Bob-Stormer

iTrader: (8)

Kids, can't live with 'em, can't get 'em to shovel snow or take out the garbage...

The only thing you can hope for with the youngsters is that they have some fun with Dad at the track. Because now that my son is 18, I think I've become about 80 IQ points stupider. Same thing happened to my dad. Oddly enough, the old man smartened up a LOT by the time I had my own place and was paying some bills and had bricks and plywood for living room furniture.

trilerian

iTrader: (51)

It is not that I know it can't be normally distributed, I am guessing that it wouldn't be. But for all fairness, I plotted my 20 laps in excel, found my mean and stdev. My slowest lap was only 1.25 stdev from the mean, knowing how a normal distribution works, either excel gave me the wrong stdev or it isn't normally distributed. But I based my previous assumption on driver error, or brain farts. But the cool thing, if you like stats, is that after enough testing with new layouts and different tracks, using the Stormer error you could create a normal distribution to give you an idea how you would do somewhere else.

miller tyme

iTrader: (5)

Interesting, Phil does dial in quick, he took the whole summer off came back and on the 2nd battery was faster than the rest of us on that note we do change the lay-out every 2 weeks and this was the first day on this one and it is pretty far off from what we normally run, I don't see as much room for improvement in his numbers as I do mine
As for chassis I did run the main with a different chassis that I've been trying to get dialed as well as my other car, the new one was close in the 3rd Q run so I decided to give it a try and leave the older one I ran the 1st 2 Q's with sitting.
At least this approach gives you a very tangilbe comparison track to track where purely laptimes and # of laps leaves way to much variable

rcnewb2004

I do not mean to hijack this thread and I do not mean to turn this into some stats thread, so this will be my last irrelevant question. I just wish to learn a few more things, and perhaps find other meanings for the Stormer-Error correction.

trilerian: Could you plot over 20 laps? maybe 40-100 laps (over a month if the track layout doesn't change) and see if the shape of the graph approaches normal? (I just got curious now, if it is possible to predict one's stormer-error by just observing the average time of a lap.) Or perhaps even try and correlate the stormer-error to a number of standard deviations.

Ok... for those who have found me annoying... i am sorry... i be quiet now.

Happy Racing.

Chad Phillips

Bob - I heard a rumor that Montana Choc. Chip cookies will help your driving consitancy and descrease your error..

miller tyme

iTrader: (5)

No need to apoligize, I think this is perfectly in topic and just helps to 'enlighten us all. I'm curious as to the answer myself.

Can I get these in quantity

Grenade10

iTrader: (40)

That sums it up for me. I have never been the fastest on a lap, but I can normally RACE well. I've also give my car for others to drive and they normally comment on how well it drives. So two less visits with the track marshall and I'm there!!!

Bob-Stormer

iTrader: (8)

I sent Ernie 3 dozen, kick ass, chocolate chip cookies, fresh from a local Montana bakery. Sent 'em next day air to the hotel in Cleveland.. The bum didn't even offer me one when they got there.... ...lol...

Bob-Stormer

iTrader: (8)

If you're that close now, and you're talking about mod, not stock, for fun try turning the throttle EPA down about 5%, and keep turning it down until your lap times stabilize. It's an interesting thing to try.

Lebatek

Although it is theoretically possible for individual laps times to be normally distributed, it is highly unlikely (at least for one individual). A normal distribution requires the mean (average) and the median (the middle-most value) to be close or identical. This means that 50% of your laps are above and 50% are below your median.

The more likely statistical representation for individual lap times is a skewed distribution. Skewness occurs when there is some type of boundary (like the fastest lap) where data congregates towards that boundary value but not past it.

Great topic Bob! What is the date of the Magic City Classic this year? I'm not sure if business travel will allow me to sneak that one in again, but I sure enjoyed the last time I was up there...if it wasn't for Blackstock out-qualifying me! (Like THAT was a surprise!)

Cheers,

John

Bob-Stormer

iTrader: (8)

March 8-9, this year it's also the regionals, and Stormer Hobbies has teamed up with tekin to throw the "Short Track Nationals" at the same event. Basically short track oval racing with the losi sliders. Double the racing, 2 complete tracks with their own timing systems. Gonna be a hoot!

http://www.rctech.net/forum/showthread.php?t=195146

or8ital

iTrader: (38)

Bob, hope you dont mind. But I wrote a program to parse Rc Scoring Pro results and made some graphs for our local drivers in Ohio based on the results using your calculation. I also expressed it in a different way. % of capability. Seems to be a hit!

Here are some screen shots. I used Eli's results since they are probably the best

Bob-Stormer

iTrader: (8)

Very cool. Fun to play with isn't it.

Good job with the software, very nice... HOWEVER, stop helping Eli go faster... that'll be enough of THAT!!!

There are a few things I've noticed can slightly mess with the results. If you miss when you should have hit your best lap (somewhere in the first 10 laps), and hit it later in the run, your accuracy will be slightly higher than it should have been. Because your fastest lap won't be quite as fast as it could have been.

All in all though, a simple way to show what your doing. And how close you are to driving your package to it's potential.

adamge

iTrader: (1)

Cool, I had the same idea. I wrote an Excel macro that analyzes RC Scoring Pro's RoundX.txt file and pumps out the Stormer Factors.

Unfortunately, the usability is severely hurt by Scoring Pro's lack of a good, simple format for storing results. I did the best I could.

To use this, open the excel file attached. You'll probably have to turn down Macro security settings and restart Excel for it to work. Then, open the roundX.txt file that you want Stormer numbers for. In the Import window, use "Fixed Width", and set a column break every 8 steps. So, there will be a column line at 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 72, and 80. If that works, do a control+a (select all), and paste into Stormer.xls. Then, go Tools --> Macro --> Macros and press Run. That should pump out the stormer factors just to the right of the results (column K).

It's a bit of work and probably requires some Excel experience to use. We'll have to bug the Scoring Pro guy to have his program output an easier to use format, like csv or tab-delimited. If the program would put out results in one of those formats, I would write a .net app where you simply use a windows dialog box to open the results file. It would automatically add Stormer factors to the results.

The really strange thing is that my results directory has a RoundXImport.txt and a RoundXImport-NoLaps.txt, but unfortunately both have no laps. It's like there is a bug in the program, because it seems like RoundXImport.txt should have laps.

Standard deviation is still probably the all-around best marker for consistent driving.

-Adam

or8ital

iTrader: (38)

Dont even get me started on the quirks in the RC Scoring Pro output. I used the same output file. The code took me about an hour to write and then 6 hours to account for all the weird things it can output. Good thing we had a blizzard and I had nothing else to do. Otherwise I would have just given up.