As you may well know, RaceCraft is the sister company of High Performance Academy
In the beginning, we decided to make Racecraft a different website at the start to focus solely on car setup/building and driver performance.
Our initial thoughts were that the people interested in those topics were different from those interested in the topics over at HPA.
As It turns out, we were wrong. The overlap in people interested in HPA as well as RC was pretty big.
So, we made the call to merge RC into HPA and make one easy place for you to get educated on all things performance and motorsport. Rest assured, we will have the same great content and interaction, just over on HPA.
This merge comes with a lot of positives; HPA has a much bigger member base so the forums will be more active, there will be more members webinars and articles.
With all that being said, thanks for all your support of RaceCraft, and we will see you over at HPA 🤘
#highperformanceacademy #racecraft #learndriveoptimise
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Positioning the car accurately and correctly as you move around the circuit has a huge influence on your lap times. It's also one thing to know where you should be but completely another to be able to put it into practice with all the other things you're concentrating on when your trying to extract everything from the car.
Each corner type on the track will also have its own ideal line depending on what comes after it - a long straight, a tight corner, a section of the track with poor grip on one side. That just covers the laps when you're trying to get the ultimate lap time, let alone when you're defending or attacking another car.
These are all topics we cover along with a whole lot more in great detail in the Race Driving Fundamentals course.
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise #racedriving
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If you have a conventionally shifted manual transmission you're using on the race track that needs a clutch for downshifts, you'll be using some heel and toe, which is what we see here. This is where the driver needs to use all 3 pedals at once during downshifts which is a lot to handle.
There's a lot of elements to get right with heel and toe, but the most difficult of them is modulating the brake pressure accurately throughout the braking zone. This is because you need to rock your foot onto the throttle pedal while trying to be consistent with the brake pressure. This is just one topic covered in the recently released Race Driving Fundamentals course.
It's something even the Pros struggle to nail at times, but like many things, there is simply no substitute for practice! How is your heel and toe technique? Any tips for people just getting started?
#highperformanceacademy #racecraft #learndriveoptimise
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The Race Driving Fundamentals course is now live! This was meant to be the first course we released, but better late than never eh! Who's already done it so far and what was your key take away? - Taz.
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One of the main advantages in moving to an aftermarket pedal box is it generally gives you the ability to adjust brake bias, which is simply the hydraulic pressure distribution between the front and rear brake circuits.
In this example the mechanism is quite clear to see, with a separate brake master cylinder for both the front and rear axles. Inside the brake pedal is a sliding bearing, by adjusting the threaded rod that you can see running through the middle of the brake pedal, the bearing can be adjusted to sit closer to either the front or rear brake master cylinders. This gives the driver the ability to modify the force distribution to both of the master cylinders, and therefore the hydraulic brake bias.
Can you guess the course Tim is working on right now? Hint, it's about brakes (not sure that is how hints work but I know you would have guessed the same anyway right 😅)
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise #brakes #brakebias
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Using string lines to measure toe angles is widespread in motorsport. This applies to those at the club level, right up to teams at some of the highest levels of racing. Some will be fooled by thinking that because it uses something as simple as a piece of string it can't be very accurate. However, with a little care, using this method will yield results that are more than accurate enough for our purposes.
Another advantage is the whole system is very compact when packed down which makes it easy to transport. This is a big advantage when you're on the road traveling from race to race.
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise #wheelalighment
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What topics would YOU be interested in learning more about? Comment below: 👇
I probably won't be doing anything on how to make the perfect Crème Brûlée anytime soon, but topics around car setup, driver training, data analysis will work. Basically, anything you would like to learn more about to help make you go faster, or even just out of interest - Tim 👨🏻
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This is what a 300kph (186mph) lockup looks like.
"Flat-spotting" a tyre is a term that's used when we damage a tyre by having a wheel locked on track. This is where one or more wheels stops turning while the car is still moving. This is one of the more extreme outcomes of a locked wheel, in this case from a lockup at close to 300 km/h where every single layer of the tyre has been worn through 😲
Normally flat spots are nowhere near this destructive, although any significant flat spot on a tyre can make a big difference to performance. The best-case scenario is a lack of grip from one corner of the car, the worst-case is having so much vibration that the driver can't even see clearly out the windscreen!
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise #tyres
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It's worth paying attention to what's under the skin of a high-end race car when you get the chance to see what lies underneath! This is a shot of a cooling duct behind the driver's door that feeds one of the rear heat exchangers of an #audisport R8 GT3.
This is a typical example of a diverging inlet duct that feeds a heat exchanger. Notice how the cross-sectional area of the duct increases as it gets closer to the heat exchanger? This is done to allow pressure recovery inside the duct. The gradual increase in area allows the velocity to slow and static pressure to rise. This increase in static pressure helps drive the flow through the heat exchanger.
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise
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An important part of a sophisticated TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring System) is the ability for the system to automatically know which pressure sensor is fitted to which corner of the car. This is important because the sensors tend to stay fitted to rims for their lifetime and this allows any rim to be fitted to any corner of the car and the system will automatically assign that sensor to a given corner of the car, say front right.
This can be handled in a few different ways, but one of the common ways is for an antenna to be fitted to each corner or the car, the ECU uses the sensor signal strength to determine which sensor is fitted where. Using 4 separate antennas is most common in high-end cars where a lot of carbon fibre is used as the carbon tends to block the radio frequencies used by the TPMS!
#racecraft #learndriveoptimise
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