Course Design Feedback & Discussion - FSAE Lincoln

[raitinger]

My name is Lawrence Raitinger, I've been the AutoX and Endurance event captain/co-captain at FSAE Lincoln for 2012 & 2013. First off I'd like to say congrats to all the teams that made it out to Lincoln this year, and I was really impressed to see all the cars complete endurance. I believe it was straight up 50%, that ties the highest completion rate for any FSAE event, and I would love to see it beaten next year.

As we move into our event wrap up and review phase we would like to take input from you guys on all things course design before we begin work on new courses for next year. I can't take any real credit for the course designs, that all goes to one of SCCA's top course designers, Roger Johnson, he does all the real design work. If you have comments that aren't specific to the Lincoln courses, that's fine just make sure to say so. You can throw in anything else for Lincoln that isn't covered in the SAE post event survey, just don't hijack my thread.

FSAE Lincoln 2013 - Course Map
Each grid square ~ 25', there are a ton of layers you can turn on and off.

This year we were able to have AutoX and Endurance set up by the end of Tuesday before all the teams showed up, and we posted some driving videos of both courses on Thursday night. Next year it's our goal to again get the courses done on Tuesday, but also get some higher quality, wider angle, videos up Tuesday night. We might even get some FSAE car video for applicable vantage and speed, and hell, I bet one of the SCCA crew could do a coaching video too.

As you might imagine it is a little tricky to design courses that appease all parties involved. We have novice drivers/novice cars to expert drivers/expert cars, and everything in between. Some would like to see courses be more tight and technical or more open and flowing, while in reality these things are not strictly related. Overall, we try to have courses that address all the dynamic attributes of the cars, are easy to navigate, and are engaging enough for the drivers to have fun. We also try to eliminate overly technical elements that would put novice drivers at a serious time disadvantage or worse a cone plowing off course.

Of course there are those pesky average speeds that have to be addressed as well. My hat goes off to Roger here for being able to incorporate all the great dynamic elements into these courses while hitting our average speed goals spot on. You might wonder how such course design is accomplished, it turns out Roger kind of wrote the book. Check it out below, there is a ton of good info that should be helpful for reading and driving courses, as well as help with your dynamic performance design assumptions for specific course elements.

SCCA Course Design Manual

Thanks, and I look forward to your comments!

Lawrence

[Claude Rouelle]

Lawrence,

1. Last year at FSAE Italy there was one tight corner that about 1/2 of the cars could not take without making their car spinning with the throttle with consequence for most of them to hit at least 2,3,4 or even more cones. Several teams complained but the organizers showed them the rule book,. In fact this tight corner radius was 0.5 meter larger that what the minimum corner could be. Most drivers hate it but all spectators loved it! I think there should be such a tight hairpin to test the car (and driver) steering abilities.
I even think that this hairpin should preceded and followed by 2 relatively long straights so that we can appreciate the cars both braking and acceleration strengths.

2. This is not Baja but I wish there could be some relatively high speed portions of the track that could be bumpier than what we usually see. That would show which car have decent damping and the best possible tire contact patch consistency.

3. I wish there could be some 270 degrees medium speed long corners that would add fatigue to the tires on only one car side. Then a heavy braking. The car will come in the braking zone with cold tire on one side and hot (too hot?) tire on the other. They will have to setup and drive their car to cope with these issues; it will be up to the drivers the students to work on this.

4. I wish we could have quite asymmetrical circuits for example all fast corners left and all tight corners right. Or all left end tight entry opening exit and the contrary for let end corners. All left hand corners smooth and all right hand bumpy. It would push the students to think asymmetrical and work on their car setup (camber, damping, aero, diff etc... ) accordingly.

5. I think we should have corners with mixed braking and cornering zones that obliges the driver to trail brake. You will see the cars which lock only one wheel and have major dynamic corner weight issues.

6. I wish the track width would slightly change from one corner to another (not much; one meter) to possibly have some corners with different possible trajectory and test driver adaptation skills.

