
reduce ay by

The bump is getting less nasty all the time, and it's obvious that we're hitting the limitations of this BOE
analysis. To expose the limitations even more starkly, consider two more questions: (1) what about the
trailing edge? and (2) what about depressions, that is, down-bumps?
As to the trailing edge, a simplistic car-as-rigid-body would just launch ballistically from the top of the
bump. Of course, in a real car, tyre elasticity and the suspension would endeavour to keep the tyres on
the ground. Short of launching, there would just be weight loss causing rebound of the tyre sidewalls and
the suspension springs. Nevertheless, everyone knows that a ballistic projectile assumes a parabolic flight
path, so, as long as the parabola off the top of the bump remains vertically above the down-ramp, our
car-as-rigid-body is assured of taking to the air. With the simple bump geometry, we can see that a
parabolic launch always starts off above the trailing-edge triangle. It intersects the road again either
somewhere on the down-ramp or on the following flat bit of road, depending on horizontal speed.
As to a depression - a down-bump as opposed to an up-bump - a car-as-rigid-body will simply have a
ballistic phase before suffering an upward acceleration. At this point, I think we've reached the point of
diminishing returns. Let us first repeat that the BOE style is doing what it's supposed to do: getting us
rough trends and quantities in the field. Primarily, we wanted to find out how bump severity varies with

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 Part 15: Bumps In The Road

speed, and we've got our answer: roughly quadratically. We are seeing some ways in which the model
departs from intuition and reality and it's time to think about how to improve it back at the lab.
The first point to notice is that we drew a pair of triangles for our bump, but used them only to calculate
the time to traverse the bump and the height acquired over that time. This is not a proper dynamic
analysis, in which we would use Newton's laws to model the motion of the car up and down the bump.
At a glance, one can distinguish a dynamic analysis by the presence mass in the equations. Nowhere did
we use the mass of the car in our BOEs above. Dynamic analysis is often too hard to do in the field
because it involves integrating differential equations, almost always by computer.
Another problem concerns our simplistic bump geometry. As noted above, strictly speaking, the severity
of a bump on a rigid body infinite, no matter what the speed. The reason is that the car acquires its
vertical component of velocity instantaneously - in zero time - upon hitting the bump, so the rate of
change of the vertical velocity, that is, the vertical acceleration, is infinite at the instant the bump is
encountered, then zero on the body of the up-ramp.
Our list-of-things-to-do, should we wish to improve the model, includes the following tasks:
Model the geometry of the bump more carefully, accounting for the fact that the initiation of the
up-ramp, no matter how severe, cannot, in fact, be mathematically instantaneous. Draw some sort of little
sinusoidal or exponential curves to account for the actual road profile.
Integrate the equations motion of the car over the bump.
Model the car more carefully, accounting for tyre flexion, springs, shocks, suspension geometry, mass
distribution, moment of inertia, and all the rest. This will entail designing a suspension.
These improvements put us squarely back in the lab. Ultimately, we will resort to computer simulation.
As promised years ago, that is the ultimate goal of this series of articles: to spec out a simulation
program. Better late than never, right?
Note on Part 14, Why Smoothness The last episode of the Physics of Racing sparked a debate on
reasonable values for effective wheel spring rates and raised the notion of "installation ratio." The
particular point raising the debate was whether 4 Hz was a reasonable value for the resonance frequency
of a real racing chassis. It seems it is certainly too fast for a road-going car, however, in the time since
Part 14 was released I was introduced to a 1980 Group C Ferrari Sports Car. This is essentially a Le
Mans car with a lower horsepower engine, for reliability. It is a fully aerodynamic car with ground
effects that corners at 2.7g and brakes at 4g. Here's the kicker: its ride height is about half an inch, it does
NOT bottom out on bumps, and its spring rate is 14,000 lb/in [sic]. I don't know the installation ratio for
this car, but I would be surprised if its chassis resonance frequency was not on the order of 4 Hz or even
higher.

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing
Simulator
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright 2000
If you’ve been following this series, you know that I’ve been moving inexorably toward a computer
simulation of racing. I’ve repeatedly debated with myself writing a new one completely from scratch
versus starting with someone else’s work. Ten years ago, when I started this series, the choice was easy.
Since there was nothing out there, I had to start from scratch. The situation has changed. There is at least
one competently executed program in the public domain.
Doing a derivative work has undeniable advantages, but conflicts with one of the enduring goals of this
series, that is, to do totally original work rather than to recapitulate information you can get from other
sources. However, one has to start somewhere. After all, it would be silly for me to rediscover Newton’s
laws, so I take those as given. Likewise, I’ve concluded that it would be silly for me to invent the
infrastructure for a simulation. It would be a very long digression indeed from the Physics of Racing to
cover all the groundwork such as
● memory management, windowing, graphics, rendering, data reporting, etc.
● programming languages, scripting, object technology
● simulation technology: time-stepping, eventing, dynamics solvers
● data structures for track description and cars
● arbitrary choices for coordinate systems
All this, while interesting, is not physics. Furthermore, nowadays, it’s all more-or-less conventional
technology. It’s not terribly important for us to make choices in these domains if we can find a competent
base platform in which reasonable choices have already been made.
So, with only a little reluctance, I take the decision to start with an existing program. My choice is
RARS, the Robot Auto Racing Simulator. This is a lovely, surprisingly simple platform for programmers
to experiment with robotics. Its purpose is to support distributed virtual racing competitions, in which
entrants write robot drivers and enter them in planned events. The last competitions I have been able to
find on the web were conducted in 1999. It is not a high-fidelity simulation, and, in fact, was never
intended to be. Its physics is simplified in a very clever way to make the main challenge for competitors
the writing of robots rather than struggling with elaborate, high-fidelity physics. It supplies a working

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

infrastructure and a large amount of decent data describing famous tracks. Finally, so far as I can tell,
RARS is in the public domain.
The simplifications in RARS make it the perfect starting point for enhancing the physics without having
to reinvent the peripheral aspects of a simulation program. Note that RARS was designed for public
contribution: the program was originally made to be easy to modify. The usual mode of modification is
for competitors to add new robots. However, it is just as easy to change the physics, as I intend to do.
Now, as I take the program in new directions, I will either have to modify the robots or, possibly, create a
new, public racing series and throw open the writing of new robots to everyone. Only time will tell what
works out best. As usual, however, I will make changes incrementally, never deviating very much from
the working base. This strategy will not only keep the changes under control, but also enable me to
explain to you what’s going on, step-by-step.
Therefore, I will create a copy of the sources and change the name of my copy to RARSEP, for "RARS,
Enhanced Physics". I will post the source code of my changes on the web to keep the new project rolling
along.
My first, long-term goal with RARSEP is to find optimal racing lines. In particular, I need a way to
answer questions about racing lines, such as whether the shortest line or the highest-speed line around a
particular feature results in the lowest time around the entire course, that is, with the feature in context.
Such a question is part of "reading a course", one of the tasks of every racer. In practice, this is a
trial-and-error process involving folklore, experience, and experimentation.
For instance, at a recent track day I attended, two instructors, each with many hours on this particular
course, were debating a certain combination of slow corners. After quite a bit of haggling and
white-board hacking, they agreed that the classic line they had been taking for years was probably not the
fastest line. It will warm the hearts of autocrossers to find that they had discovered that the autocrosser
line, rather than the class road-racer line, was probably fastest.
Autocrossers spend most of their effort finding the fastest way around slow corners, whereas the primary
challenge for road-course drivers is finding the fastest way around fast corners. There is no end of
reading material supporting the classic, road-racing lines: enter as wide as possible (or, as high, as one
would say in NASCAR), trail-brake, get back on the throttle in the first half, squeeze on the gas, look up,
late apex, and track out. As often as not, however, autocrossers find that simply hugging the inside as
tightly-as low-as possible yields the quickest way around. Why? Is there science behind this? Can they
both be right? How about both wrong? What about intermediate cases: medium-slow and medium-fast
corners?
That is an example of the kind of question that we want to answer with a simulation program. It was
interesting that the instructors' debate concerned slow corners. No one was debating that the fast corners
should be taken classically. But, and here I hypothesize, slow corners have the characteristic that the
corner is not very much larger than the car. Could it be that when this is true the classic racing line is
suboptimal? Experienced autocrossers would, when coming up on such corners, without even thinking
about it, go in low and tight and just carry speed or toss-and-catch the car. The instructors had, following
the classic theory, been going in high and wide, turning in late, and thereby wasting time trying to form a
classic line around corners not much bigger than the car. But, could it be that the classic theory is not best
when a corner is so small that the wheelbase of the car is a significant fraction of the distance around the

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

corner? Maybe there are other factors, though. Could it be that the size of the corner does not suffice to
distinguish an "autocrossy" corner from a "road-racey" corner? Does context matter, as in whether the
corner is near other corners or near straights?
It seems that even the most experienced drivers of a particular track will occasionally discover
improvements to the line. Some of these improvements depend on transient conditions like weather or
the particulars of a certain car or setup. Lots of tracks have canonical "rain lines" that differ from the "dry
lines". I would also bet that Winston Cup cars take different lines around Sears Point and Watkins Glen
than do ground-effects sports cars and downforce formula cars. But some improvements will be deep,
permanent, invariant revelations that may have eluded the racer on previous outings and analysis. That,
in a nutshell, is the first place we’re going with RARSEP: to have a way to answer such questions.
I will start with the Windows port of RARS version 074, which you can get in source and binary forms
from the following web sites:
● http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/rars/rars.html

● http://rars.sourceforge.net/

I choose the Windows port because it’s most convenient for me: I already have working development
systems on Windows, whereas to work on other platforms would entail ramp-up time and money. The
RARS code base is currently portable to multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. The code is
very well partitioned, so that the platform-dependent bits are separated from the platform-independent
bits. Everything I intend to do will be in the platform-independent parts of the program and should build
without difficulty on all the platforms. However, I will not be able to test my changes on all platforms -
the Physics of Racing is not an exercise in industrial-strength, portable software development. While I
have no intention of making non-portable changes, there is a small risk that I might inadvertently do so
and it could happen some files might someday need a little tweaking to get going on other platforms. I
am sure my readers will let me know about it.
The web sites contain very complete descriptions of how to build and run the program, plus how to write
robots. To write a robot, one needs to understand the existing physics model of RARS. Similarly, to
enhance the physics, we'll need to know the same thing. It presently appears that the best way to enhance
the physics incrementally will be in the context of writing a robot, but this may change as we dig in. The
subject of this instalment of the Physics of Racing will therefore be to introduce the existing RARS
physics model along with a long-range plan for enhancing the physics. I am very grateful to the authors
for supplying RARS and I hope they will enjoy what I do with their work. The program is very easy to
build, run, understand, and enhance. I encourage you to download it and follow along with me. However,
my articles will be self-contained: you won’t need to build and run RARS to understand what I’m doing
with it.
I have found that there is another independent effort afoot to enhance RARS. It's called TORCS and can
be found at http://torcs.free.fr/. This includes some of the enhancements I intend to make, but its goals
are like those of RARS rather than like mine. It looks very promising, but it has three features that make
it unsuitable as a starting point for me:
● it's unfinished, whereas RARS is functional and established

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

● it's Linux-based. I don’t have a Linux development environment, and it would take me too much
time and money to build one up at present
● as usual, peeking (too much) at other work would spoil the fun for me
However, I will be keeping an eye on TORCS. It may turn out to be terrific!
My first approach to adapting RARS to a line-finding task will be to write a robot that learns the optimal
line by making small modifications on each lap around the track, much as a human driver would do. This
is a kind of variational approach, common in physics. The line-finding robot (LFR) will build an internal
memory of its current line and everything it discovers about the track. Then, it will tweak the line, and, if
the lap time goes down, continue to tweak in the same direction. Otherwise, it will discard the tweak and
try another. At the point of diminishing returns, it will start tweaking another part of the line.
It’s going to consume a lot of computing resources and not be competitive in the real-time setting of the
old RARS. However, remember, with RARSEP, we are changing the goals. Also, this plan may take
considerable time and span many articles. It may not work out at all. As usual, I am taking you along for
the ride.
So, let's describe the current physics model. RARS' algorithm is devilishly simple, just the right
compromise between physics rich enough to be convincing yet not so complicated that writing a robot is
too challenging. Every time step, the simulation engine gives each robot a situation structure, and the
robot responds with a command or control structure. The situation structure contains the current location
and velocity of the car relative to the track, the walls, and the other cars. The control structure declares
the desired slip angle - roughly representative of the steering-wheel angle - and the desired forward
velocity - roughly representative of the throttle (positive) and brake (negative). The controls interact with
the road through a tyre friction model, generating a force that accelerates the car. The force is limited by
the power available from the engine, so, it is not always the case that all the force the tyres could deliver
can be applied, since the engine may not be able to pump it out. So, the desired velocity may not be the
achieved velocity.
One reason that RARS is simple is that it is two-dimensional. In 2-D RARS, there are three, right-handed
coordinate systems. First is the ground, a nearly inertial coordinate system fixed with respect to the road.
Forces and accelerations are computed in this system, since it is inertial. Second is the car coordinate
system. The x-axis of car points forward and the y-axis points to driver’s left. Third and final is the path
coordinate system, aligned with the car’s velocity vector. The tangential component of any vector points
along the x-axis of path, and the normal component of any vector points along the y-axis of path. Car
aligns with path only when the car has no slip angle.
The following table, adapted from the program documentation, summarizes the physics model:
V = car's velocity vector WRT (with respect to) ground
v = ground speed = magnitude of V
P = forward-pointing unit vector in the car system
alpha = "slip angle" [command output from robot], which separates P and V. Alpha is positive when
the car points to the left of V, as when power-sliding around a left-hand corner.
W = velocity vector of tyre contact patch WRT car, always points backwards along x axis
vc = "velocity commanded", [command output] forward in the car system; W = -P * vc

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

L = V + W = V - P * vc = "slip vector", velocity of contact patch WRT ground

Lt = path-tangential component of L = v – vc * cos(alpha)
Ln = path-normal component of L = v - vc * sin(alpha)
l = slip speed = magnitude of L
Q = L / l = unit vector in the direction of L
mu(l) = coefficient of friction, depending only on slip speed
F = - Q * mass * mu(l) = force vector pushing the car, in the direction opposite to L
f = mass * mu(l) = magnitude of F
Ft = path-tangential component of F = - f * Lt / l
Fn = path-normal component of F = - f * Ln / l
FtP = projection of Ft in the car system = Ft * cos(alpha)
FnP = projection of Fn in the car system = Fn * sin(alpha)
pwr = engine power consumed = sum of force components along P limited by engine capacity =
max(181hp, (FtP + FnP) * vc)

The friction function currently used is of the form u(l) = FMAX * l / (K + l) where FMAX and K are
given constants.

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 Part 16: RARS, A Simple Racing Simulator

To summarize the limitations of the current model:

❍ Track

● Flat, fixed-width, no bumps

❍ Car

● Point mass, no suspension

Planned enhancements:
❍ Track:

● Elevation changes

● Width variation

● Camber, banking

● Crown, profile

● FIA berms

● Bumps

❍ Car:

● Four wheels

● Discrete transmission, gear changes

● Suspension: springs, dampers

● Aerodynamics

As we progress, it may be helpful to keep these pages around. We will refer to them frequently.

