The fastest car is not always the fastest car

There is an ongoing debate about the importance of racing to road cars. Even race cars based on road cars end up being very different from each other. They both conform to completely different rules; They both have very different use cases. But there’s a lesson from racing that applies to road cars very well: the fastest car isn’t always the fastest car.

There are a lot of ways you can define “fastest car.” For the purposes of this story, we’ll talk in terms of cycle time.

In racing, you have a lot of levers you can pull to achieve the desired handling balance – springs, dampers, anti-roll bars, alignment, brake bias, and aerodynamics. Some race cars have a few more, some less, but those are the basics. Race cars, like modern GT3 cars, also have traction control and ABS, and although they work differently to their road car counterparts, the principles are the same.

You have a lot of these same levers in a road car, but add more advanced electronic systems like adaptive suspension, electronic differentials, stability control, etc. Slightly different setup tools, but similar goals.

Making a car fast may seem like a simple physics problem. But in reality, it’s an inexact science, thanks to a living, breathing human being in the middle of the equation.

“The optimal speed setting is not always what is best for the drivers, driveability and racing ability,” explains Adam Adelson, one of the drivers of the Wright Motorsport #120 Porsche 911 GT3 R in the IMSA WeatherTech Series.

“You can have a supercar that is theoretically capable of the fastest lap, but if you have to be perfect to a tenth of a degree in your steering inputs, and perfect by a millimeter on each pedal, you will lose more time in mistakes than you will gain.”

You can create a setup that might achieve an amazing time in a simulator, or a setup that a metronomically perfect driver could achieve in a time trial, but that’s not actually the fastest. There is fast in theory, and fast in reality, and they are both very different.

Good road car engineers understand the same thing. Last year, Lamborghini CTO Reuven Mohr He explained to Engine1 It’s on the test trackthey will have drivers with different skill runtimes. “We compared the best time with the worst time (in the car), and the difference shouldn’t be too big.”

Sports car racing is a team sport, so all drivers must agree on one setup that represents a reasonable compromise between what each of them wants. You can make small adjustments to the setup throughout the race, but as Adelson’s teammate Elliot Skeer explains, you don’t change the springs in pit lane.

“If it’s a 40-minute race for one driver, it’s a lot easier to have an understanding of the conditions and the environments. (The team) can really fit them into the car,” he says. But we’re talking before the 10-hour endurance race at Petit Le Mans, and it’s not.

“Over the course of 10 hours, three drivers, you see every type of environment you can, it’s become a game of averages,” explains Skeer, “where you have to sacrifice certain angles for others, you have to sacrifice certain hours of the day for others.”

The Petit Le Mans race begins under the autumn sun at midday at 12:10pm and ends in the dark at 10:10pm that night. There is a significant drop in temperature at sunset, so teams typically set up their cars to be faster at night, at the expense of some performance during the day.

Skeer’s “game of averages” comment applies to road cars as well. Engineers have to optimize the car to suit a wide range of drivers, yes, making it as safe as possible while maintaining some speed, but also for a wide range of conditions and environments.

Of course, while a high-performance road car may have electronic systems that can respond to various external and driver inputs, it must be set up to operate on essentially any road or track it travels on. Obviously, a team like Wright Motorsports prepares the car for the specific track and conditions, looking into very fine details.

In terms of handling, in general, drivers want a car that goes where they point it, and that inspires confidence. You need enough front end that the car wants to turn, but you need a rear end that follows faithfully. In a racing environment, this is very important as there is always traffic to deal with. Even more so in multi-class races like the IMSA WeatherTech Series, where in a GT3 car you’re a small fish in a big pond.

It’s the human element that makes this interesting. There is a lot of science involved, and as with all modern racing teams, Wright Motorsport spends hours poring over data and video from the car. But they also have to match the data and video to the words drivers use to describe the car.

“We correlate what we say, we watch the video and match that with our feedback, and that can be really important,” Adelson says.

It’s this combination of soft and hard science that makes car setup so fascinating. Trying to put the self in objective terms, as well as knowing the limits of what the target tells you is true. It’s an incredibly complex subject, but ultimately the goal is simple – to create a car that can win a race.