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[CookinFlat6]

Big apologies all round for coming back on topic and saying yet the same thing about Button and how McLaren have designed this years car around him and are paying the price for catering to a mediocre driver. This is an excellent article that just has to be posted in the Team Button thread. In fact you could say it is the manifesto for Team Button.

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/will-gray/gray-matter-button-big-chance-170332781.html

snippet from the interview

He insists: “I think (my driving style) is actually the quickest way, so long as the car can be made to work that way.”
To that end, he says his input on development last year was “massively important” and he indicated in pre-season interviews that the new McLaren has indeed been designed around that style.

[andrew]

I think that snippet could be a quote from any driver.

[Hammer278]

We'll see the "quickest way" led by Jenson Button in just 7 hours I reckon.

[CookinFlat6]

He thinks the quickest way is to gently bleed speed into the corner and then corner as if on rails with perfect balance and then accelerate once safely out the corner.
Whreas any boy racer whos had a street race would tell you that if you carry all your speed into the corner, brake at the last moment, then turn and accelerate again, although trickier is much faster.
The difference is ofcourse you must be able to regain control of a car that becomes momentarily unstable, and the more unstable you can afford to let it go the quicker you will be (up to a limit)

Jensons way is slower ultimately because you never become unstable, so its safer and smoother but slower. The car can only go so fast round a corner perfectly balanced. And if you try make it understeer to avoid the unstability limit you have to go slower to make the corner in first place.

So the McLaren has been designed with an emphasis on rear grip and a tendency to understeer, and its only till button finds the perfect balance thru setup that it can really find its true limits of speed round the corner.

Problem with that is many tracks little time for setup in each

This is why all the engineers would prefer to develop cars round drivers who dont need this perfection and can handle rearend instability and just slow down a bit to handle understeer

I mean this aint rocket science, no wonder paddy did a runner if he was ordered to build a car that would understeer you silly ages before any oversteer.

This is how Button has ruined every team he has been at - the search for the car with perfect driving miss daisy balance and poise through 20 different tracks

Its such a criminal waste I feel like calling the police

[andrew]

Did you just compare spanking a clapped out Vauxhall Corsa round a street to racing a finely tuned F1 car?

[CookinFlat6]

Have you ever even driven a car Andrew? You do know they all have 4 wheels and a fifth one for steering though?

[racechick]

I'm surprised he's admitting it was designed round him with his input when it clearly isn't working. It seems the car has understeer problems, amongst other things, is that because they gave it understeer to help Button? But went a bit too mad with the understeer? Or is it because understeer has just happened as a by product of those radical changes they did?

[andrew]

Have you ever even driven a car Andrew? You do know they all have 4 wheels and a fifth one for steering though?

Of course I have but you just compared driving a road car with circa 100bhp to driving an F1 car with nearly 800bhp.

[CookinFlat6]

I'm surprised he's admitting it was designed round him with his input when it clearly isn't working. It seems the car has understeer problems, amongst other things, is that because they gave it understeer to help Button? But went a bit too mad with the understeer? Or is it because understeer has just happened as a by product of those radical changes they did?

Every car has a limit to how fast it can go round a track, 2 things limit it, over steer - grip on the back end goes or understeer - you are going too fast and the car cant turn enough in time.
The engineers setup the car to go as fast as possible till one of these things happens to limit the speed they can create.
Once at this limit they can then look at weighting the dynamics of different things. The perfect balanced car will still have to have a limit where 1 of these happens, so button wants a car where the front tyres warm up quickly despite his smooth style they need to make sure theres more contact with the ground when hes tyrning etc

A bit simplistic but it aint rocket science, this is what engineers work out I just like to drive

[scotty]

He thinks the quickest way is to gently bleed speed into the corner and then corner as if on rails with perfect balance and then accelerate once safely out the corner.
Whreas any boy racer whos had a street race would tell you that if you carry all your speed into the corner, brake at the last moment, then turn and accelerate again, although trickier is much faster.

The fastest theoretical way of driving a car is to trailbrake all the way to the apex then progressively and consistently apply the throttle on exit. This allows the driver to operate at the limit of the force circle (ie the actual limit of adhesion) and so maximises speed into, during, and out of a corner. Purely on paper that is the very fastest way of getting a car through a corner, so Button would be correct to think that. Obviously in real life it is never perfect like that, we all know that, but that is the fastest potential method - fact.

Anyone who's had a street race is frankly a moron and those types usually end up in a ditch upside down because their ego outweighs their ability, so god only knows what point you are trying to make here. I don't know why you would try to put that even in the same planet as professional race driving.

[racechick]

I like it simplistic I hadn't thought of it like that. I mean that one end or the other will ultimately let go,and understeer or oversteer is which end lets go first. I like that much clearer. I'd just thought of it as a tendency for the car to do understeer or oversteer at corners as a result of other things the engineers did. And that Button found understeer easier so they made the car do that. Much easier to understand now. Perez is really not going to like that handling then is he?

[racechick]

He thinks the quickest way is to gently bleed speed into the corner and then corner as if on rails with perfect balance and then accelerate once safely out the corner.
Whreas any boy racer whos had a street race would tell you that if you carry all your speed into the corner, brake at the last moment, then turn and accelerate again, although trickier is much faster.

The fastest theoretical way of driving a car is to trailbrake all the way to the apex then progressively and consistently apply the throttle on exit. This allows the driver to operate at the limit of the force circle (ie the actual limit of adhesion) and so maximises speed into, during, and out of a corner. Purely on paper that is the very fastest way of getting a car through a corner, so Button would be correct to think that. Obviously in real life it is never perfect like that, we all know that, but that is the fastest potential .

Im not sure what trail braking is....But if that's the fastest way to go round a corner, why does Button usually go slower than Lewis?

[CookinFlat6]

He thinks the quickest way is to gently bleed speed into the corner and then corner as if on rails with perfect balance and then accelerate once safely out the corner.
Whreas any boy racer whos had a street race would tell you that if you carry all your speed into the corner, brake at the last moment, then turn and accelerate again, although trickier is much faster.

The fastest theoretical way of driving a car is to trailbrake all the way to the apex then progressively and consistently apply the throttle on exit. This allows the driver to operate at the limit of the force circle (ie the actual limit of adhesion) and so maximises speed into, during, and out of a corner. Purely on paper that is the very fastest way of getting a car through a corner, so Button would be correct to think that. Obviously in real life it is never perfect like that, we all know that, but that is the fastest potential method - fact.

Anyone who's had a street race is frankly a moron and those types usually end up in a ditch upside down because their ego outweighs their ability, so god only knows what point you are trying to make here. I don't know why you would try to put that even in the same planet as professional race driving.

Thats precisely why I used that example, in real life, irresponsible yobs tend to drift around corners with wheel spin etc because you can get round quicker than with a theoretical ballistic model where you are at the perfect speed and take the inch perfect theoretical line,

They ofcourse wont know that all the fastest F1 drivers in history have favoured this approach, such as Senna, MS, Mansell, Hamilton, but as yobs on the street they will be going by instinct.

The theoretical limit for a stable car is as you explained, the other approach is not stable and so isnt definable by the mathematical calculations really

[CookinFlat6]

In fact its like the eurofighter, its inherently unstable, it wont glide without its computers making millions of adjustments each second to different surfaces. But it can change direction faster and tighter than the theoretical model tells us

[bud]

Boy racers are faster than an F1 world champion now... Know more about driving now... Amazing how narrow minded some F1 fans really can be!

Wheel spin through a corner fast? Go back to school!