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or,
Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright August 2000

You may remember way back in part 5 that we did some simple calculations by hand to show that the
classic racing line through a 90-degree right-hander is better than the either the line that hugs the inside
or the line that hugs the outside of the corner. 'Better' means 'has lowest time.' The 'classic racing line'
was, under the assumptions of that article, the widest possible inscribed line.
In this and the next instalment of The Physics of Racing, we raise the bar. Not only do we calculate the
times for all lines through a corner, but we show a new kind of analysis for the exit, accounting for
simultaneously accelerating and unwinding the steering wheel after the apex. This kind of analysis
requires us to search for the lowest time because we cannot calculate it directly. We apply the
approximation of the traction circle-subject of part 7-to stay within the capabilities of the car. We also
model a more complex segment than in part 5, including an all-important exit chute where we take
advantage of improved corner-exit speed. This style of analysis applies directly to computer simulation
that we now have in progress in other continuing threads of The Physics of Racing.
The whole point of this analysis is to back up the old mantra: "slow-in, fast-out." We will find that the
quickest way through the whole segment does not include the fastest line around the corner. Rather, we
get the lowest overall time by cornering more slowly so we can get back on the gas earlier. It's
always tempting to corner a little faster, but it frequently does not pay off in the context of the rest of the
track.
This analysis is sufficiently long that it will take two instalments of this series. In this, the first
instalment, we do exact calculations on a dummy line, which is the actual line we will drive up to the
apex, but just a reference line after the apex. In the next instalment, we improve on the dummy line by
accelerating and unwinding, predicting the times for a line we would actually drive, but entailing some
small inexactitude.
Let's first describe the track segment. Imagine an entry straight of 650 feet, connected to a 180-degree
left-hander with outer radius 200 feet and inner radius 100 feet, connected to an exit chute of 650 feet. In
the following sketch, we show the segment twice with different lines. The line on the left contains the
widest possible inscribed cornering radius, and therefore the greatest possible cornering speed. The
sketch on the right shows the line with the lowest overall time. Although its cornering speed is slower
than in the line on the left, it includes a lengthy acceleration and unwinding phase on exit that more than

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

makes up for it.

Line with Line with

Fastest Cornering Speed Lowest Overall Time

Note that both lines begin on the extreme right-hand side of the entry straight. Such will be a feature of
every corner we analyse. Lines that begin elsewhere across the entry straight may be valid in scenarios
like passing. However, we focus here on lines that are more obvious candidates for lowest times. Also,
throughout, we ignore the width of the car, working with the 'bicycle line'. If we were including the
width, w, of the car, we would get the same final results on a track with outer radius of 200 + w / 2 feet
and inner radius of 100 - w / 2 feet.
First, we compute exact times where we can on the course: the entry straight, the braking zone, and the
corner up to the apex. To have a concrete baseline for comparison, we also do a 'suboptimal' exit
computation-the dummy line-that includes completing the corner without unwinding and then running
down the exit chute dead straight somewhere in the middle of the track. In the next instalment of The
Physics of Racing, we compare the dummy line to the more sophisticated exit that includes
simultaneously accelerating and unwinding to use up the entire width of the track in the exit chute.
Let us enter the segment in the right-hand chute at 100 mph = 146.667 fps (feet per second). We want the
total times for a number of different cornering radii between two extremes. The largest extreme is a

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

radius of 200 feet, which is the same as the radius of the outer margin of the track. It should be obvious
that it is not possible to drive a circle with a radius greater than 200 feet and still stay on the track. This
extreme is depicted in the following sketch:

We take the opportunity, here, to define a number of parameters that will serve throughout. First, let us
call the radius of the outer edge of the track r1; this is obviously 200 feet, but, by giving it a symbolic
name, we retain the option of changing its numeric value some other time. Likewise, let's call the radius
of the inner circle r0, now 100 feet. Let's use the symbol r to denote the radius of the inscribed circle we
intend to drive. In the extreme case of the widest possible line, r is the same as r1, namely, 200 feet. In
the other extreme case, that of the tightest inscribed circle, r is 150 feet, as shown in the following
sketch:

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

We're now ready to discuss the two remaining parameters you may have noticed: h and (Greek letter
alpha). Consider the following figure illustrating the general case:

h indicates the point where we must be done with braking. More precisely, h is the distance of the turn-in
point below the geometric start of the corner. Its value, by inspection, is (r - r0) cos . is the angle
past the geometric top where the inscribed circle-the driving line-apexes the inner edge of the track. We
see two values for the horizontal distance between the centre of the inscribed circle and the centre of the
inner edge, and those values are (r - r0) sin and r1 - r. Their equality allows us to solve for :

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

The following table shows numeric values of h and for a number of inscribed radii (Note that if we
varied r0 and r1 we would have a much larger 'book' of values to show. For now, we'll just vary r.):
Inscribed
Corner
Radius (ft) (deg) h (ft)
150 90.00 0.00
151 73.90 14.14
152 67.38 20.00
153 62.47 24.49
154 58.41 28.28
155 54.90 31.62
160 41.81 44.72
165 32.58 54.77
170 25.38 63.25
175 19.47 70.71
180 14.48 77.46
185 10.16 83.67
190 6.38 89.44
195 3.02 94.87
200 0.00 100.00

There are a couple of interesting things to notice about these numbers. First, they match up with the
visually obvious values of h = 0, = 90 and h = 100, = 0 when r = 150, r = 200 respectively. This is
a good check that we haven't made a mistake. Secondly, changes very rapidly with corner radius, and
this fact has major ramifications on driving line. By driving a line just one foot larger than the
minimum, one is able to apex more than fifteen degrees later!
With these data, we're now equipped to compute all the times up to the apex and beyond. First, let's
compute the speed in the corner by assuming that our car can corner at 1g = 32.1 ft / s2 = v2 / r, giving us
. We express all speeds in miles per hour, but other lengths in feet. We won't take the time and
space to write out all the conversions explicitly, but just remind ourselves once and for all that there are
22 feet per second for every 15 miles per hour.
Now that we have the maximum cornering speed, we can compute how much braking distance we need
to get down to that speed from 100 mph. Let's assume that our car can brake at 1g also. We know that

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 Part 17: "Slow-in, Fast-out!" or, Advanced Analysis of the Racing Line

braking causes us to lose a little velocity for each little increment of time. Precisely, dv / dt = g.
However, we need to understand how the velocity changes with distance, not with time. Recall that
dx / dt = v, dt = dx / v, so we get dx = vdv / g. Those who remember differential and integral calculus
will immediately see that is the required formula for braking distance. In any event,

the braking distance goes as the square of the speed, that is, like the kinetic energy, and that's intuitive.
However, there's a factor of two in the numerator that's easy to miss (the origin of this factor is in the
calculus, where we compute limit expressions like ).

We next subtract the braking distance from the entry straight, and also subtract h, to give us the distance
in which we can go at 100 mph, top speed, before the braking zone.
Now, we need the time spent braking, and that's easy: . All the other times are easy to
compute, so here are the times for a variety of cornering lines up to the apices (or apexes for those who
aren't Latin majors):
Braking Time (sec) Time Total
Distance Straight in straight (sec) in time
Inscribed Cornering (ft) @1g Distance @ 100 Time (sec) corner (sec) up
Corner speed @1g in from 100 (ft) prior to mph prior in braking prior to to the
Radius (ft) mph mph braking to braking zone apex apex
150 47.24 261.11 388.89 2.652 2.418 6.802 11.872
152 47.55 260.11 369.89 2.522 2.404 5.987 10.912
154 47.86 259.11 362.60 2.472 2.390 5.682 10.544
155 48.02 258.61 359.77 2.453 2.382 5.566 10.401
160 48.79 256.11 349.17 2.381 2.347 5.144 9.872
170 50.29 251.11 335.64 2.288 2.278 4.641 9.208
180 51.75 246.11 326.43 2.226 2.212 4.325 8.762
190 53.16 241.11 319.45 2.178 2.147 4.099 8.424
200 54.55 236.11 313.89 2.140 2.083 3.927 8.150

At first glance, it appears that the widest line is a huge winner, but we must realize that these times
include only driving up to the apex, and that is far earlier on the widest line, where = 0. Suppose we
continued driving all the way around the corner at constant speed and then accelerated out the exit chute
at 0.5g? This is the dummy line. We won't really drive this line after the apex, but discuss it nonetheless
to provide a reference time. It's very easy to compute and provides a foundational intuition for the more
advanced exit computation to follow in the next instalment:
Total Time Time for Exit speed Combined
time (sec) in entrance from Time post-apex
Inscribed (sec) up corner and chute in exit time and
Corner to the after complete (mph) @ chute Combined exit-chute
Radius (ft) apex apex corner g/2 accel (sec) segment time time
150 11.872 0.000 11.872 109.091 5.670 17.541 5.670

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152 10.912 0.860 11.773 107.857 5.528 17.301 6.388

154 10.544 1.209 11.754 107.422 5.460 17.213 6.669
155 10.401 1.348 11.750 107.260 5.430 17.180 6.779
160 9.872 1.881 11.753 106.697 5.308 17.061 7.189
170 9.208 2.600 11.808 106.101 5.116 16.924 7.716
180 8.762 3.126 11.888 105.806 4.955 16.844 8.082
190 8.424 3.556 11.980 105.666 4.813 16.792 8.369
200 8.150 3.927 12.077 105.627 4.682 16.760 8.609

So, we see that, driving the dummy line, the widest line yields the slowest time from the entrance up
through the complete semicircle, but the quickest overall time when the exit chute is included. The
widest line has lower (better) times than the tightest line in
● the entry straight by about half a second, because h is large and the entry straight is shorter for
wider circles
● in the braking zone by about three tenths because the cornering speed is higher and less braking is
needed
● and in the exit chute by almost a second, again because is h large and the exit chute is thereby
shorter
The widest line has higher (worse) times by about a second in the circle itself because the wider circle is
also longer. When the balances are all added up, the widest line is about eight tenths quicker than the
tightest line, but it's all because of the effects of the corner on the straights before and after.
Recall once again that the dummy line is not a line we would actually drive after the apex. But, with that
as a framework, we're in position to introduce the next improvement. Everything we do from here on
improves just the post-apex portion of the corner and the exit chute. We will actually drive the dummy
line up to the apex. So, from this point on, we need only look at the last column in the table above, where
we are shocked to see that there are almost three seconds' spread from the slowest to the quickest way
out. A good deal of this ought to be available for improvement by accelerating and unwinding.

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

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Physics of Racing,
Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or,
Advanced Racing Line, Continued
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright August 2000

In the previous instalment, we did exact calculations for a dummy line down a 650-foot entry straight, a
180-degree left-hander, and a 650-foot exit chute. Cornering radii vary from 150 feet to 200 feet, and the
track is 100 feet wide all the way around. This dummy line carries constant speed around the entire
left-hander. We did those calculations to provide reference times to compare against this month's more
sophisticated calculations, in which we unwind the steering wheel and accelerate at the same time. The
baseline times for the dummy line over the whole course, as a function of cornering radius, are in the
second-to-last column of the following table:
Exit
Total Time Time for speed Combined
time (sec) in entrance from Time post-apex
Inscribed (sec) up corner and chute in exit time and
Corner to the after complete (mph) @ chute Combined exit-chute
Radius (ft) apex apex corner g/2 accel (sec) segment time time
150 11.872 0.000 11.872 109.091 5.670 17.541 5.670
152 10.912 0.860 11.773 107.857 5.528 17.301 6.388
154 10.544 1.209 11.754 107.422 5.460 17.213 6.669
155 10.401 1.348 11.750 107.260 5.430 17.180 6.779
160 9.872 1.881 11.753 106.697 5.308 17.061 7.189
170 9.208 2.600 11.808 106.101 5.116 16.924 7.716
180 8.762 3.126 11.888 105.806 4.955 16.844 8.082
190 8.424 3.556 11.980 105.666 4.813 16.792 8.369
200 8.150 3.927 12.077 105.627 4.682 16.760 8.609

From this point on, we need only look at the last column. It's after the apex and down the exit chute
where we look for improvement; we actually drive the dummy line up to the apex. Many readers will be
screaming that we could try to get on the gas before the apex for even more improvement. Others will be

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

screaming "trail brake!," that is, ease off the brakes at the same time as winding the steering wheel at turn
in (thanks to reader Marc Sibilia for pointing this out to me). We leave those refinements to later articles.
The approach in this article is to find a line by building it up, step-by-step, honouring the traction circle
and the sides of the track. This is one of the techniques we can use in computer simulations, so we get to
kill two birds with one stone: previewing simulation and analysing a particular driving line. For
convenience, we need a Cartesian coordinate system, that is, a square grid. Let's turn the track around
180 degrees for this purpose, and put the centre of the coordinate system at the centre of the corner. Since
the inside edge of the track and the outside edge of the track are concentric semicircles, there is only one
identifiable centre of the corner.
We'll work by measuring the position and heading of the centroid of the car with respect to this new
coordinate system. We have a goal of arriving at the point x = 200, y = 650, measured in feet, in the least
possible time, with a heading of as close to 90 degrees as we can get it, that is, heading straight down the
track. We start at the apex, which measures from x = r0 sin , y = r1 cos . The following sketch
illustrates:

I must note, at this point, if you haven't already noticed, this instalment of The Physics of Racing is going
to be more concentrated and intense than previous instalments. I'm just going to blurt out facts without
the usual explanations and walkthroughs. The reasons are (1) that we have a lot to get through in a little
space and (2) that we assume that if you've been following the series this far, you've got the fortitude to
work through it. So, let's get it on!

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

The initial heading is tangent to the inner edge of the track, that is, perpendicular to the line from the
centre of the track's corner to the apex. Therefore, it has the angle up from the horizontal x axis. We
know the starting speed, v0, so we know its components in the x direction and in the y direction:
v0x = v0 cos , v0y = v0 sin .

We perform the entire manoeuvre whilst never exceeding the limits of the traction circle. We set those
limits as 1g cornering and braking and 0.5g accelerating, with smooth transitions all way around, as in
the following sketch (the horizontal cap shows a way of accounting for engine limitations with
non-smooth transitions, which will allow us to accelerate harder with the wheel still turned but probably
scare us in the seat. Also, we note that 0.5g is a plausible, if only approximate, number for acceleration.
We leave it to the reader to show that 0.5g in the quarter mile results in a realistic 13-second elapsed
time, if at an unrealistic speed of 150 mph):

In each step of the calculation, we keep track of the following information:

● the time, t

● the current position, x(t), y(t), which we check to make sure we're still on the track (x < 200) and to
see whether we're done (y 650)
● the current velocity, vx(t), vy(t), which we use to update the current position:
, and likewise for y
● the tangential and radial acceleration, at(t), ar(t), that is, tangential and radial to the bit of racing
line at each instant (the instantaneous line), which we check to make sure that we're not cornering

over the limit and that we're not exceeding the capacity of the engine, i.e., that is inside
the traction envelope
● the acceleration in the x and y directions, ax(t), ay(t), which we use to update the current velocity:

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

, and likewise for vy

We drive the whole simulation by feeding on the throttle linearly with time over a time span called k and
by simultaneously increasing the instantaneous radius of the driving line over a potentially different time
span called kunwind. Feeding on the throttle allows us to increase the tangential acceleration, at at each
time step, and unwinding allows us to decrease the radial acceleration, ar so we can stay within the
traction circle. Since we'll still have centripetal traction available after the throttle is buried full on, we
ought to be able to unwind more slowly, enabling us to stay on the track, but use it all up. In other words,
we ought to look for solutions wherein kunwind is larger than k, perhaps by twice.

