I love this thread, so I'm giving it a well deserved bump!

Just found this thread and only read the first paragraph of Bobs post and started laughing because he is right on the money. Like I said I didn't read the whole thread so forgive me if this has been said.
Pay a couple bucks to the promoter for printouts of your races, go home and study them, put them in a binder and compare week to week track to track.
It will be painfully obvious quickly where you can improve.
Personally if I can't drive within a car width of the line I want I slow down, when I have the car and my brain a little more dialed I'll step it up a bit. Discipline like that will also make you much more comfortable running door to door knowing if the other car misses his line very much you can easily pass.

I am running WGT with 2S + 17.5T (boosted) on carpet. Last race I had 1 brand new LiPo pack and other which is 4 years old. The difference in performance was quite obvious. After a good 1st final with the new battery I switched to old one and understood soon that I am screwed - no power at all. My laptime dropped by 0.13s and I even had problems lapping people because I just wasn't fast enough to pass quickly. But I kept my lines as close as possible and won the run. But what surprised me was that my overall result got even better, because my "error" was 0.088s. Now I just have to achieve the same stability with the new battery :)

Final 1
Final 2

More juice = faster speed = magnify your errors. Or maybe the faster pack requires a few setup changes?

You know, reading this thread its funny, but my last few race outings my lap times come back like this: 12.1 12.2 12.0 12.3 12.4 and about every three minutes I get 19.5 or something like that as I clipped some lapped traffic and am put nose-first against the board somewhere. Ah well, that's racing toy cars.

Bump for useful content.

I've seen some lap timing printouts that show a drivers "consistancy" for their run. I wish it was calculated on the sheets at my local track. I'm pretty certain the formula used is known as a standard deviation. If you want to do it manually...

1. Each laptime - avg. laptime then squared
2. Average of step 1 results
3. Square root of step 2

If you don't want to do the math for the entire run (every lap), you can use the sample standard deviation which is nearly the same formula except step two would not use the total number of data points (laps), but instead use one less. That formula is suitable for any number of data points you want to use less than the total population.

Obviously this is considerably more work but if one wants to compare to what is calculated on those timing systems that do it.. That's how it's done.... I think.

I didnt know this thread existed, but Bob is spot on,

I really like the Alycat timing as you get your consistency info

see this shameless plug from a club round earleir in the year

http://www.castlehillraceway.com/fil...al_Race_7.html

while learning i try to set consistency targets rather then getting quickets lap times, most of the time i am not the fastest one on the track, but if i can focus on not wasting time being overtaken and overtaking people, i can usually make up time, there is a real art to it.

Beth.

My corporate firewall blocked that link, said it was porn. :weird:

-Mike

My first time seeing this thread and I think it is spot on as well!
Though I know for a fact in one race I ran recently, the other guy was much faster down the straight and beat me, despite my mistake free run. I know hes not cheating, but he really does have a faster motor! :lol:

yep anyone of us could be porn stars :lol:

here is a screen print

Beth.

This is a really good thread. +1

That's pretty good Beth, but can you beat this? My best consistency at Castle Hill in a race is 0.04. That was with an unmodified M-01.

I've been having a good run at the Sydney Cup in the last couple of years in 2WD Stock too. In 2011 I qualified and finished 4th despite only being 12th quickest on fastest lap. This year I was 8th quickest on fastest lap, more than 1.2 seconds slower and won!

Different timing programs definitely calculate the consistency differently, which can make some of the consistency results a bit misleading, and certainly not transferrable from program to program.

My favourites from the UK so far are BBK and Fabcount. These both give use a simple calculation based on the difference between your fastest laps and the average of all your laps. I'm usually happy with under 0.5s from this value, 0.3s is about my limit.

Laps Free/RC Timing uses some kind of algorithm and I can't really see where it gets the numbers from - sometimes if you make a mistake you will end up with a really huge consistency number, and the consistencies it does generate seem very flattering.

Ttt foal Bret thread