In other short words, make it safe, unusual but technically difficult for car setup

The FSAE most beautiful track is Brazil because it is a very green environment (lots of trees), there is a lot of elevation change, several of camber and blind apex corners and you can see practically the whole track from anywhere you stand. A sort of mini Brands Hatch or a mini twist Martinsville road course if you want. It is for sure contributing to the nice atmosphere of the competition. If you add the emotion and the enthusiasm of Brazilian singing Sambas, you get an idea of the feast; I love it there! It is a go kart track with many additional cones so it relatively low speed and it is safe with a lot of grass between the track and the guard rails.

Juts my 0.02 $ perspectives.

[Claude Rouelle]

Lawrence,

Additional thoughts.

Look at Turn 2,3,4 at Suzuka: a succession of chicanes which are different geometries. If you take the "right trajectory" for the first one you will lose a lot of time in the last one. There are a few example alike on the long Nurburgring.

PS1 There a free of charge simplified lap time simulation software on our website. It is not perfect but it is useful. It is "only" a mass point but it is within a fraction of a percent of the real lap time (with good drivers) so it is very useful to understand and simulate cars and track. Several FSAE teams use it so there are already several available car and track libraries.
PS2 Our company has been involved in several track design (Miller Park was one of them) in the US but we did that with more sophisticated software: the main goal was not only to predict lap time for different car categories but to design the shape and the size of escape zones and gravel traps.

[Nayrsiemanym99]

Lawrence,

Excellent job with track design and event operation at Lincoln.

-I greatly enjoyed how early and available the tracks were to walk. This is truely taking advantage of the space available at Lincoln.

-A complex design combining everything from single cone to multi-cone turns, super wide to super narrow, and long corners to hairpins is something that makes Lincoln amazing.

-I like that different drivers can very easily see the track in different ways. It gives those who take the time to walk the track and talk about it an advantage.

Elements of Lincoln tracks that I especially like:
-Single cone apex turns of widening radius in Autocross
-The tight section into a long straight in Autocross
-The long sweeping Left turn in Endurance

-I didn't like that the endurance tracks remained similar from year to year. Mix it up for next year.

-I liked that the track designs were posted early online and they were laid out VERY accurately. Great job to the SCCA guys who worked hard to set them up! It allows us to take advantage of simulation tools like OptimumLap and train drivers on our own tracks by setting up similar elements.

-I agree with Claude that a difficult track element near the spectators would be a great addition.

-There were a few confusing points in the drivers meeting like "four wheels off course." Making sure all event captains use the same phrasing could easily fix that. I did like that there was only one meeting which covered everything dynamic event wise.

-Of the competitions I've attended, Lincoln tracks have been by far my favorite.

Thanks for sharing the Manual!

Cheers,
Ryan Johnson
Crew Chief
McGill Racing Team

[raitinger]

My first thoughts from Claude's points.

-Add spin cone of impending penalty doom

-Add FSAE log pit, aka rumble strips
-Add super sweeper, this has got to be in the ball park of 270deg

-Substantial asymmetry, enough to begin thinking about crankin in some wedge?
-Trail braking corners.
-Varied track width, I'd say most US courses have this to some extent already. Are talking about more driving line options than this? I suppose we do choke down exits fairly tight.








-Make Lincoln more pretty, add elevation change, trees, and Brazilian women.

But seriously.

I kind of like the idea of the straight-hairpin-straight, but the cone hitting part might be unnecessary. You should be able to give room on the outside of the turn for a little runoff without loosing the "tightness" of the fast line. The lap times will separate the cars out without the need for penalties. Though it does sound fun to watch. Most courses do lack the opportunity to test outright acceleration, really hard braking, and the transitions to and from each.

There is certainly the opportunity at Lincoln to add in a bit of bumpiness in high speed turns, but I'd guess a majority of the teams can't even afford an accurately tunable set of shocks. They take what they can get.

I'm kind of surprised at the emphasis on asymmetry. I suppose it would lend itself to some killer design questions and certainly separate the men from the boys, so to speak. Unfortunately the number of team's that could make these adjustments with any real confidence is probably very small.

I'm also a little surprised at the interest in pushing driver's skills further coming from a design judge. Good to really good drivers can already knock off around 3-5sec a lap. There always the old this is an "engineering" competition argument.

If you look to the second half of Roger's course design manual it's like a rather analog version of a basic lapsim. Make some assumptions about lateral and longitudinal accel capabilities, and start braking down course elements...lengths straights, radius of corners, etc. I STRONGLY encourage teams to check it out combined with the to-scale course maps. We would have killed to have that info, back in the day...