Let's look at the first few rows of this simulation in a spreadsheet and delve into the formulas more
deeply:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
a(t) v2/r a(t)
(tangential, (radial, (radial, r(t) ax(t) ay(t) x(t) y(t) vx(t) vy(t) v
t fpsps) fpsps) fpsps) (feet) (fpsps) (fpsps) (feet) (feet) (mph) (mph) (mph)
0.00 0.00 32.00 32.00 160.00 -21.33 23.85 66.67 -74.54 36.36 32.52 48.79
0.20 1.28 31.90 30.27 169.92 -21.20 21.64 76.80 -64.41 33.46 35.66 48.90
0.40 2.56 31.59 28.54 182.30 -20.76 19.75 86.09 -53.42 30.59 38.51 49.18
0.60 3.84 31.06 26.81 197.64 -20.06 18.19 94.54 -41.64 27.79 41.12 49.63
0.80 5.12 30.32 25.08 216.59 -19.17 16.96 102.20 -29.13 25.10 43.54 50.25
0.90 5.76 29.85 24.22 227.68 -18.67 16.47 105.74 -22.62 23.80 44.69 50.63
1.00 6.40 29.33 23.35 240.01 -18.13 16.05 109.09 -15.94 22.53 45.80 51.04

[column 1]: increments by each row; we actually computed with = 0.05 sec and display here
every fourth actual row; this is an independent column, meaning that it does not depend on data from any
other column.
[column 2]: tangential acceleration,

,
accounting for squeezing on the throttle up to g / 2; depends only on column 1.
[column 3]: maximal radial acceleration,

,
accounting for the traction circle; more precisely, for the upper half of the circle treated as a flattened
(oblate) ellipse with height g / 2; depends only on column 2.
[column 4]: radial

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

,
accounting for unwinding the steering wheel; in steps from the inner parentheses outwards:
g(1 - t / kunwind) slowly decreases from g as time increases from 0, but, it is never allowed to exceed
v2 / r, by the min expression, as mandated by the traction circle, and then, never allowed to be negative,
by the max expression, because we don't want to start turning back toward the entry straight; depends on
columns 1 and 3.
[column 5]:
;

just for amusement, it's interesting to calculate the instantaneous radius of a circle we could be driving if
we were not accelerating tangentially; depends on columns 4 and 12, but no other columns depend on
this.
[column 6]:

,
this just selects out the x components of both the radial and tangential accelerations, but makes sure that
we never turn the wheel so much that we start going to the left. Note that the radial acceleration always
tries to pull the car to the left, hence the minus sign (centripetal: see part 4 of The Physics of Racing);
depends on columns 2, 4, 10, 11, and 12.
[column 7]:

,
selecting the y components, this time always pointing down the track, the way we want to go; depends on
columns 2, 4, 10, 11, and 12.
[column 8]:
,

just update the x coordinate by the velocity from the prior time step; depends on columns 8 (the prior row
of itself) and 10.
[column 9]:

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

do likewise for the y coordinate; depends on columns 9 (prior row) and 11.
[column 10]:
,

for updating the x component of the velocity (but don't let it go negative, checking yet again, and, yes,
this is a hack); depends on columns 10 (prior row) and 6.
[column 11]:
,

likewise for the y coordinate of the velocity; depends on columns 11 and 7.

[column 12]: finally,

,
depends on columns 10 and 11.
I've packed all this in an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet should be in the download package for
readers who acquired this document electronically.
Enough talk! Let's drive! Driving means playing with the values of r, k, and kunwind, and possibly even
, to find the lowest overall time at which columns 8 and 9 show 200 or less and 650 or more,
respectively. In general, "playing with" should be a sophisticated process involving hill climbing, genetic
search, simulated annealing, and other fancy strategies for finding the very best values. In a computer
simulation, we'd do that. However, we can do a reasonable job, for the sake of demonstration, by just
tweaking the numbers by hand in the spreadsheet.
I have to admit that as I did so, I got kinaesthetic feelings as if I where actually driving. When I 'ran off
the track,' that is, picked numbers that gave me x > 200, I gritted my teeth and blushed. When I was still
unwinding at the end, I got that panicky feeling of understeer, knowing that I wasn't going to stay on
after the end of the segment, and so on.
The best values I found by hand are shown in the following table at r = 167.5, k = 3.25, and
kunwind = 7.22. That means that we take 3.25 seconds to bury the gas and 7.22 seconds to unwind the
wheel. There are solutions with lower segment times, but, since we're still unwinding long after the
segment is done, I reject these solutions as assuming too much about what's going on after our segment is
done. With more track to work with, however, we can find lots more time. In fact, it's a slightly
surprising fact that by taking 9 seconds to unwind at r = 167.5, k = 3.25, we lose hardly any time and stay
15 feet inside the outer edge. There is quite a bit of territory to investigate even in this simple model.

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 Part 18: "Slow In, Fast Out!" or, Advanced Racing Line, Continued

Best Best Total

time Dummy Dummy- Time
r k kunwind Found Time Best Found
155 1.500 2.000 6.500 6.779 0.279 16.901
160 2.500 3.700 6.875 7.189 0.314 16.747
165 3.000 5.950 7.050 7.482 0.432 16.550
167.5 3.250 7.22 7.120 7.605 0.485 16.466
170 3.500 8.550 7.225 7.716 0.491 16.433
175 4.000 11.170 7.400 7.912 0.512 16.367
180 4.500 13.330 7.575 8.082 0.507 16.337
185 5.000 30.000 7.700 8.233 0.533 16.282

Since the best dummy time, with the widest possible circle, is 16.760, and the best time I found here was
16.466, the improvement by unwinding and accelerating simultaneously is 0.294 seconds. This is
very significant. If the exit straight were longer, the improvement would be even more dramatic since it
would continue to accumulate time down the straight.
Note that this does not involve changing the entry to the corner other than by slowing down! There is no
trail braking or lifting-while-turning or other risk-taking going on at corner entry. There is a very
important driving lesson, here: to go faster, it is not necessary to take risks on corner entry. It is, in fact,
both safer and faster just to slow down on the entry. The improved exit will follow naturally from the
combination of looking far ahead and of being smooth. And that's not even fair!
There is no guarantee that this is the best possible improvement in the model. I found these numbers by
'seat-of-the-pants' tweaking. A more systematic or algorithmic search would very likely find better ones.
In other words, I was able to find almost three tenths by just driving a better line without trying very hard
at all. There is another driving lesson, here: just driving a better line gives better times time without
changing the driver's margin for error, that is, without getting deeper into the g limits of the machine.
For the future, we can start taking more risks to get even more improvement. We can risk accelerating
before the apex and we can risk deeper entry by trail braking, that is, easing off the brake and winding up
the steering wheel at the same time. These makeovers do entail more driver risk since they are new
opportunities for loss of car control.
Erratum: in part 17, I wrote "By driving a line just one foot larger than the minimum, one is able to
apex more than fifteen degrees later!". I should have written "…fifteen degrees earlier!" The point was
that the tightest line does not apex until the geometric exit of the corner, and that's way too late. The
slip-of-the-pen occurred because one is so accustomed to talking about late apexing as preferable.

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

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Physics of Racing,
Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright January 2001

In part 16, we introduced RARS, the Robot Auto Racing Simulator. We talked about the clever and
simple tyre-friction model in RARS and gave a terse presentation of its details in the big table in the
article. Here, we'll explain in a little more detail why the model is cool.
First, consider RARS' idea of a tyre when there is no steering applied. In the following diagram, we look
down on a RARS tyre from above, using "X-Ray Vision" to see the contact patch:

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

There are only two interesting quantities at this point: the velocity of the car with respect to the ground,
and the velocity of the contact patch with respect to the car. If there is no power, braking, or cornering
applied, then these two vectors are equal and opposite; in other words, the velocity of the contact patch
with respect to the ground is zero. In general, if you have a velocity of some thing, any thing, with
respect to the car and you have the velocity of the car with respect to the ground, all you have to do to
get the velocity of the thing with respect to the ground is add the vectors, and we show how to add
vectors immediately below. You eliminate the middleman - the car - by so doing. This is relativity, not
the Einstein kind, but the Galileo kind-hence the title of this article. In the Einstein kind of relativity, you
correct the vector sum with some quantities depending on the speed of light, a constant, and this is not
relevant for auto racing because the speeds are so low compared to the speed of light, which is about 670
million miles per hour.
What happens when you apply a little steering input? Look at the next diagram.

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

The velocity of the contact path with respect to the car, , gets a little angle-the slip angle or the grip
angle, as I called it in part 10 of the Physics of Racing. still points directly back along the plane of the
tyre, and the velocity of the car with respect to the ground, , still heads forward, that is, up on the page,
at least for an instant. To find out the velocity of the contact patch with respect to the ground, , we add
the vectors and , just as before, but now there's an intervening angle. Here's the procedure for
adding the vectors: Transport one of them, without changing its direction, so that its tail touches the head
of the other one. It turns out that not all kinds of vectors can be transported like this, but velocity in this
context is one of the kinds that we can freely transport. We'll transport over to the head of , as in the
following diagram:

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

Draw a new vector from the tail of to the head of in its new location. This new, little vector is
defined as the vector sum, , drawn from the tail of one to the head of the other. Note it would have the
same direction and length if it were drawn from the tail of to the head of . Because of this fact, we
can write the following equation:

= + = +
This procedure for adding vectors works even when the vectors are collinear, in which case the triangle is
flat, the opposite corners coincide, and the vector sum is zero-the mathematically unique vector zero. It
also turns out that this procedure has a very simple equivalent in algebraic form. To do computations, we
need to represent vectors with numbers. To do so, we measure the length of the projection of the vector
against the axes of a coordinate frame, as in the following diagram:

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

So, we get just what we need: numbers, also called components because they are the component parts
that make up the perpendicular, independent projections of the vector. Numbers, in general, are also
called scalars since they can be used to scale vectors. In general, we'll get three numbers for any vector
in a 3D world, and two numbers in a 2D world. In either case, adding vectors is trivial. If we write
= (Vx, Vy, Vz) and = (Wx, Wy, Wz), then

+ = (Vx + Wx + Vy + Wy + Vz + Wz)

Just add them up componentwise. Couldn't be easier. I'll leave it to you to show that the head-to-tail
method is equivalent to the numerical add-'em-up-componentwise method.
Let's go back to the tyres. Here's what makes RARS' model so clever: It's undeniable that the contact
patch moves with respect to the ground if we assume that it continues to move in the circumferential
direction with respect to the wheel and the car. We can summarize all the complex motion of the contact
patch in a single velocity and we can approximate our friction model so that it depends only on the
magnitude of . This is a simpler model than the one presented in part 10, but also potentially less
accurate. Let's review that one briefly. Again, looking at the contact patch from above, as if by X-Ray
vision:

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

In the diagram above, we're looking at a wheel steered slightly to the left of the direction of travel.
Assuming that there's a little acceleration in addition to the steering, both sides of the contact patch move
backwards with respect to the ground. The left-hand side (LHS) of the patch moves a little more slowly
than the right-hand side (RHS) because the RHS crabs around the corner. The wheel, through the carcass
of the tyre, twists the patch to the left, generating a force couple illustrated by the grey arrows. The
ground resists, through friction, producing the right-twisting, restoring, force couple in black. Since the
patch continues to twist leftward with respect to an inertial reference frame in a steady-state turn, the
grey couple must be a little larger than the black one.
This model is not by any means complete, and it's already MUCH more complex than the RARS model,
which does a decent job in practice. RARS computes just one quantity, the vector , and accounts for all
forces and torques on the tyre through that one variable. The advantages of the approach, when it comes
to computer simulation, are
● very simple math, easy to code and debug

● very fast conversion from velocity to force

● one table lookup and one interpolation

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 Part 19 : Space, Time, and Rubber

The limitations, of course, are that RARS cannot account for detailed tyre physics and important effects
like suspension geometry and dynamics, so the whole scheme trades off accuracy for simplicity.
However, as a quick-and-dirty approximation, it's remarkably effective.

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 20 : Four-Point Statics
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright January 2001

In this instalment, we analyse the stability of a single wheel, a bicycle, tricycle, and, finally, of a
four-wheeled vehicle. In the offing, we introduce force moments, vector cross products, matrices and
linear algebra, and some interesting facts about how the number of wheels on a vehicle relate to the
number of dimensions of space and to the practice of weight jacking on a race car.
Consider a single bicycle wheel and tyre combination, all by itself, just standing on the ground. Call it a
unicycle wheel. It almost immediately falls over. The reason is that its centre of gravity (CG) is above the
ground, but its contact patch (CP) is ON the ground. Assuming that the CP doesn't slide, then the ground
will resist any force put on it with an equal and opposite force. If the wheel begins to tip ever so slightly
sideways, Earth's gravitation, pulling on the CG, and the reaction force, pushing mostly up and a little
sideways on the CP, conspire to twist the wheel even more sideways down toward the ground. In other
words, if it tips over just a little, it will have an overwhelming tendency to tip over ALL the way. The
following figure shows the wheel precariously balanced on its CP:

The next figure shows the wheel just starting to tip over. One can easily see that the weight, pulling down
on the CG, and the reaction force, pushing up on the CP, will quickly knock the wheel down to the
ground. At any instance of time, the tendency for the wheel to fall over is measured by the moment of the
forces about some arbitrary point. The moment of a force about a point is the magnitude of the force
times the perpendicular distance of the force line from the point. We suggest this perpendicular distance

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

in the following diagram with a small right triangle. Since the CP is not sliding, by assumption, it's fixed
in inertial space and is an ideal candidate for a moment centre: the point about which to compute force
moments. There is also a small, sideways component to the ground's force on the CP, but we ignore that
in the diagram.

