Last month at the 2016 SCCA National Championship Runoffs, several qualifying records fell at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Some time had passed since the SCCA held its end-of-year Runoffs at Mid-Ohio, so it wasn’t a complete surprise that drivers got quicker thanks to advancements in engineering and tire technology. But another important factor in the faster pace may come down to use of data analysis.
Andrew Aquilante grabbed his third GT-2 Tire Rack Pole award while setting a new GT-2 Runoffs qualifying record at Mid-Ohio. When asked why so many records where being reset, Aquilante said, “The last Runoffs here at Mid-Ohio was in 2005, that’s just when we started playing with GPS data systems. Data acquisition has evolved so much that it now changes the way we drive.”
SAFEisFAST.com, the Road Racing Drivers Club website that offers online tutorials and guidance to teach skills necessary to be successful and safe on track, recently produced a video where professionals from across the motor racing spectrum offered insight on how data impacts the sport. Mike Hull, managing director of Chip Ganassi Racing, noted in the video that “telemetry can tell you, perhaps, what the car either does or it’s capable of doing. But it won’t do that unless the person driving it is willing to do it.”
IndyCar driver Josef Newgarden, who has raced with the SCCA, also noted in the video that data acquisition and telemetry can be super helpful, but only to a point.
“It’s all about what the driver really wants,” Newgarden said. “The driver has to understand what he needs to go quicker and how he’s going to achieve that. The driver feedback to me is still the biggest component to figuring that out. But at the end of the day, if the driver doesn’t know what he wants and know what he’s feeling, it’s very hard to find that end result.”
According to Tim Cindric, president of Team Penske, data can also be a trap
“You can over-analyze a lot of things,” Cindric pointed out. “When things get real complex, you need to break it down to the real simple.”
