Riassunto analitico
In motorsport, the one and only goal of each participant is to reach the chequered flag before anyone else, regardless of the type of vehicles used, the importance of the racing series or what is at stake. In order for this to happen, driver, car and team members must act at the best of their abilities, so that the whole package can outperform the competition. There are very slim chances of winning races if any of the previous factors is not operating at their highest expectations, as long as luck is not involved in the equation. Given that it is not desirable to base all the winning possibilities only on luck, there is no other way to reach success than training, understanding one’s limits and exceeding them again and again.
From an engineering point of view, driver and car can be seen as one single body, whose maximum potential must be unlocked by the team through an attentive and accurate process of data analysis. Data analysis is a very general term that, in this case, refers to all kind of examinations and in-depth studies related to the performance achieved by a determinate race car and driver entity.
This thesis aims to report and present the analysis carried out during the second round of the 2024 Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe and a further test day conducted at the same venue a few weeks prior to the race weekend. In particular, the main focus of the work is related to the balance of the car, thus most of the analysis will cover the research – and correction – for understeering or oversteering behaviour, which deeply affect the performance of the vehicle. The order maintained throughout the dissertation has been kept unchanged with respect to the activity carried out on-site, where the driver’s feedbacks first indicated the limiting factors and the phenomena to be searched for in the data, and only after a positive cross-check with the latter followed the consequent setup modifications. Before reaching the actual analysis of the data acquired, the reader will find introductory and explanatory chapters regarding the track, the vehicle and the techniques used.
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