More generally, the moment of a force vector can be thought of as a vector in its own right (at least in
three dimensions, it can; the story is more complicated in four or more dimensions). This vector is the
cross product of the moment arm and the force vector. The moment arm is a vector drawn from the
moment centre to the point of application of a force. In the diagram above, the moment arm of the
gravitational force is along the hypotenuse of the little triangle and points upwards. The cross product of
a moment arm, r, and a force, F, is defined to be a certain vector that is perpendicular to both r and F.
There are lots of vectors perpendicular to both r and F if r and F are not collinear, and there are NO
vectors perpendicular to both of them if they are collinear. In any event, we're looking for the particular
one that satisfies some properties. Suppose r has components (rx, ry, rz) and F has components (Fx, Fy,
Fz). Let the vector we're seeking be T. The conditions that T be perpendicular to r and to F can be
written as follows (assuming you understand the much-simpler inner product or dot product of vectors-if
not, take a search for "inner products" at http://www.britanica.com/, for one of many Internet sources):

T r = 0 = Txrx + Tyry + Tzrz

T F = 0 = TxFx + TyFy + TzFz

It's easy to check that the following vector satisfies these two equations in three unknowns:

T r F = (ryFz - rzFy, rzFx - rxFz, rxFy - ryFx)

It's a little more subtle to check that the magnitude of T, written , is the magnitude of r times the
magnitude of F times the sin of the angle between them in the plane they form. My favourite method is
to do the calculation in that plane, where it's easy, then to assert that nothing in the result depends on the
orientation of that plane in 3-space, so the answer must be the same after the plane is rotated into any

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

arbitrary orientation. For the masochist, it's possible to prove by grinding through all the algebraic
arithmetic that

Furthermore, the cross product we need satisfies the right-hand rule, whereby r, rotated into F by a
right-handed twist, as though by turning a right-handed screw or faucet handle, would advance the screw
in the direction of T. The opposite product, F r, would have the opposite sign. There are many more
interesting properties of the cross product, for which we refer you again to http://www.britannica.com/.

Let's go back to our unicycle wheel. Generically, a physical system is unstable if small inputs lead to
large outputs, say, if ambient forces amplify little disturbances. The fact that our wheel falls over with
just the slightest disturbance, almost by itself, indicates that the one-wheel system is unstable. By the
way, a wide race tyre will not tip over by itself until it's pushed sideways far enough that the line of the
gravitational force vector lies outside the edge of the tyre. At that point, the restoring force, pushing up
on the edge of the tyre, can no longer counteract the tipping-over, twisting tendency of gravitation. A
complete, ride-able unicycle is even more unstable than a unicycle wheel, because a rider must also keep
himself from falling backwards or forwards by continuously adjusting pressure on the pedals. A ride-able
bicycle does not suffer forward-backward instability since the CG is between the front CP and the rear
CP. However, it does suffer left-right instability, and the rider must continuously adjust body weight and
steering input - which generates sideways restoring force - to keep the bike from falling over. Going from
one wheel to two wheels eliminates one form of instability. How about going to three wheels?
A tricycle is optimally stable. It will sit still without tipping over, and its stability in steady-state motion
is almost exactly the same as its static - or standing-still - stability. It takes a large disturbance to knock
over a tricycle. It will tend to come back down on its wheels even after becoming partially or completely
airborne, so long as the CG stays within the bounds of the triangular outline of the CP's projected
vertically on the ground (see the following figure):

The stability of a tricycle is reflected in the mathematics to solve for the normal forces on the contact
patches when the tricycle is still or in steady motion in a straight line. Briefly, if the tricycle is NOT

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

tipping over, the sum of the moments of the normal forces must vanish (the choice of the moment centre
is arbitrary, but the CG is convenient because the weight has no moment about the CG). With reference
to the preceding figure, we have the following vector equation:

0 = (r1 F1) + (r2 F2) + (r3 F3)

Since the forces are normal forces, they have only Z-components - that's what "normal" means when
speaking of forces. The cross products are quite simple, then, and work out to be

ri Fi = (riy Fiz, -rix Fiz, 0)

for i = 1, 2, 3. Furthermore, we know that the forces must add up to the weight, W. We now go into the
language of matrices and linear algebra to present the solution (you know the drill: go to Britannica if
you're not comfortable), and, in the interest of space, we omit the intermediate arithmetic, which you may
check on your own. We may write our equations as

This set of equations has a solution if and only if the determinant of the square matrix is nonzero. This
determinant is

,
which will vanish if all three y components of the moment arms are equal, or, for that matter, if all three
x components are equal. In other words, it will vanish if the three points of application of the forces are
collinear, in which case we have three wheels in a line and we might as well have a bicycle as to
stability. In any event, the solution turns out to be

Obviously, there is no solution if d, the determinant, vanishes. It is an interesting exercise to find out all
the geometric circumstances in which one or more of these forces vanish or to catalogue all the possible
ways in which the determinant can vanish. I will leave these exercises to the reader. Before leaving the
tricycle, I'd like to assert without proof that the fundamental, geometric reason we can solve for the
normal forces is that ANY three points define a plane. No matter how the tricycle is positioned on any
(sufficiently horizontal) plane, all three wheels will touch the ground and three normal forces will be
generated.
We now take a huge risk and generalize TWO aspects of the model at once. First, we go to four wheels.
Second, we tilt the plane upward by a small angle and bank it by a small angle . Going to four

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

wheels will cause our equations to break down because there is TOO much symmetry in the vehicle and
blind application of linear algebra cannot derive, unambiguously, how the normal forces are to be
apportioned among the wheels. Four points cannot lie on a plane unless they are exquisitely balanced
there. We restore sanity by expressing the desired symmetry explicitly, and this makes for a bit of
interesting math. Physically, in a four-wheeled vehicle with a suspension, it is very easy to load wheels
preferentially by jacking the springs up or down. NASCAR crews are often furiously spinning wrenches
above the rear wheel purchases in the pits, effectively jacking weight into or out of wheels to adjust
handling. In a three-wheeled vehicle, weight jacking is not possible, to first order, that is, so long as the
CG does not tip appreciably. Playing around a little with the spring heights on a tricycle will not affect
the weight on each wheel.
Elevating and banking the plane further complicates the math by adding angle terms to the moment arms
or to the forces, depending on point of view (we go with the latter). We turn on the fire hose, here,
because it would take several instalments to go step-by-step. We just state the math and leave it to the
adventurous reader to check it. First, a diagram:

Now, suppose the car has front track t1, rear track t2, distance w1 from the CG to the front axle, distance

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

w2 from the CG to the rear axle, and height hG of the CG off the ground. The lever arms, gathered in a
matrix, are

Let's abbreviate the four normal forces to (a, b, c, d) for (F1, F2 ,F3 ,F4). After elevation and banking,
they are

The four torques are too long to write out. We're really only interested in their sum, which works out to
be the following 3-vector:

where
and where we have replaced a + b + c + d with mg, the weight of the car, expressing force balance. We
now have three equations in four unknowns, so we cannot solve without more information (in fact, the
4-matrix written out similarly to the tricycle example has a symbolically vanishing determinant-not good
for physics, but it is the interesting mathematical point). Symmetry constraints are a typical way to add
information, and a good symmetry is that the ratio of the two rear forces should equal the ratio of the two
front forces, or ad = bc, expressing the circumstance that we have NOT jacked any weight into the car.
As an intermediate step, we can solve the original set of equations for a in terms of b, c, and d, yielding

We can go one more step by solving for b in terms of c and d by setting the torque in the PITCH, or y,
direction to zero, yielding

Let's make a few simplifying definitions:

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 Part 20 : Four-Point Statics

Writing out our symmetry equation and substituting the solutions for a and b above, we get (after a
distressing amount of grungy grinding)

The good ol' high-school formula for the solution of quadratic equations gives

We've gone on long enough in this article. We'll leave it to a later instalment or to the reader to work
with some numerical values and plots.

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal
Version
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright February 2001

Driving a car is a classic problem in control. Here, we mean control in the technical sense of control
theory, an established branch of engineering science (once again, I find http://www.britannica.com/ to
have a very nice, brush-up article on that term). In a more-or-less continuous fashion, the driver
compares desired direction, speed, and acceleration with actual direction, speed, and acceleration. The
driver uses visual input to sense actual direction and speed; and uses visceral, inertial feedback-the butt
sensor-for actual acceleration. When the actual differs too much from the desired, the driver applies
throttle, brake, steering, and gear selection to change the actual. These inputs cause the tyres to react with
the ground, which pushes back against the tyres, and through the suspension, pushes the body of the car
and driver. Drivers in high-speed circumstances can also generate desired aerodynamic forces, as in
slipstreaming, in the "slingshot pass," and in the Earnhardt TIP manoeuvre, where the driver "takes the
air off" the spoiler of the car in front of him.
Tyres generate forces by sticking and sliding and everything in between. They transmit these forces to
the wheels by elastic deformation. The elastic deformation is extremely complex and theoretical
computation requires numerical solution of finite-element equations. However, despite fierce trade
secrecy, industry and academia have reached apparent consensus in recent years on a formula that
summarizes experimental and theoretical data. This so-called magic formula is not a solution to
equations of motion-a solution in such a form is not feasible. It's just a convenient fitting of
commonplace mathematical functions to data. It allows one to compute forces at a higher precision than
something like RARS (see parts 16 and 19 of the Physics of Racing [PhOR]), but without integrating
equations. Therefore, forces can be computed within a reasonable time, say in a real-time simulation
program.
To understand the magic formula, we need first to define its inputs, which include slip. Slip is an indirect
measure of the fraction of the contact patch that is sticking. It is frequently asserted in the literature that a
tyre with no slip at all cannot create forces. It has taken me a very long time to accept this assertion. Why
can I steer a tin-toy car with metal tyres on a hard surface like Formica? If there is any slip in such tyres,
it is microscopic, yet there are sufficient forces to brake and steer, even if just a little. I finally caved in
when I realized that the forces are minute, also. If there is any friction between the tyre and the surface,
there MUST be slip, as it is defined below. Though to a very small degree, the Formica and the tiny
contact patches of the tin tyres actually twist and stretch each other. The only way to eliminate slip

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

completely is to eliminate GRIP completely. Any grip, and you will have slip.
There are two, slightly different flavours of the magic formula. The longitudinal one is the subject of this
entire instalment of PhOR, and we cover the lateral one in the next instalment. Longitudinal slip is along
the mean plane of the wheel and might also be called circumferential or tangential. It creates braking and
accelerating forces. Lateral slip is our old friend grip angle [PhOR-10], and it generates cornering forces.
We write longitudinal slip as . It's defined by the actual angular velocity, , of a wheel plus tyre
under braking or acceleration, compared to the corresponding angular velocity of the same wheel plus
tyre when rolling freely. We write the free-rolling angular velocity as , where V is the
current, instantaneous velocity of the hub centreline of the wheel with respect to the ground, and Re is the
effective radius, a constant defined below. Since the dimensions of V are length/time, and the dimensions
of any radius are length, the ratio, , has dimensions of inverse time. In fact, it should be
viewed as measuring radians per unit time, radians being the natural, dimensionless measure of angular
rotation. There are radians in one rotation or one circumference of a circle, just as the length of the
circumference is times the radius.

Let's begin the discussion of longitudinal slip with a question. Consider a wheel-tyre combination with
13-inch radius or 26-inch diameter, say a 255-50/16 tyre on a 16-inch rim. The "50" in the tyre
specification is the ratio of the sidewall height to the tread width, which is also written into the
specification as 255, millimetres understood. We get a sidewall height of 50 percent of 255 mm, which is
5.02 inch. Therefore, the total, unloaded radius, half of the tread-to-tread diameter, is about 5 + 16/2 =
13 Inch. Now consider a rigid tyre of the same radius, made, say, of steel or of wood with an iron tread
like old Western wagon wheels. The question is whether, given a certain constant hub velocity,
pneumatic tyres spin faster than, slower than, or at the same speed as equivalent rigid tyres?
At first glance, one might say, "Well, faster, obviously. Since the pneumatic tyre compresses radially
under the weight of the car, its radius is actually smaller than the unloaded radius at the point of contact,
where it sticks and acquires linear velocity equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to the hub
velocity. Since smaller wheels spin faster than larger ones at the same speed, the pneumatic tyre spins
faster than the equivalent rigid tyre of the same unloaded radius. Let the unloaded, natural radius of the
pneumatic tyre be R, also the radius of the equivalent solid tyre. If the hub has velocity V, the solid tyre
spins with angular velocity . Since the loaded radius, of the pneumatic tyre, Rl, is smaller than
R, V/Rl, the angular velocity of the loaded pneumatic tyre, must be larger than V/R."

This is partly correct. The pneumatic tyre-wheel combination does spin faster than a rigid wheel of the
same unloaded radius, but it does not spin as fast as a rigid wheel of the same loaded radius, which is the
height of the hub centre off the ground under load. The reason is that the tyre also compresses
circumferentially or tangentially, setting up complex longitudinal twisting in the sidewall. The tangential
speed of a particle of tread varies as the particle goes around the circumference of the tyre.
Let's mentally follow a piece of tread around as the wheel, not necessarily the tyre, turns at a constant
radial velocity, . Imagine a plug of yellow rubber embedded in the tread, so that you could visually
track it or photograph it with a movie camera or strobe system as it moves around the circumference. The

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

rubber of the tread does not travel at constant speed, even though the wheel supporting the tyre does. At
the top of the tyre, the radius is almost exactly R, the unloaded radius, so the tread moves with tangential
velocity . As the yellow plug rolls around and approaches the contact patch from the front, it slows
down in the bunched up area at the leading edge of the contact patch-just forward of it. There is a
bunched-up area, because the tyre is made up of elastic material that gets squeezed and stretched out of
the contact patch and piles up ahead of the contact patch as it rolls into it from the direction of the
leading edge. Eventually, the plug enters the patch, in the centre of which it must move at speed
relative to the hub centre, that is, backwards at a speed dictated by the loaded radius and the wheel
velocity. We've assumed that the plug is not slipping on the ground at the point where it has speed
with respect to the hub. This means that it has speed zero with respect to the ground at that point.

The average of the tangential velocities around the wheel defines the effective radius, Re, as follows. Let
measure the angular position, from 0 to , around the wheel. Suppose we knew the tangential
velocity with respect to the hub centre, V( ), at every . We could easily measure this with our strobe
light and cameras. V( ) gives us the radius at every angular position via the equation V( )/ = R( ),
where is the constant angular velocity of the wheel. The average would be computed by the following
integral:

Let's run some numbers. 10 mph is 14 feet/second or 176 inches/second. With an unloaded
circumference of inch/revolution, we get 176/ = 2.154 revs per second, or 129 RPM for each
10 MPH. Under ordinary circumstances, the effective radius will be no more than a few percent less than
then the unloaded radius, and the RPMs should be, then, a few percent more than 129 RPM per 10 MPH.
At 100 MPH, the tyre is under considerable stress and spins at something over 1,300 RPM.
Now we're in a position to define longitudinal slip, written . We want a quantity that vanishes when
the wheel rolls at constant speed, increases when the wheel accelerates the car by pulling the contact
patch backwards, and decreases below zero when then wheel brakes the car by pushing the contact patch
forward. Under acceleration, the wheel and tyre combination will tend to spin a little faster than it would
do while free rolling. We already know that, for a given V, the free-rolling angular velocity is
, by definition. The actual angular velocity, , then, is higher under acceleration. So, if we
know V, , and the constant Re, then we can define the longitudinal slip as the ratio, minus 1, so that it's
zero under free-rolling conditions:

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

Just looking at this formula, a free-rolling wheel has , = 0 a locked-up wheel under braking
has = 0, = -1 and an accelerating wheel has a positive of any value.

