Since several people have PMed me asking about this, I'll post a reply on the topic to make it more accessible. Apologies if some details may be a bit rusty, because I did this 5-6 years ago and I no longer have the original file on me.
My aim was to make a formula for the time it would take for a car to complete a whole race, and determine the strategy required to complete it in the shortest amount of time possible using the rate of change in lap times due to fuel loads and tyre degradation.
From what I can recall, there are several pieces of data that you need:
- Race distance in laps
- Lap time increase due to tyre degradation
- Time to complete a lap with 1 lap of fuel on board
- Fuel consumption
- Lap time reduction due to fuel consumption (AKA fuel load effect)
- Average pit stop and pit lane time
The formula to calculate the fuel load effect can be found here:
https://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/o ... car-racing
After this, you need to calculate how tyre degradation affects lap time too. Unfortunately, I can't find the source I used to calculate this, but for this you only need the rates of change of lap time in seconds depending on tyre compounds (I think on mine they were constant).
Then, you add each individual lap times of the race and change variables (e.g. stint length, when to pit, what tyre compounds to put on, etc) to find the optimum strategy.
Keep in mind that this is a very basic interpretation of how race strategies actually work since it ignores a large amount of variables (tyre temperatures, etc), but for an IA it should be pretty solid.