Arcanum wrote: ↑04 Oct 2022, 00:48
VacuousFlamboyant wrote: ↑03 Oct 2022, 14:57
OO7 wrote: ↑02 Oct 2022, 02:58
10kg is roughly worth four tenths per lap around a typical circuit right?
It depends on the track, how the car behaves with those extra kilos and the added tyre degration. Engineers often say something between 0.033s to 0.133s per kg each lap. On average 0.067 seconds per lap. When referring to the lower figure as a base, you could be looking at 0.3s-0.6s.
Hamilton keeps saying the car is roughtly 1s slower than what it could be, though that seems a bit of a stretch. Altough, you never know.
So at the end of a race, a car that's used 80kg of fuel would be 5.36-seconds/lap faster than at the beginning of the race (80kg x 0.067 seconds per lap). Feels like a plausible number, though maybe a little high?
[obviously normalising for tyre compound, tyre wear, energy state, driving style, etc.]
Yes, approximately. If someone were to go into the data the actual number should be a bit lower. The engineer I talked to in the paddock was very kind the share this kind of knowledge. The amount of rubber you have left carries more weight the more you progress in the race (pun intended
). It means, the lighter the car, the more it can benefit from a weight reduction, until you hit a ceilling that has to do with mechanical grip, etc. There are outliers. Nevertheless, it's used as a rule of thumb.
Thus, you can place ballasts. I've read somewhere the weight reduction to Perez's car has allowed them to better suit the car to Perez in Singapore.