The magic formula yields the longitudinal force, in Newtons, given some constants and dynamic inputs.
The formula takes eleven empirical numbers that characterize a particular tyre {b0, b1...b10}. The
dynamic parameters are Fz, or weight, in KiloNewtons on the tyre, and the instantaneous slip, . The
eleven numbers are measured for each tyre. We borrow an example from Motor Vehicle Dynamics by
Giancarlo Genta. On page 528, he offers the following numbers for a car that appears to be a Ferrari 308
or 328, to which I have added dimensions:

b0 1.65 dimensionless b6 0 1/(KiloNewton)2

b1 0 1/MegaNewton b7 0 1/KiloNewton
b2 1688 1/Kilo b8 -10 dimensionless
b3 0 1/MegaNewton b9 0 1/KiloNewton
b4 229 1/Kilo b10 0 dimensionless
b5 0 1/KiloNewton

Though the majority of these values are zero for the tyres on this car, it is by no means always the case.
In fact, the 'large-saloon' example just before the (alleged) Ferrari in Genta's book has no zeros.
We build up the magic formula in stages. The first helper quantity is µp = b1Fz + b2. This is an estimate
of the peak, longitudinal coefficient of friction, fitted as a linear function of weight (see Part 7 of
PhORs). From this definition, we begin to see what's going with the dimensions. A typical, streetable
sports car might weigh in at 3,000 lbs, which is about 3,000 / 2.2 = 1,500 * 0.9 = 1,350 kg, which is
about 1,350 * 9.8 = 13,200 Newtons, or 13.2 KiloNewtons (look, ma, no calculator!). Let's assume each
tyre gets a quarter of that to start off with, or 3.3 KN. b1 multiplies that number to give us something with
dimensions of KiloNewton/MegaNewton, which we write simply as 1/Kilo (inventing units on-the-fly,
one Mega = 1 Kilo squared). b2 has the same dimensions, so it's kosher to add it in, yielding
µp = 1688 / Kilo in this case. The next step is the helper D = µpFz, which will be in Newtons. We now
see the reason for the 1/Kilo unit. In our case, we get about D = (1700 - 12) * 3.3 = 5610 - 40 = 5570 N.
The important point is that D is linear in Fz, so µp acts, mathematically, like a coefficient of friction, as
promised. b2 is a pretty direct measurement of stickiness, times 1,000 for convenience. This model tyre
has a coefficient of friction of almost 1.7! Not my data, man.
The next step is to compute the product of a new helper, B, times b0 and the aforecomputed D. The
magicians who created the formula tell us that Bb0D = (b3Fz2 + b4Fz) exp(-b5Fz). This slurps up a few
more of the magical eleven empirical numbers, and a pattern emerges. These bi numbers serve as
coefficients in polynomial expressions over Fz. So, b5Fz is dimensionless, as must be the argument of the
exponential function. b3Fz2 + b4Fz has dimensions of Newtons, as does the entire product. Therefore, B

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

must be dimensionless. We need B in the next step, so let's solve for it now:

,
Where we've been able symbolically to divide out one factor of Fz, convenient especially for numerical
computation, where overflow is an ever-present hazard. Continuing with our numerical sample,
b3Fz + b4 = 229 / Kilo, the exponential is unity, and the numerator is

yielding B = 229 / 2786 = 0.0822. Most importantly, B depends only weakly on Fz. In the sample case,
not at all, because b1 = b3 = b5 = 0, but there are lots of other ways to characterize the algebraic
dependence of B on Fz.

The next step is to account for the longitudinal slip with another helper, S = (100 + b9Fz + b10); in our
sample case, this reduces to just S = 100 .

Only one more helper is needed, and that's E = (b6Fz2 + b7Fz + b8), very straightforward. The final
formula is

Once again, don't try to find any physics in here: it's just a convenient formula that fits the data
reasonably well. Plugging in numbers for = 0, because that's an easy sanity check to do in our heads,
we see immediately the result is zero. Let's try S = 10, ten percent slip. SB = 0.822, tan-1(0.822) = 0.688,
E = -10, so the argument of the outer arctangent is SB - 10 * (-0.266) = SB + 2.66 = 3.48,
tan-1(3.48) = 1.29, 1.29 b0 = 2.13, sin(2.13) = 0.848, and, finally, D * 0.848 = 4720 Newtons. Lots of
longitudinal force for a 3,300 N vertical load!
Let's plot the whole formula:

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 Part 21: The Magic Formula: Longitudinal Version

The horizontal axis measures S = 100 , which is really just slip in percent. The deep axis, going into the
page, measures Fz from 5 KN, nearest us, to zero in the back. The vertical axis measures the result of
applying the formula to our model tyre, so it's longitudinal force-force of launching or braking. Notice
that for a load of 5 KN, the model tyre can generate almost 8 KN of force. Very sticky tyre, as we've
already noticed! Also notice that the generated force peaks at around = 0.08, or 8 percent. The peak
would be something one could definitely feel in the driver's seat. Overcooking the throttle or brakes
would produce a palpable reduction in g-forces as the tyres start letting go. Worse than that, increasing
braking or throttle beyond the peak leads to reduced grip. This is an instability area, where increasing
slip leads to decreasing grip.
Finally, note that the function behaves roughly linearly with Fz, showing that it acts like a Newtonian
coefficient of friction, albeit a different one for each value of slip.

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

prev home next

The Physics of Racing,

Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral
Version
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright February 2001

In this instalment, we review the other side of the magic formula: the one that computes lateral or
cornering forces from slip angles (or grip angles). This formula is sufficiently similar to the longitudinal
version of Part 21 that we can skip many preliminaries. But it's sufficiently different as to require careful
exposition, leading us to define coordinate frames that will serve us throughout the rest of the Physics of
Racing series. This instalment will be one to keep on hand for future reference.
Diving right in, just like its longitudinal sibling, this formula requires some magical constants, fifteen of
them this time. Again, from Genta's possible-Ferrari data sheet:

a0 1.799 dimensionless a7 1 dimensionless

a1 0 1/MN a8 0 dimensionless
a2 1688 1/Kilo a9 -6.111/1000 Degree/KN
a3 4140 N a10 -3.224/100 Degree
a4 6.026 KN a11 0 1/MN - Degree
a5 0 1/Degree a12 0 1/Kilo Degree
a6 -0.3589 KN a13 0 1/Kilo
a14 0 N

where N is Newton, KN is KiloNewton, and MN is MegaNewton. As with the longitudinal magic

formula, there are lots of zeros in this particular sample case, but let us not confuse particulars with
generalities. The formula can account for much more general cases.
The first helper is the peak, lateral friction coefficient µyp = a1Fz + a2, measured in inverse Kilos if Fz is
in KN. Next is D = µypFz, which is a factor with the form of the Newtonian model: normal force times
coefficient of friction. In our sample, a1 is zero, so µyp acts exactly like a Newtonian friction coefficient.
In all cases, we should expect a1Fz to be much smaller than a2 so that it will be, at most, a small

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

correction to the Newtonian behaviour.

To get the final force, we correct with the following empirical factor:

This has exactly the same form as the empirical correction factor in the longitudinal version, but the
component pieces, S, B, and E are different, here.

where is the slip angle and is the camber angle of the wheel. In practice, we must carefully account
for the algebraic signs of the camber angles so that the forces make sense at all four wheels. The usual
negative camber, by the 'shop' definition, as measured on the wheel-alignment machine, will generate
forces in the positive Y-direction on the right-hand side of the car and in the negative Y-direction on the
left-hand side of the car. This comment makes much more sense after we've covered coordinate frames,
below.
As before, we get B from a product, albeit one of greatly different form

where is the absolute value of the camber angle, that is, a positive number no matter what the sign of
. This gives

Almost done; include and sneak in an additive correction for ply steer and conicity,
which we'll leave undefined in this article:

To arrive at the final formula

This form is almost identical-in form-to the longitudinal version of the magic formula. The individual
sub-components are different in detail, however.
The most important input is the slip angle, . This is the difference between the actual path line of the

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

car and the angle of the wheel. To be precise, we must define coordinate systems. We'll stay close to the
conventions of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), as published by the Millikens in Race Car
Vehicle Dynamics. Note that this may differ from some frames we've used in the past, but we're going to
stick with this set. There's a lot of intense verbiage in the following, but it's necessary to define precisely
what we mean by wheel orientation in all generality. Only then can we measure slip angle as the
difference between the path heading of the car and the wheel orientation.
First, is the EARTH frame, whose axes we write as {X, Y, Z}. The Z axis is aligned with Earth's
gravitation and points downward. The origin of EARTH is fixed w.r.t. the Earth and the X and Y axes
point in arbitrary, but fixed, directions. A convenient choice at a typical track might be the centre of
start/finish with X pointing along the direction of travel of the cars up the main straight. All other
coordinate frames ultimately relate back to EARTH, meaning that the location and orientation of every
other frame must be given w.r.t. EARTH, directly or indirectly. The next coordinate frame is CAR,
whose axes we write as {x, y, z}. This frame is fixed w.r.t. the sprung mass of the car, that is the body,
with x running from tail to nose, y to driver's right, and z downward, roof through seat. Its instantaneous
orientation w.r.t. EARTH is the heading, . Precisely, consider the line formed by the intersection of
EARTH's XY plane with CAR's xz plane. The angle of the that line w.r.t. EARTH's X axis is the
instantaneous heading of the car. It becomes undefined only when the car it points directly up-standing
on its tail-or directly down-standing on its nose. To emphasize, heading is measured in the EARTH
frame.
The next coordinate frame is PATH. The velocity vector of the car traces out a curve in 3-dimensional
space such that it is tangent to the curve at every instance. The X-direction of PATH points along the
velocity vector. The Z-direction of PATH is at right angles to the X direction and in the plane formed by
the velocity vector and the Z-direction of EARTH. The Y direction of PATH completes the frame such
that XYZ form an orthogonal, right-handed triad. The path of the car lies instantaneously in the XY plane
of PATH. PATH ceases to exist when the car stops moving. Path heading is the angle of the projection
of the velocity vector on EARTH's XY w.r.t. the X-axis of EARTH. Milliken calls this course angle,
(Greek upsilon). Path heading, just like heading, is measured in the EARTH frame. The sideslip angle
of the entire vehicle is the path heading minus the car heading, . This is positive when the right
side of the car slips in the direction of travel.
The next set of coordinate frames is ROADi, where i varies from 1 to 4; there are four frames
representing the road under each wheel, numbered as 1=Left Front, 2=Right Front, 3=Left Rear, 4=Right
Rear. Each ROADi is located at the force centre of its corresponding contact patch at the point Ri = (Rix,
Riy, Riz) w.r.t. EARTH. This point moves with the vehicle, so, more pedantically, the origin of ROADi is
Ri(t) written as a function of time. To get the X and Y axes of ROADi, we begin with a temporary, flat,
coordinate system called TAi aligned with EARTH and centred at Ri, then elevate by an angle -90° < <
90°, to get temporary frame TBi, and bank by an angle -90° < < 90°, in that order, as illustrated below:

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

Consider any point P in space with coordinates P = (Px, Py, Pz) w.r.t. EARTH. A little reflection reveals
that its location w.r.t. TAi is PAi P - Ri, just subtracting coordinates component-by-component. To get
coordinates in TBi, we multiply by the orthogonal matrix (once again, see http://www.britannica.com/
for brush-up) that does not change the Y components, but increases the Z and decreases the X
components of points in the first quadrant for small, positive angles, namely:

We pick this matrix by inspection of the figure above or by application of the right-hand-rule (yup, see
Britannica) Finally, to bank the system, we need the orthogonal matrix that does not change the X
components, but increases the Y and decreases the Z components of first-quadrant points for small,
positive angles, namely:

In case you missed it, we snuck in a reliable, seat-of-the-pants method for getting the signs of orthogonal
matrices right. In any event, given P and Ri, we compute the coordinates, PRi, of the point P in ROADi

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

as follows:

If the angles are small, , and the matrix can be simplified to

Even at 20 degrees, the errors are only about 6% in the cosine and 2% in the sin, resulting in a maximum
error of 12% in the lower right of the matrix. This matrix approximation is suitable for the majority of
applications. One feature of orthogonal matrices is that their inverse is their transpose, that is, the matrix
derived by flipping everything about the main diagonal running from upper left to lower right. In the
small-angle approximation, we get

The right-hand side is very close to the unit matrix because the squares of small angles are smaller, yet.
With the inverse matrix we can convert from coordinates in ROADi to coordinates in EARTH:

The last set of coordinate frames is WHEELi. As with ROADi, there is one instance per wheel. WHEELi
is centred at the wheel hub. Under normal rolling, the coordinates of its origin in ROADi are WRi = (0, 0,
-Ri), where Ri is the loaded radius of the tyre-wheel combination. Pedantically, Ri should be corrected for
elevation and banking, but such corrections would be small for ordinary angles-on the order of
-plus it seems not to be standard practice (I can find no reference to it in my sources).
More important is the orientation of WHEELi. Consider the plane occupied by the wheel itself. This
plane intersects ROADi in a line that defines the X direction of WHEELi, with the positive direction
being as close to that of travel as possible. The Y direction points to driver's right. The wheel plane is
tilted by a camber angle, , about the X-axis of the WHEEL coordinate system. To emphasize: WHEELi

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

does not include wheel camber, and it differs from ROAD only by a rotation about ROAD's Z axis that
accounts for the pointing direction of the wheel.
At this point, you should create a mental picture of these coordinate frames under typical racing
conditions. Picture a CAR frame yawed at some heading w.r.t. EARTH-and perhaps pitched and rolled a
bit; a PATH frame aligned at some slightly different path heading; and individual ROAD and WHEEL
frames under each tyre contact patch, where the ROAD frames are perhaps tilted a bit w.r.t. EARTH and
the WHEEL frames are aligned with the wheel planes but coplanar with the ROAD frames. For a car
travelling on a flat road at a stable, flat attitude, the XY planes of CAR, PATH, and EARTH would all
coincide and would differ from one another only in the yaw angles and . When some tilting is
engaged, and are still defined by the precise projection mechanisms explained above.

Now, imagine the X-axis of CAR projected on the XY plane of each WHEEL frame and
translated-without changing its direction-to the origin of WHEEL. The angle of WHEEL's X axis, which
is the same as the plane containing the wheel, w.r.t. the projection of CAR's X axis, defines the steering
angle, , of that wheel. Finally, imagine PATH's X axis projected onto the XY plane of WHEEL in
exactly the same way. Its angle w.r.t. to the X axis of WHEEL, in all generality, defines the slip angle.
Since WHEEL is lilted w.r.t. gravitational down, the load, Fx, on the contact patch, which we need for
the magic formula, must be computed in WHEEL. It will be smaller than the total weight, Wi, by factors
of and , which are obviously unity under the small-angle approximation.

