Post by wilmywood8455 on Apr 12, 2023 2:03:54 GMT -8
The IndyCar calendar offers what is probably the most diverse collection of tracks of any racing series in the world. This is usually taken to mean that over a season, IndyCar pays visits to the likes of speedways, short ovals, road courses, and street courses. However, the variability in surface type, bumpiness, grip level, and ambient conditions that IndyCar teams will experience over the course of a season is also extraordinarily diverse, and something that engineers are constantly analyzing and assessing as they fine-tune setups in search of every ounce of performance.
Unlike every other sport, in racing each team is not only battling with one another but also with the field of play itself, and that arena changes from week to week (and even session to session) in ways that no other sport would allow. While the likes of soccer, football, and baseball have standardized their playing surfaces – and even gone so far as to play indoors under stadium roofs to protect from outside conditions – teams in racing are left to adapt on the fly to the ever-changing characteristics of the race track.
Engineers are almost always thought of as engineering the car, but there times when a better way to think about it might be that they are trying to reverse-engineer the track, and simply apply the appropriate changes to the car as a result.
Unlike every other sport, in racing each team is not only battling with one another but also with the field of play itself, and that arena changes from week to week (and even session to session) in ways that no other sport would allow. While the likes of soccer, football, and baseball have standardized their playing surfaces – and even gone so far as to play indoors under stadium roofs to protect from outside conditions – teams in racing are left to adapt on the fly to the ever-changing characteristics of the race track.
Engineers are almost always thought of as engineering the car, but there times when a better way to think about it might be that they are trying to reverse-engineer the track, and simply apply the appropriate changes to the car as a result.
Teams and engineers are constantly adjusting a whole host of setup parameters in reaction and anticipation to track surface and ambient conditions changes that occur throughout a race weekend. Being able to adapt (and even predict) these changes offers a huge competitive advantage to those that can continuously keep the car’s setup in the optimum window, even as the variables are changing all around them.