It isn't the simple cost of the strain gauges.
It's knowing where and how to fit them on the kart and being able to predict how they will modify the karts behaviour under certain circumstances.
Take a particular corner on a track. Whingers' at Forest is a good one as it has been recently resurfaced.
Going into Whingers there are a variety of lines, most designed to avoid the 'Dip' that has been built into the racing line.
So when you sensor up the kart you need to monitor the various forces on the kart, but also have a very precise image of what causes those forces. Is the compression of the outside wheel a result of hitting the Dip or the effect of adverse camber (there's that too) or the change in adhesion from old to new tarmac or simply the flex in the chassis or the effect of a tyre that is more or less grippy because any of the variables, heat cycles, temperature, pressure, age of rubber, ambient pressure, internal density, humidity of the filling air, etc has altered.
Then having got all these measurements, how do you build them into software that tells the team what they want to know, in a timely manner. It may be possible for an F1 race team to have several analysts monitoring the different parameters, but the average kart team?
So you want software that will tell you in a fairly simple way that what you need to do is change the tyre pressures by X and change the diagonal torque by Y to suit that corner at this time. I suspect that such software will be fairly complex...alright, if I was writing it myself I would be looking at self-modifying heuristics, looking for patterns that had known cause and effect, constantly revising themselves and possibly being relevant to one particular track.
If that was so, then there is £000's in research required. An individual might have the time and inclination to write it himself and carry out the base research, but I doubt that any particular firm or team is prepared to spend that much money on what is essentially speculative. After all, if it costs a year's salary of a skilled electronics / software engineer it's going to cost what, £50k, £100k and the services of a skilled driver and kart in firstclass condition, which means a kart engineer as well.
So lets say it costs £250k to develop the package then you have to fill the database of tracks. So you have to account for the same effort to be added to your race team as well.
How many extra karts or places on your race team do you need to sell to make money out of the effort?
Secondly, the inevitable result is that you create an extra layer of expense in karting. Now I can remember when the BBC included the various F1 races on their Sunday afternoon sports round up, because people arrived towing their F1 car on a trailer to Thruxton. It wasn't a 3 hour programme on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday, it was the filler between football and horseracing.
The only reason it was possible for Ecclestone to create the circus as it is now was to make that level of motorsport exclusive. I have no doubt that one could make Karting Supreme events exclusive (or more exclusive) but how would you generate the advertising and sponsorship to fund it?
After all, we regularly notice that there is a trend towards disposing of the extra expenses of the MSA, for the autocratic authority of non-MSA racing. ( One could argue that the major cost of the MSA is having "fairness", the ability to argue a decision rather than just submit to the organiser's ruling, and a lot of people don't think that the expense is worth the privilege because winning at any cost just isn't that important to them.)
So if one produced a significant advantage by having that technology, one effectively creates a new class of racing, the EME class (even more expensive) limited to the very few. Or in the same way that championships now limit the access to tracks during race weeks, the technology could be forbidden to increase the number of drivers wanting to race.
And if it didn't produce that significant advantage, then would anyone buy it, apart from the very rich in the assumption that they were good enough to exploit it?
As I say, it is something that someone is going to have to develop off their own backand turn into a cheap solution (under their own rock, as it were) rather than have an expensive development project at someone else's expense.
(Ok, the Christadolou experience of F1 types of money into developing an engineering advantage might give the lie to this opinion, but how many Christadolous are there in the sport?)
|
|
Chassis tortional rate measurement by 'Danlee' (12 Jul 2011 @ 20:18)