At last, we can plot the magic formula:

The horizontal axis measures slip angle, in degrees. The vertical axis measures lateral, cornering force, in
Newtons. The deep axis measures vertical load on the contact patch, in KiloNewtons. We can see that
these tyres have a peak at about 4 degrees of slip and that cornering force goes down as slip goes up on
either side of the peak. On the high side of the peak, we have dynamic understeer, where turning the
wheel more makes the situation worse. This is a form of instability in the control system of car and
driver.

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 Part 22: The Magic Formula: Lateral Version

As a final comment, let me say that I am somewhat dismayed that the magic formula does not account
for any variation of the lateral force with speed. Intuitively, the forces generated at high speeds must be
greater than the forces at low speed with the same slip angles. However, the literature-sometimes
explicitly, and sometimes by sin of omission-states that the magic formula doesn't deal with it. One of the
reasons is that, experimentally, effects of speed are extremely difficult to separate from effects of
temperature. A fast-moving tyre becomes a hot tyre very quickly on a test rig. Another reason is that
theoretical data is usually closely guarded and is not likely to make it into a consensus approximation
like the magic formula. This is a fact of life that we hope will not affect our analyses too adversely from
this point on.

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 Part 23: Trail Braking

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 23: Trail Braking
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright March 2001

Trail-braking is a subtle driving technique that allows for later braking and increased corner entry speed.
The classical technique is to complete braking before turn-in. This is a safer, easier technique for the
driver because it separates traction management into two phases, braking and cornering, so the driver
doesn't have to chew gum and walk at the same time, as it were. With the trail-braking technique, the
driver carries braking into the corner, gradually trailing off the brakes while winding in the steering.
Since braking continues in the corner, it's possible to delay its onset in the preceding straight braking
zone. Since it eliminates the sub-optimal moments between the ramp-down from braking and the
ramp-up to limit cornering by overlapping them, entry speeds can be higher. The combination of these
two effects means that the advantage of later braking is carried through the first part of the corner. In
many ways, this is the flip side to corner exit, where any speed advantage due to superior technique gets
carried all the way down the ensuing straight. The magnitude of the trail-braking effect is much smaller,
though: perhaps a car length or two for a typical corner. Done consistently, though, it can accumulate to
whole seconds over a course.
When I was taught to drive in the '80s, not all the fast drivers used trail braking and instructors usually
gave it at most a passing mention as an optional, advanced technique. The reason was probably a
risk-benefit analysis:
● it's a small effect compared to the big-picture basics, like carrying speed out of a corner, that
everyone must learn early on
● it's difficult to learn, so why burden new students with it?

● mistakes with it are ugly

Another reason may have been that my instructors hadn't got their butts kicked recently by a trail-braking
driver. It was not a commonplace technique back then, so one might drive a whole season of club racing
without getting spanked by trail braking. Since not everyone used it, not everyone had to develop the
skill.
Nowadays, however, the general level of driving skill has increased to the point where it's no longer
optional, unless you're content with fourth place.
As with most driving skills, it's difficult to get a feel for the limits without exceeding them from time to
time. However, exceeding the limits at trail braking has some of the worst consequences one can invite
on a race track, typically worse than those from mistakes at corner exit. It's definitely a big risk for a
small effect, justified only because it accumulates. Blowing it results in too high an entry speed. You get:

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 Part 23: Trail Braking

● inappropriate angular attitude in the corner

● immediate probing of the understeer or oversteer characteristics of the car
● surprise, pop quiz on the driver's car-control skills
● missed apex and track-out points
● a looming penalty cone, gravel trap, tyre barrier, concrete wall, tree, etc.
● when you bounce back from that impact, you can hit other cars, spectators, corner marshals,
berms, etc.
● anything else that can go wrong in a blown corner
That's one of the reasons I have not, in the past, singled it out for my personal driver-development work -
it's hard to do at all and harder to do it consistently and just didn't seem worth it. Another reason is that
the kinds of cars I like to drive let you get away without it much of the time. I prefer ultra-powerful cars
because they're fun and loud and attract a lot of attention. Paradoxically, though, such cars can lull one
into becoming a lazy driver. With a lot of power on tap, you can often make up for an overly
conservative entry speed on the exit.
However, when the cars are equalized, as in spec races, showroom stock, or in a lot of Solo II car classes,
trail braking takes a prominent role. It can be difficult to spot it as an issue in Solo II, where drivers are
alone against the clock. All else being equal, a Solo II driver without trail braking may just find himself
scratching his head wondering how in blazes the other drivers can be so much faster. Go wheel-to-wheel
on the track with equal cars, though, and the issue becomes instantly and visually obvious. You may be
just as fast in the corner, coming out of the corner, down the straight. You may have perfect threshold
braking. You may have perfect turn-in, apex and track out points. But that little extra later braking and
entry speed will allow the trail-braker to take away several feet every corner. Corner after corner, lap
after lap, he will gobble you up.
I recently completed a road-racing school at Sebring International Raceway where this is precisely what I
saw. In identical Panoz school cars, the drivers who were faster than I were doing it right there and
nowhere else. My ingrained, outdated style did me in, and even though I had much, much more on-track
experience than the rest of the students, and even though they weren't faster in top speed than I, and even
though their cornering technique was not nearly as polished as mine, three (out of twelve) of them had
better lap times than I.
The instructors were as surprised as I. One even said he would have bet money that I was the quickest
from watching me and riding with me (instructors sis not ride in the wheel-to-wheel sessions). The clock
doesn't lie though, and we were scratching our heads and I started swapping cars. Once we went
wheel-to-wheel on the third day of the program, I spotted it, right there the first time into turn 2: the three
quicker drivers took a car length from me on the corner entry. They did it again in turn 10 (Cunningham),
at the Tower turn, and turn 15 approaching the back stretch: all the turns requiring full braking and
downshifts. I made up a bit at the hairpin, which is an autocrosser's corner if there ever was one, and I
knew the importance of not missing the apex by more than an inch or two if possible. They also couldn't
beat me entering turn 17, which has no straight braking zone: instead, the best technique is to brake
partially after turn in (at 115 mph, this is big-time, serious fun). Thus, turn 17 did not trigger my
old-fashioned "braking-zone" program, and I was able to use my high-speed experience to coax a bit
more than average grip through it. So, in sum, my conservative turn-ins on the slow corners added up to

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 Part 23: Trail Braking

about half a second per lap, which is about 65 feet at the start-finish line where we're going about 90 mph
=132 fps (90 x 22 / 15). Ugly.
I was doing it the old-fashioned way: get the braking done in the braking zone and get your foot back on
the gas pedal and up to neutral throttle before turn-in. That little tenth of a second or so where I'm
coasting and they're still braking is the car-length they were taking out on me. It was small enough that
the instructors couldn't feel it or see it. But electronic instrumentation would have picked it up. When I
go back to the Panoz Sebring school next year, I will take advanced sessions in fully instrumented cars,
where the instructors go out for some laps at 10/10s, then the students go out in the same car and take
data. Back in the pits, the charts are differenced and the student can see precisely what he needs to do to
come up to the instructor's level (most of the instructors have years of experience on the track, and hold
current or former lap records in various cars on the course, so it's quite unlikely that a student will be as
quick out of the box).
The following is a picture of the course snipped from the web site at http://www.sebringraceway.com/, so
you can see the bits of the course I'm talking about:

Let me say a few things about the school. The three-day program consisted of

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 Part 23: Trail Braking

● solo exercises in braking, skid recovery, and autocrossing

● detailed in-car instruction as driver and passenger over several lapping sessions
● racecraft including passing and rolling starts
● wheel-to-wheel sessions on the full open course
It's a great program, easily better than spending the same amount of money on the car: highly
recommended.
Sebring is large, exciting, lovely, complex course with a deep history of sports-car racing. It is currently
3.70 miles in length, though it has been as long as 5.7 miles in its history. Let's do some dead reckoning,
that is, math in our heads without even envelopes to write on. We'll see if we can cook up some data,
from memory, to justify the intuitions and explain the results above.
There are 2.54 centimetres per inch: that's an exact number. Therefore, there are 2.54 x 12 = 30.48
centimetres per foot. The number of centimetres per mile, then are 30.48 x 5280 = 30 x 52 x 100 + 30 x
80 + 48 x 52 + 48 x 80 / 100 = 156000 + 2400 + (50 - 2)(50 + 2) + 3840 / 100 = 158400 + 2500 - 4 +
38.40 = 160,934.4. Thus, a mile contains 1.609344 kilometres, which we can round to 1.61, which is,
conveniently, 8/5 + 1/100. So 3.70 miles is 29.637 / 5 = 5.927 kilometres or just about 6. Now, there are
5280 / 3 = 1760 yards in a mile, so we have 3700 + 2590 + 222 = 6,512 yards, which is consistent with 6
kilometres, so we've got a check on our math. In fact, we can be a little more sanguine about it. Another
number we remember is that there are about 39 inches per metre; that's a yard and three inches, or 13/12
yard. So, if we have about 6,000 metres, that's going to be about 6,000 + 6,000 / 12 = 6,500 yards.
Amazing, isn't it? Finally, this is 6,512 x 3 = 13,036 + 6,512 = 19,048 feet.
Big Track. Nice.
A record time around the course in the Panoz school cars is 2 min 28 seconds. The students were doing
2:40 to 2:45. I believe I uncorked a 2:36 somewhere along the way, but my typical lap was 2:40 and the
quicker guys pulled about 65 feet on me at the start-finish every lap, which I reckoned before to be worth
half a second. What's the average speed at 2:40? That's 3.70 miles in 160 seconds. The average speed is
19,048 / 160 fps ~ 1905 / 16 ~ 476 / 4 ~ 119 fps, which is 119 x 15 / 22 mph, and that is (1190 + 595 ~
1785) / 22 = 892.5 / 11. It's hard to divide by 11, so lets multiply instead. 80 mph by 11 would be 880,
and that's not enough by 12.5. So, if we go with 81 mph by 11, namely 891, we're short by 1.5. A tenth of
11 will take care of some of that, so 81.1 by 11, namely 892.1, leaves us close enough. Now, doing the
same distance in 2:28, or 148 seconds, yields an average speed of 19,048 / 148 ~ 4,762 / 37. Another
tough divisor. Let's try 130 x 37 = 3700 + 1110 = 4810, too much by 48. But, we lucked out, it's obvious
that 48 is about 1.30 x 37, so we get 130 - 1.30 = 128.7 fps. Now multiply that by 15 / 22: (1287 + 643.5)
/ 22 ~ 1930 / 22 = 965 / 11. 90 x 11 would be 990, too much by 25, which is a little more than 2 x 11. So
90 - 2 = 88 x 11 would be 880 + 88 = 968, too much by 3, so we'll reduce 88 by 0.3 x 11 to get 87.7. The
average speed of a record-setting lap is 6.6 mph faster than our pitiful student laps! The difference is 12
seconds, so, as a rule of thumb, a second at 85 mph average is worth a little more than 1/2 an mph.
But, before we wander too far off topic, let's compare 2:40 to 2:40.5, since my contention from the
beginning of this note is THAT difference can be accounted entirely to trail braking in four corners of
this course: 2, 10, 13, and 15. Well, at 119 fps, average speed, half a second is about 60 feet, which is
about 4 car lengths. Yep, there you have it: one car length per significant corner due to trail braking.
Darn it, looks like I'll just have to go back there and keep trying, over and over again.

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Part 23: Trail Braking

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 Part 24: Combination Slip

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 24: Combination Slip
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright February 2001

The goal in this and the next instalment of the Physics of Racing is to combine the magic formulae of
parts 21 and 22, so that we have a model of tyre forces when turning and braking or turning and
accelerating at the same time. In this part, we figure out combination slip, and in the next instalment, we
figure out combination grip. Roughly speaking, slip is the input and grip is the output to our model. Slip
comes from control inputs on brakes, throttle and wheel, grip comes from reaction forces of the ground
on the tyres.
The regular magic formulae apply only to a tyre generating longitudinal or lateral forces in isolation, that
is, to a tyre accelerating or braking and not turning, or a tyre turning but not accelerating or braking. In
part 7, we approximated the response under combination slip by noting that it follows the circle of
traction. A tyre cannot deliver maximal longitudinal grip when it's delivering lateral grip at the same
time, and vice versa. According to my sources, modelling of combination slip and grip is an area of
active research, which means we are on our own, once again, in the original, risk-taking spirit of the
Physics of Racing series. In other words, we're going way out on a limb and this could all be totally
wrong, but I promise you lots of fun physics on the journey.
From part 21, recall our definition for the longitudinal slip, , the input to the longitudinal magic
formula

where V is the forward speed of the hub w.r.t. ground, Re is a constant, the effective radius, for a given
tyre, and Re is the backward speed of the CP w.r.t. the hub. Therefore, Re - V is the backward speed
of the CP w.r.t. EARTH. A slick technique for proving this, and, in fact, for figuring out any
combinations of relative velocities (see part 19) is as follows. Write V = HUB - GD, meaning speed of
the HUB relative to the ground (GD). Now write Re = -(CP - HUB) meaning the backward speed of
the CP relative to the HUB; the overall minus sign outside reminds us that we want Re positive when
the CP moves backwards w.r.t. the hub. Now, just do arithmetic:

Re- V = -(CP - HUB) - (HUB - GD)

= -CP + HUB - HUB + GD = -(CP - GD)

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 Part 24: Combination Slip

voila, backward speed of the CP w.r.t. the ground. This realization gives us intuition into the sign of :
if and only if the CP moves backwards faster than the hub moves forward; the car accelerates
forward-visualize that in your head; in that case, Re is greater than V; Re - V is greater than zero;
and is positive.

It turns out that we developed this formula only for the case when V is positive, that is, the car is moving
forward. And, in fact, the formula only works in that case. To generalize it to cars moving in reverse,
we'd best analyse it in excruciating detail. A moment's reflection reveals that there are eight cases: two
signs for V, two signs for Re, and two cases for whether the absolute value of V is greater than the
absolute value of Re, yielding eight = (2 2 2) possibilities, which have the following physical
interpretations:
1. Car (hub) moving forward, CP moving slowly forward w.r.t. ground, resisting car motion. This
models driving slowly in reverse gear while moving forward. Slowly, here, means slowly relative

to V, or, precisely, that , where is the absolute value or unsigned magnitude of

Re and is the absolute value or unsigned magnitude of V.

2. Same as above, just with CP moving quickly forward, that is with .

3. Car moving forward, CP moving slowly backwards, just not quickly enough to accelerate the car.
This is braking or engine braking in forward gear. Wheel lockup while moving forward falls in this
case, too.
4. Car moving forward, CP moving quickly backwards, accelerating the car forward.
5. Car moving backward, CP moving slowly forwards, just not quickly enough to accelerate the car
backward. This is braking or engine braking in reverse, and wheel lockup in reverse falls in this
case.
6. Car moving backward, CP moving quickly forward, accelerating in reverse.
7. Car moving backward, CP moving slowly backward, resisting motion.
8. Car moving backward, CP moving quickly backward, resisting motion.

