The Friction Egg

Hideously disfigured egg, anyway. Regarding tire grip potential you could really simplify it as a friction circle. A lot of the time it's a bit asymmetric, maybe skewed a bit higher toward drive/brake than cornering.

With RWD vehicle grip you get an egg-looking shape, exaggerated by downforce. Heap of braking grip coming in at top speed into a turn. Bleed off some speed and downforce as you transition to max cornering, then to WOT (assuming you're entering the turn on the brakes). The drive end of the egg is a lot shorter than brake given that you have less speed and downforce at that point, you're only using 2 tires instead of 4, and in the higher gears you probably are significantly power limited.

Wrote up a quick Matlab script that takes some simple vehicle parameters, Max Braking G's, Max Lateral G's, and Max Drive G's and does a simple cornering loading analysis. These plots just use some guess parameters...

This will be handy to get corner loads going through a turn. When I figure my pitch and roll stiffness I can combine the two and get roll and pitch angles through the turn which will be an input to OptimumK for dynamic camber and steer angles. Niiiiiice.

And yea yea yea I know it's not very good without a real corner sim and knowing downforce vs speed, length of braking zone, all that stuff. But it's not bad to get in the ballpark.