Baby steps - can put a straightaway together!

Nothing too thrilling tonight. First, credit to Liz C for turning me on to People Under the Stairs.

Good tune to sit back and have a vodka on the rocks.

Anyway. Pretty much got the straightaway stuff squared away. Making the ghetto solver was definitely a blessing in disguise with being able to set a distance limit for integration, rather than time. I'm sure that excites you - in many ways.

So for example we can come out of a 30 mph corner down a 1000' straight and back the braking point up in 50' increments:

 

Not super thrilling to look at, but important. There is time data that goes along with the velocity and distance outputs, not shown here. All the numbers for drag, downforce, and longitudinal tire grip are just made up at the moment so don't heed too much attention to it. If I wanted to be really fancy I could probably put a segment in the acceleration solver that puts a delay between gear shifts. I'll screw around with that a bit down the road.

So next up I need to make a quick and dirty corner solver (find max speed a corner of given radius can be taken, when including both tire and aero effects) and then the actual full lap solver. To actually run my first sim I'll need to define a track. Road America, Mid Ohio, or even Nelson Ledges will take some time to break down segment by segment. Therefore, as a first pass to make sure the damn thing works at all, I'm going to start with the most simple track I can think of...

Martinsville!

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Should really be able to wrap most of this crap up by this weekend, which is good given that I can potentially get out and be social. You would be amazed at the look of raw animal lust in a woman's eyes when I strike up a bar conversation about racecar vehicle dynamics.