We've caught all this in the following diagram, in which we have drawn V and Re as arrows, pointing
in the actual direction that the hub moves w.r.t. the ground and the CP moves w.r.t. the hub, respectively.
Algebraically, V and Re have opposing sign conventions, so Re is negative when its arrow points
up. In looking at this table, note that the longitudinal force Fx has the same sign as . When Fx and
are positive, the car is being forced forward by the ground's reacting to the tyres. When they're
negative, the car is being forced backwards. So, to figure out which way the car is being forced, just look
at the sign of .

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 Part 24: Combination Slip

Inspection of this table reveals that the following new formula works in all cases:

Where the numerator, Re - V is the signed difference of the two speeds and the denominator is
unsigned. It is perhaps surprising that there is so much richness in such a little formula. However, it is
precisely this richness that we must maintain as we add steering, that is, lateral slip angle at the same
time. The best way to do that is to vectorize the formula so that the algebraic signs of the vector
components take the place of the signed quantities V and Re. The approach here parallels the
approaches of parts 16 and 19. We want the signed component Vx to take the place of the old, signed V,
the signed component Lx of the slip velocity L to take the place of the old Re, and V now to denote the

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 Part 24: Combination Slip

unsigned magnitude of the vector V, that is . The next table summarizes

these changes:
Quantity old notation new notation vector
signed, forward speed of hub w.r.t. EARTH V Vx V

signed, backward speed of CP w.r.t. hub -Wx W

unsigned magnitude of hub speed V

or V
signed, backward speed of CP w.r.t. EARTH -Lx L=V+W

signed, longitudinal slip ?

Slip velocity, L [Lx, Ly, Lz] = V + W is the plain-old vector velocity of the CP w.r.t. EARTH with no
secret sign convention to confuse things. As an aside, we note that when the car sticks to the ground on
flat road, we may assume Lz = 0. W is CP velocity w.r.t. hub. In the TYRE system, W has only a
(signed) x-component, that is, WTYRE = [Wx, 0, 0]. These definitions hold whether the car is moving
forward or backward, accelerating or braking.
The big question mark in the table indicates that we do not have a vector for combination slip because we
measure its longitudinal and lateral components differently, as a ratio and as an angle, respectively. Note

that, since lateral slip is the angle made by V in the TYRE system, it is .
Since L = V + W, it's easy to see that

,
which is a most convenient expression, though some attention must be paid to the quadrant in which the
angle falls. We resolve this in the next two instalments of PhORS as we stitch together the two magic
formulae to make Combination Grip.
But first, let's update the big diagram, showing all eight cases with a little slip angle thrown into the mix,
and the vector sum, L = V + W, replacing the ad hoc, signed quantities of the old notation. The sign of

the slip angle does not introduce new cases so long as because the right-hand and left-hand
cases are precisely symmetrical. The nice thing, here, is that we can treat all eight cases the same way-the
nature of vector math takes care of it because the magnitude of a vector is always unsigned. Using
signed, scalar quantities, we had to dissect the system and introduce absolute value to get everything to
work. Absolute value has always struck me as a kind of crock or kludge to use when the math is just not
sufficiently expressive. The main contribution of this instalment is to fix that problem.

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Part 24: Combination Slip

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 25: Combination Grip
Brian Beckman, PhD

©Copyright February 2001

In this instalment of the Physics of Racing, we complete the program begun last time to combine the
magic formulae of parts 21 and 22, so that we have a model of tire forces when turning and braking or
turning and accelerating at the same time. Parts 21 and 22 introduced the magic formulae. The first one
takes longitudinal slip as input and produces longitudinal grip as output. The other one takes lateral slip
as input and produces lateral grip. Slip depends primarily on driver inputs, grip is force generated at the
ground. Longitudinal means in the straight-ahead direction. Lateral means sideways, as in the forces for
turning. Since the magic formulae work only in isolation, we have work to do to model turning and
braking at the same time and turning and accelerating at the same time.
Last time, we vectorized slip - the input - to come up with combination slip, captured in the vector slip
velocity. That vector measures the velocity of the contact patch with respect to (w.r.t.) the ground in one,
handy definition. This time, we first boil down combination slip to new inputs for the old magic
formulae. In the old magic formulae, we measure longitudinal slip as a percentage of unity, that is, as a
percentage of breakaway sliding; and we measure lateral slip as an angle in degrees. These are not
commensurable, meaning that we do not use the same units of measurement for both kinds of slip. That's
why there was a big, fat question mark in the vector slot for combination slip in one of the tables in part
24. Once we make them commensurable, then we stitch the magic formulae together to get one vector
gripping force as a function of one vector slip. This finally allows us to compute the forces delivered by a
tire under combination control inputs.
Once again, we are in uncharted territory, so take it all in the for-fun spirit of this whole series of articles.
I don't represent anything I do here as authoritative racing practice. I only claim to be bringing the fresh
perspective of a stubbornly naïve physicist to the problems of racing cars as an amateur. The standard
practice of the professional racing engineering community may be completely different. This is the
Physics of Racing, not the Engineering of Racing. I'm after the fundamental principles behind the game. I
use techniques that may be foreign to the engineers that build and race cars professionally. My results
may not be precise enough for final application. I may take approximations that simplify away things that
are actually critically important. On purpose, I'm figuring things out on my own. Often, this helps me
understand published engineering information better. Just as often, it helps me debunk and debug the
conventional wisdom. If you find mistakes, gaffs, or laughable dumb stuff, or if you know better ways to
do things, I encourage you to fire up debate, publish rebuttals, or write to me directly. I've done my best
to track down the latest and greatest information, but I've found lots of errors, ambiguities, and
inexplicabilities in the open literature. I also suspect a conspiracy, meaning that I'd bet that the tyre
manufacturers and pro racing teams don't publish their best information-I certainly wouldn't if I were

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

they.
Disclaimers out of the way, we now have enough tools on the table to combine the two magic formulae.

Recall the formulae from parts 21 and 22: and for the longitudinal and lateral
forces. Here they are, in isolation:

There are a lot of ways we could stitch them together. This is not the kind of situation where there is one
right answer. Instead, in the absence of hard theory or experimental data, we have the freedom to be
creative, with the inevitable risk of being wrong. We pick a method that satisfies some simple, intuitive,
physical requirements. First, we must put the inputs on the same footing. Ask "what is the value of for
which has its maximum, and what is the value of for which has its

maximum?" Call these two values and . They are constants for given Fx and : characteristics of a
particular tyre and car and surface. So, we can finesse the notation and just write and .

The maxima identify points on the rim or edge of the 'traction circle'. The grip decreases when
exceeds and when exceeds . Let's illustrate with , = 0, and the constants from
Genta's alleged Ferrari. Once we substitute all that in (and we'll let you check our arithmetic from the
data in prior articles), we get

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

We evaluate these equations for = 0, = 0, getting , , and showing a

small lateral force (about 16 lbs) due to conicity and ply steer. The source of that problem is the constant
offset in S, which results from a9 and a10's being non-zero. We just set them to zero for now. Let's plot
, slip on the horizontal axis and grip on the vertical:

The maximum positive grip occurs, just by eyeball, around = 0.08. To the left of the maximum,
adding more slip - more throttle - generates more grip. To the right of the maximum, adding more
slip generates less grip. That's where we've lost traction. We can find the maximum precisely by
plotting the slope of this curve, since the slope is zero right at the maximum:

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

Using secret physicist methods, I've found that this curve crosses the horizontal axis - that is, goes to zero
- at precisely = 0.0796. This was so much fun that we'll just do it again for . First, the curve
proper:

Notice the same kind of stability situation as we saw before. To the left of the maximum, more slip -
more steering - means more grip. To the right of the maximum, more slip means less grip. Here's the
slope:

We find that the maximum of the original curve, the zero-crossing of the slope, occurs at = 3.273°

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

Once we find the maxima, we can create new, non-dimensional quantities by scaling and by these
values, namely . These are pure numbers, so they're commensurable. They are unity
when and have the values of maximum traction in isolation of one another. We can then write new

functions and which have their maxima at s = 1 and a = 1. We seek a

vector-valued function of s and a whose longitudinal x component expresses the

longitudinal force component and whose lateral y component expresses the lateral force component
under combination slip. Build this up from and so that it satisfies the following requirements:

1. The magnitude of , that is, , should have its maximum

all the way around the traction circle, that is, whenever .
2. The individual components should agree completely with the old magic formulae whenever there
is pure longitudinal or pure lateral slip. Mathematically, this means that
and .

3. For a fixed, positive value of (throttle), as (steering) increases, the input to Fx must increase.
Say what? Here's the idea. Suppose you're on the limit of longitudinal grip. When steering
increases, the forward grip limit must be exceeded, and a great way to model that is just to shove
the input over the cliff to larger . We want the same behaviour the other way, namely, for a
fixed value of (steering), as (throttle) increases, the input to Fy increases to model the fact
that at maximum steering adding throttle exceeds the limit. We model the three other cases
entailing negative values of and below.
4. Below the limits, we do not want dramatic increases in forward grip when steering increases, and
vice versa. So, although we must increase the input to Fx with increasing , we must decrease the
output of Fx. Likewise, while we increase the input to Fy with increasing , we must decrease the
output. This requirement is a bit of a balancing act because often there is an increase of steering
grip with braking, as we see in the technique of trail braking. However, there is usually no increase
in steering grip with increased throttle in a front-wheel-drive car, even below the limits. In the
modelling of combined effects like this, it's necessary to include weight transfer with the
combination grip formula. That simply means that until we have a full model of the car up and
running, we won't be able to evaluate fully the quality of this combination magic grip formula.
The following table fleshes out requirement 3 for the cases of braking ( < 0 ) or turning left ( < 0 ).
The essential idea is that if the magnitude of either parameter increases, then the magnitudes of the inputs
to the old magic formulae must increase, but honouring the algebraic signs. If a parameter is positive, it
should get more positive as the magnitude of the other parameter increases. Similarly, if a parameter is
negative, it should get more negative as the magnitude of the other parameter increases.

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

sgn( ) sgn( ) Trend Trend input to Fx input to Fy

+ + increasing fixed increasing increasing
+ + fixed increasing increasing increasing
+ - increasing fixed increasing decreasing
+ - fixed decreasing increasing decreasing
- + decreasing fixed decreasing increasing
- + fixed increasing decreasing increasing
- - decreasing fixed decreasing decreasing
- - fixed decreasing decreasing decreasing

Without further ado, here's our proposal for the combination magic grip formula:

, ,

Using as the input, with the appropriate algebraic signs, satisfies requirements 1. Multiplying the
outputs by the ratio of s to and a to magically satisfies requirements 2, 3, and 4. There is, in fact,
plenty of freedom in the choice of the outer multiplier: strictly speaking, any power of the ratios would
do for requirements 2 and 4, and some care will be required to get the signs right for requirement 3. Until
we have a good reason to change it, we'll just go with the ratio straight up, especially since it
automatically gets the signs right. We close this instalment with a plot of the magnitude

showing the traction circle very clearly:

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 Part 25: Combination Grip

The stability criteria are visually obvious, here. If the current, commensurable slip values, s and a, are
inside the central "cup" region, then increasing either component of slip increases grip. If they're outside,
then increasing slip leads to decreasing grip and the driver is in the "deep kimchee" region of the plot.
ERRATA: The Physics of Racing series has been fairly error-free over the years, but I caught three
small errors in part 22 whilst going over it for this instalment. The good news is that they did not affect
any final results. I defined the WHEEL frame at the wheel hub but later I implied that it is centred at
the contact patch (CP). In fact, the frame at the CP is the important one, and we call it TYRE from now
on, avoiding the ambiguous "WHEEL". We never actually used the improperly defined WHEEL frame,
so, again, final results were not affected. Also, the dimensions for a3 in Part 22 should be N/Degree,
not just N, because a3 furnishes the dimensions for B, which always appears in the combination SB, and
has dimensions of degrees. Finally, the dimensions for a6 are 1/KN, not KN.

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

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The Physics of Racing,

Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I
Brian Beckman, PhD
©Copyright July 2001
Imagine 400 ft-lbs of torque measured on a chassis dynamometer like a DynoJet (see references at the
end). This is a very nice number to have in any car, street or racing. In dyno-speak, however, the
interpretation of this number is a little tricky.
To start a dyno session, you strap your car down with the driving wheels over a big, heavy drum, then
you run up the gears gently and smoothly until you're in fourth at the lowest usable engine RPM, then
you floor it, let the engine run all the way to redline, then shut down. The dyno continuously measures
the time and speed of the drum and the engine RPM through a little remote radio receiver that picks up
spark-plug noise. The only things resisting the motion of the driving wheels are the inertia of the
driveline in the car and the inertia of the drum. The dyno 'knows' the latter, but not the former. Without
these inertias loading the engine, it would run up very quickly and probably blow up. Test-stand dynos,
which run engines out of the car, load them in different ways to prevent them from free running to
annihilation. Some systems use water resistance, others use electromagnetic; in any case, the resistance
must be easy to calibrate and measure. We are only concerned with chassis dynos in this article,
however.
What is the equation of motion for the car + dyno system? It is a simple variation on the theme of the old,
familiar second law of Newton. For linear motion, that law has the form F = ma, where F is the net
force on an object, m is its mass, and a is its acceleration, or time rate of change of velocity.
For rotational motion, like that of the driveline and dyno, Newton's second law takes the form
where T is the net torque on an object, J is its moment of inertia, and is its angular acceleration, or
time rate of change of angular velocity. The purpose of this instalment of the Physics of Racing is to
explain everything here and to run a few numbers.
To get the rotational equation of motion, we assume that the dyno drum is strong enough that it will
never fly apart, no matter how fast it spins. We model it, therefore, as a bunch of point masses held to the
centre of rotation by infinitely strong, massless cables. With enough point masses, we can approximate
the smooth (but grippy) surface of the dyno drum as closely as we would like.

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

Assume each particle receives a force of F / N in the tangential direction. Tangential, of course, means
the same as circumferential or longitudinal, as clarified in recent instalments about slip and grip of tyres.
So, each particle accelerates according to F / N = ma / N. The N cancels out, leaving a = F / m. Now, a
is the rate of change of the velocity, and the velocity is defined as , where r is the constant radius
of the circle and is the angular velocity in radians per second. The circumference of the circle is
, by definition, so a drum of 3-foot radius has a circumference of about 6.28 x 3 = 18.8 feet. At 60
RPM, which is one rev per second, each particle goes 18.8 feet per second, which is about 15 x 18.8/22 =
12.8 mph. RPM is one measurement of angular velocity, but it's more convenient to measure it such that
angular units go by every second. Such units save us from having to track factors of all over the
math. So, there are radians per revolution, and the equation is seen as a general expression of
the example that x revolutions per second = 18.8 feet per second = velocity.