[raitinger]

Ryan,

Thanks for the input, I'm glad you enjoyed the courses. Testing the courses in the prepared miata, I thought this years AutoX course flowed much better and was much more fun.

Next year both courses will be completely new. We are considering developing 3 well sorted courses for AutoX and Enduro each that we can then just cycle through each year.

I agree, a tough technical section for the spectators would be cool. It might be a bit tougher to implement a very technical element in endurance for safety reasons, but I bet we can figure something out.

Yeah the drivers meeting was a little rough around the edges, it was everyone's first year presenting. The four wheels off course is a little confusing on/off when course isn't the difference between pavement and grass. For our purposes it only means within all of the gates/cone walls. The chalk line is only a visual reference, as long as you make it through all the gates you're good.

Lawrence

[MCoach]

One of the tracks that I hear about that is the favorite of many is the VIR track. It was technical, had elevation and camber variation which made it very enjoyable for spectators and drivers alike. The closest thing that I've driven to that is the Mosport karting track.

Asymmetry in a course makes it fun and takes some thinking from the design end of things. Play it safe and set up a car to be easily drivable in both directions or get out of the safe zone and try to set up the car to match?

There was a certain corner from the Michigan endurance track, I believe it was the 2nd to last corner. It was almost a straight away. It was fast, required only a little steer input and the cars that took it well looked very elegant.

Curbs could be added. I know it's not standard autocross procedure, but if anyone is looking for a little added experience, it's good practice for GT and faster style cars. Super low ride height and avoid the bumps or slightly higher ride height and slam the curb.

The straight-hairpin-straight would be fun. It would be able to test a car in full accel and decel conditions. Steady state comes hard, fast, and fleeting before flying out of a corner again.

One corner style that I like to navigate is a decreasing radius sweeper because it takes driver focus to get into and out of it quickly. Some of the interesting variations on it are a constant inner radius and decreasing outer radius, a constant outer radius and increasing inner radius, or both starting relatively wide and decreasing at different rates. It moves the apex further down the line and keeps you on your toes to not carry too much speed into it.

---

The Lincoln track seemed awesome, and was cool to see the Mini video, running the course and giving a very good study tool for drivers. Bravo on the course design and thank you very much.

[Luniz]

@Claude: The problem in the 2011 FS Italy Corner was not the corner itself but the two corners leading into it and exiting the particular situation. Cars couldn't approach this corner from the outside, nor could they exit at the outside which made the "effective" radius very small.
But I agree, it was hilarious to watch ;-)

And concerning straight-hairpin-strait: This was FSUK 2009 (look at 00:43 onwards): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1zgUjCwNY4

[Lorenzo Pessa]

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
1. Last year at FSAE Italy there was one tight corner that about 1/2 of the cars could not take without making their car spinning with the throttle with consequence for most of them to hit at least 2,3,4 or even more cones. Several teams complained but the organizers showed them the rule book,. In fact this tight corner radius was 0.5 meter larger that what the minimum corner could be. Most drivers hate it but all spectators loved it! I think there should be such a tight hairpin to test the car (and driver) steering abilities.

That's not correct.

In the last two years there was that tight corner.
But that tight corner was not alone but in a sequence of three tight corner without enought road between each corner.
Drivers had not enough room to set the correct trajectory to the second and the third corners.

Even if my former team had a car capable to turn around minimum corner (it was verified before), our (experienced) drivers had to use gearshift to get the car inside the last two corners. And in the last two or three laps something got broken.
Rookie drivers had very little chances.

You missed to say that many of that cars were blackflagged.

That was an example of stupid interpretation of rules.

Originally posted by Claude Rouelle:
I even think that this hairpin should preceded and followed by 2 relatively long straights so that we can appreciate the cars both braking and acceleration strengths.

That's a more appropriate interpretation of rules.

[Bemo]

I loved that element Luniz is talking about. It was implemented in the 08 and 09 AutoX course at FS UK (for Endurance it wouldn't be a good idea ).
The differences how the cars got around that single cone coming out and getting back into the slalom were huge. And seeing the old videos when Tobi just took the wheel spin option near to perfection is still soooo incredible