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Track temperature and balance


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#1 Huffer

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Posted 26 July 2015 - 07:36

There was a discussion in one of the racing threads where it was mentioned that a cooler track temperature will always lead to the balance of the car shifting forward and inducing understeer.

Now...I can sort of understand this, but I have my reservations with this bit of perceived wisdom. I can understand that with lower temps, the front tire temps will be lower and so the car will end up with more lateral slip as the tires won't deform so easily to keep the contact patch anchored to the track.

So understeer occurs, right?

But surely the rear tires suffer the same issues? The won't be as warm as expected as well, leading to them producing less lateral forces to resist the turning moment of the car.

 

Is it just a case that the front tires producing less lateral force is a more dominant factor while turning?

 

 



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#2 Fat Boy

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Posted 12 August 2015 - 17:54

There are no absolutes. Test it.



#3 Greg Locock

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Posted 12 August 2015 - 22:34

FB is back, hooray. I was recently discussing the effect of tire pressure on linear range cornering stiffness with the guy who develops our first pass tire modelling program (basically I type in an existing tire's dimensions, and its tire model, modify some parameters (say width and psi), and it generates a new tire model for me.

 

Conventional wisdom is that a typical road tire will increase in cs as the pressure increases.

 

Luckily we often test tires at two pressures (in Australia we often specify higher tire pressures for fully laden, which I am sure 99.5% of customers ignore), so I was able to confirm that conventional wisdom is misleading. There are no absolutes.



#4 Fat Boy

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Posted 14 August 2015 - 04:30

I guess I'm back. I never really left. Sometimes there's just not much I can add to things.