Since r is constant, it has no rate of change. Only has one, measured in radians per second per second,
or radians per second squared, or , and denoted with an overdot: . The equation of motion,

so far, looks like . Now, we know that torque is just force times the lever arm over
which the force is applied. So, a force of F at the surface of the drum translates into a torque of T = Fr
applied to the shaft-or by the shaft, depending on point of view. So we write ,
which we can rearrange to . We can make this resemble the linear form of Newton's law if
we define , the moment of inertia of the drum, yielding , which looks just like F = ma

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

if we analogise as follows: .
This value for J only works for this particular model of the drum, with all the mass elements at distance
r from the centre. Suffice it to say that a moment of inertia for any other model of the drum could be
computed in like manner. It turns out that the moment of inertia of a solid cylindrical drum is half as
much, namely . Moments of inertia for common shapes can be looked up all over the place,
for instance at http://www.physics.uoguelph.ca/tutorials/torque/Q.torque.inertia.html.

So, now, the dyno has a known, fixed value for J, and it measures very accurately. This enables it to
calculate trivially just how much torque is being applied by the driving wheels of the car to the drum. But
it does not know the moment of inertia of the driveline of the car, let alone the radius of the wheels, the
gear selected by the driver, the final-drive ratio in the differential, and so on. In other words, it knows
nothing about the driveline other than engine RPM.
Everyone knows that the transmission and final-drive on a car multiply the engine torque. The torque at
the driving wheels is almost always much larger than the flywheel torque, and it's larger in lower gears
than in higher gears. So, if you run up the dyno in third gear, it will accelerate faster than if you run it up
in fourth gear. Yet, the dyno reports will be comparable. Somehow, without knowing any details about
the car, not even drastic things like gear choice, the dyno can figure out flywheel torque. Well, yes and
no.
It turns out that all the dyno needs to know is engine RPM. It does not matter whether the dyno is run up
quickly with a relatively large drive-wheel torque (DWT) or run up slowly with a relatively small DWT.
Furthermore, the radius of the driving wheels and tyres also does not matter. Here's why.
Wheel RPM is directly proportional to drum RPM, assuming the longitudinal slip of the tyres is within a
small range. The reason is that at the point of contact, the drum and wheel have the same circumferential
(longitudinal, tangential) speed, so . Let's write
, where . Engine RPM is related to wheel RPM by a factor that
depends on the final-drive gear ratio f and the selected gear ratio . We write
. Usually, engine RPM is much larger than wheel RPM, so we can expect
to be larger than 1 most of the time. So, we get

We also know that, by Newton's Third Law, that the force applied to the drum by the tyre is the same as
the force applied to the tyre by the drum. Therefore the torques applied are in proportion to the radii of
the wheel + tyre and the drum, namely that

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

or . Recalling that the transmission gear and final drive multiply engine torque, we also
know that , so . But we already know :

it's the ratio of the RPMs, so , or, more usefully,

Every term on the right-hand side of this equation is measured or known by the dyno, so we can measure
engine torque independently of car details! We can even plot versus , effectively taking
the run-up time and the drum data out of the report.
Almost. There is a small gotcha. The engine applies torque indirectly to the drum, spinning it up. But the
engine is also spinning up the clutch, transmission, drive shaft, differential, axles, and wheels, which, all
together, have an unknown moment of inertia that varies from car-to-car, though it's usually considerably
smaller than J, the moment of inertia of the drum. But, in the equations of motion, above, we have not
accounted for them. More properly, we should write

This doesn't help us much because we don't know , so we pull a fast one and rearrange the
equation:

This is why chassis dyno numbers are always lower than test-stand dyno numbers for the same engine.
The chassis dyno measures , and the test-stand measures . Of course, those trying to
sell engines often report the best-sounding numbers: the test-stand numbers. So, don't be disappointed
when you take your hot, new engine to the chassis dyno after installation and get numbers 15% to 20%
lower than the advertised 'at the crankshaft' numbers in the brochure. It's to be expected. Typically,
however, you simply do not know : it's a number you take on faith.

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

Let's run a quick sample. The following numbers are pulled out of thin air, so don't hang me on them.
Suppose the drum has 3-foot radius, is solid, and weighs 6,400 lbs, which is about 200 slugs (remember
slugs? One slug of mass weighs about 32 pounds at the Earth's surface). So, the moment of inertia of the
drum is about . Let's say that the engine takes about 15 seconds to run from
1,500 RPM to 6,000 RPM in fourth gear, with a time profile like the following:
t e RPM V MPH v FPS drum drum drum RPM RPM ratio Torque
0 1,500 35 51.33 17.11 0.00 163.40 0.1089 0.00
1 1,800 42 61.60 20.53 3.42 196.08 0.1089 335.51
2 2,100 49 71.87 23.96 3.42 228.76 0.1089 335.51
3 2,400 56 82.13 27.38 3.42 261.44 0.1089 335.51
4 2,700 63 92.40 30.80 3.42 294.12 0.1089 335.51
5 3,000 70 102.67 34.22 3.42 326.80 0.1089 335.51
6 3,300 77 112.93 37.64 3.42 359.48 0.1089 335.51
7 3,600 84 123.20 41.07 3.42 392.16 0.1089 335.51
8 3,900 91 133.47 44.49 3.42 424.84 0.1089 335.51
9 4,200 98 143.73 47.91 3.42 457.52 0.1089 335.51
10 4,500 105 154.00 51.33 3.42 490.20 0.1089 335.51
11 4,800 112 164.27 54.76 3.42 522.88 0.1089 335.51
12 5,100 119 174.53 58.18 3.42 555.56 0.1089 335.51
13 5,400 126 184.80 61.60 3.42 588.24 0.1089 335.51
14 5,700 133 195.07 65.02 3.42 620.92 0.1089 335.51
15 6,000 140 205.33 68.44 3.42 653.60 0.1089 335.51

The "v MPH" column is just a straight linear ramp from 35 MPH to 140 MPH, which are approximately
right in my Corvette. The "v FPS" column is just 22 / 15 the v MPH. The drum is in radians per
second and is just v FPS divided by 3 ft, the drum radius. The drum is just the stepwise difference of
the drum numbers. It's constant, as we would expect from a run-up of the dyno at constant
acceleration. The drum RPM is times the drum . The RPM ratio is just drum RPM divided by
engine RPM, and it must be strictly constant, so this is a nice sanity check on our math. Finally, the
torque column is the RPM ratio times J = 900 slug - ft2 times drum . We see a constant torque output
of about 335 ft-lbs. Not bad. It implies a test-stand number of between 394 and 418, corresponding to
15% and 20% driveline loss, respectively. Looks like we nailed it without 'cooking the books' too badly.
Of course, we have a totally flat torque curve in this little sample, but that's only because we have a
completely smooth ramp-up of velocity.
Dyno reports often will be labelled 'Rear-wheel torque' (RWT) or, less prejudicially, 'drive-wheel torque'
(DWT) to remind the user that there is an unknown component to the measurement. These are well
intentioned misnomers: do not be mislead! What they mean is 'engine torque as if the engine were
connected to the drive wheels by a massless driveline', or 'engine torque as measured at the drive wheels
with an unknown but relatively small inertial loss component'. It should be clear from the above that the
actual drive-wheel torque cannot be measured without knowing A, the ratio of the drum radius to the

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 Part 26: The Driving Wheel, Chapter I

wheel + tyre radius. It's slightly ironic that an attempt to clear up the confusion risks introducing more
confusion.
In the next instalment, we relate the equations of motion for the driving wheel to the longitudinal magic
formula to compute reaction forces and get equations of motion for the whole car.
References:
http://www.c5-corvette.com/DynoJet_Theroy.htm [sic]
http://www.mustangdyne.com/pdfs/7K%20manualv238.pdf
http://www.revsearch.com/dynamometer/torque_vs_horsepower.html
Attachments:
I've included the little spreadsheet I used to simulate the dyno run. It can be downloaded here.

ERRATA:
* Part 14, yet again, the numbers for frequency are actually in radians per second, not in cycles per
second. There are cycles per radian, so the 4 Hz natural suspension frequency I calculated and then
tried to rationalize was really 4 / 6.28 Hz, which is quite reasonable and not requiring any rationalization.
Oh, what tangled webs we weave…
* Physical interpretations of slip on page 2 of part 24: "Car (hub) moving forward, CP moving slowly
forward w.r.t. ground, resisting car motion." Should be "Car (hub) moving forward, CP moving slowly
forward w.r.t. HUB, resisting car motion."
* Part 21, in the back-of-the-envelope numerical calculation just before the 3-D plot at the end of the

paper, I correctly calculated , but then incorrectly calculated

as -0.266. Of course, it's 0.688 - 0.822 = -0.134. One of the hazards of doing math in
one's head all the time is the occasional slip up. Normally, I check results with a calculator just to be
really sure, but some are so trivial it just seems unnecessary. Naturally, those are the ones that bite me.

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 Physics of Racing Series, FAQ

Physics of Racing Series, FAQ

This FAQ was written by Brian Beckman, with updates by Robert Keller .
● What is the PhORS?

It is a series of articles about the physics of racing cars. It is decidedly slanted toward autocrossing (my
favorite sport), but sidebars from other forms of racing appear when relevant. I start with the fundamentals
(Newton's Laws, for example) and am slowly but surely building up complexity and covering more advanced
topics. I cover all aspects of racing where physics applies, from driving to car setup to computer simulations.
I am trying hard to make the articles useful and enjoyable for the non-technical reader who knows that
physics is important for racing but needs some help understanding it. So, you don't have to be a physicist,
engineer, etc. to understand the articles.
The series started in our local-area autocrosser's newsletter in June '90. I started posting them to Team.Net
not long thereafter. To date (27 July 91) there are nine articles. There is no end in sight. (There are now
twelve articles in total -rck 1995)
● What are your sources for info in the articles?
The analyses in the articles are totally original. I'm figuring out the physics as I go along, as part of figuring
out autocrossing and trying to get better at it. I'm a professional physicist (actually doing computer science,
these days), and an amateur racer. The articles are kind of a journal of a personal learning process from a
physicist's point of view.
I avoid reading the "classical" technical texts (Smith, Puhn, Taruffi, etc.) before writing an article (though I
*sometimes* cross-check my results with them). I do this on purpose for several reasons:
❍ It would be of little value to you to see mere regurgitations of material you can read yourself in those
sources,
❍ I want the depth of understanding that can come only from figuring out the physics from first
principles,
❍ "peeking at the answer" would spoil the fun for me,

❍ I hope and can give a somewhat fresh outlook on things.

As time goes on, I am working into more accurate approxi- mations at the cost of greater complexity. The
earlier articles are easier to understand but less accurate.
● How can I get copies of the series?
The articles are stored in electronic form for anonymous ftp on ftp://ftp.team.net/autocross/ thanks to the
generosity of Mark Bradakis, one of the founders of Team.net. Ask your local network guru for help with ftp
and the decoding procedures outlined below.
The articles are free for the taking for personal use, though they are copyrighted by me (more about that
below).
The following describes the format of the files by giving the example of Physics09.tar.Z, the file that
contains the ninth physics article on "Straights."
First, download the file to your favorite machine using anonymous ftp. On my unix machine, I would do the
following:

$ ftp ftp.team.net

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Physics of Racing Series, FAQ

Name: ftp
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password: [email protected]
:
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> binary
200 Type set to I.
ftp> cd autocross
ftp> ls P*
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 37152 Dec 4 1991 Physics-12.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 245929 May 10 1991 Physics01.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 119451 May 10 1991 Physics02.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 128571 May 10 1991 Physics03.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 136700 May 10 1991 Physics04.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 207627 May 10 1991 Physics05.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 138705 May 10 1991 Physics06.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 194927 May 10 1991 Physics07.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 136828 Jun 21 1991 Physics08.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 262933 Jul 9 1991 Physics09.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 131816 Aug 19 1991 Physics10.tar.Z
-r--r--r-- 1 0 3 256133 Oct 9 1991 Physics11.tar.Z
226 Transfer complete.
ftp> get Physics09.tar.Z
ftp> quit
$
Then, uncompress the file, as in the following:

$ zcat Physics09.tar.Z
That results in Physics09.tar, which is a virtual "Tape ARchive." Extract the files from it as follows:

$ tar xvf Physics09.tar

A directory "09" containing three files will appear. The files are:

-rw-r--r-- 1 brian 354692 Jul 9 09:54 09-Straights.PS

This is a file containing PostScript input for any PostScript printer. The file was made and tested on an Apple
LaserWriter, but should work on anything. Notice it is very large. The reason is that the Apple Macintosh
software that produces it is kind of dumb. The articles are usually five or six pages when printed.

-rw-r--r-- 1 brian 126102 Jul 9 10:05 09-Straights.self.sit.hqx

This contains original Macintosh files. The files are encoded in "binhex" format. This file is straight ASCII.
Get it over to your Mac, run Stuffit 1.5.1 or 1.6, select "decode binhex" from a menu, and decode the file. An
application program will result. This application program is a so-called "self-unstuffing archive." Just
execute it (by double clicking, for example). It will extract its contents automagically.
There is always a "Textures" file. Textures is a Mac implementation of TeX, Donald Knuth's technical

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 Physics of Racing Series, FAQ

typesetting software package, with extensions for pictures. Textures allows me to put figures in the articles. I
know of no UNIX implementation of TeX that makes it easy to put in pictures, so I use the Mac
implementation.
Sometimes there are other supporting files such as Excel spreadsheets or original artwork files.

-rw-r--r-- 1 brian 13176 Jul 9 06:28 09-Straights.tex

This is the TeX source for the article. It is a human-readable, ASCII file, so you can still get the gist of an
article by reading it if you don't have an implementation of TeX for typesetting the article. **NOTE** if you
process this file, you will get the text of the articles and any equations and tables. You will not get the
figures. The figures are available only to Mac users via the Textures file or to hardcopy users who print out
the PostScript file.
● What are the terms of the copyright?
Anyone can download the files, print them, read them, give copies to your friends, etc. I ask that you do not
charge money if you give away copies. I ask that you not change the articles. Essentially, the articles are
"copylefted:" use them freely, but do not restrict the access of anyone else to them by charging money or
altering them.
You are free to print them in your local autocrossing newsletter if you
❍ ask me first (email is OK, [email protected]),

❍ make sure you attribute them to me with my name and address and copyright stuff in the printed
version (make sure the blame gets to the right person),
❍ send me copies of your newsletter.
These articles are already being published in at least four newsletters around the country and I have gotten
generally positive reviews. I've also generated some debates, which is great fun and really brings out the
issues.
Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them!
\brian\

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 On The Track

Click
Here

Motorsport!
The Miata has proven to be a star performer on the autocross track. We'll be adding more information
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Mazda Motorsports

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The Physics Of Racing

The best technical description
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esoteric, but excellent!

PDF version of Physics of

Racing

Drive to Race - Amateur Racing

24 Hours at Daytona

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 On The Track

Targa Tasmania

Racing Seat & Harness Installation

A Driving Tour of Road Atlanta - by Rob Ebersol

Warning: Gas pedal can stick on wide open throttle.

Kate Hughes' Solo II Novice Handbook

Kate is a top autocrosser, driving a '91 base model Mariner Blue Miata affectionately
named "Prudence." She originally wrote this article for the Tire Rack Motorsports page.

Miata Autocross Tips and Allowable Modifications

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Sierra Sports Car Club

20 December, 2002

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