10 Easy Steps to Using Track Facts
Build any number of Car Profiles (CP). Naming your car is the only field that is required, all other fields optional.
Build your track list (one or many). When logging session data your tracks will be there.
Build your team list (one or many).
Start logging session data. Naming your session is the only field that is required, all other fields are optional.
Save a Car Profile to your session data (button is at bottom of the session screen).
After saving Car Profile to session, you have the option to continue to edit the “session CP” and the session data too. Track Facts never locks you out of recording changes.
Export Your Session data (button at bottom of session page) to any designated email address, to a teammate or your driver coach.
Export Weekly session data*. The export button for weekly data is next to the date listed on the session list. Data can be exported to any email address via CSV file.
Export All data collected*. This export button is at the bottom of the sessions list.
Learn and Go Faster!
* Available as in-app purchase.
How to go Faster using Track Facts: A User Manual and tips by Tim
Read More
Test and Tune: I’ve Got a Pyrometer-Now What? - Part one and Part two
Part One
Using tire pyrometer readings to tune the suspension and optimize tire performance is a vital tool at the race track. A pyrometer is a device that uses either a needle probe or an infrared beam to read the temperature of various areas on the tire tread. Getting accurate readings, however, requires a proper (and repeatable) process.
In this TrackFacts Test and Tune segment, let’s first talk about getting good, useable pyrometer numbers.:
The driver needs to bring the car into pit lane off of a hot lap; no dawdling. As he/she stops, the steering is cranked all the way to one side or the other to expose the front tread, making it easier to probe the rubber.
Temps need to be recorded as soon as the car stops; if the car sits even for a short time, the tires begin to cool down and produce erroneous numbers. (A good trick is to station the pyrometer crew at an an area of pit wall as close to “pit in” as allowed.)
Ideally, there should be two crew members on the task: one person mans the pyrometer and calls out the readings to a second person, who enters the data into the TrackFacts pyrometer chart for the session.
In most cases, we want to start with the front tires, since they do the bulk of the work — and, if there’s a particular tire that bears a disproportionately heavy load on track, read that one first. A good example would be the left front at Willow Springs; since that racetrack is a predominantly right-turns circuit, the left front is the hardest working tire there. At Laguna Seca, though, there are a lot of left turns, so the right front tire is worked the hardest.
Continue around the car reading each tire in the same order — at Willow Springs, we’d read LF > RF > LR > RR — and take readings of the tread at the outside shoulder, the middle, and the inside shoulder. ALWAYS follow the same sequence to avoid confusing the crew person entering the numbers into the TrackFacts chart. It doesn’t much matter what direction — outside/middle/inside, or vice versa — as long as it’s consistent.
An accurate tire temperatures record in your TrackFacts data set can provide very useful information to maximize tire life, as well as offer clues on fine-tuning the suspension settings, especially if multiple tracks are run with different setups. In the next segment of Test and Tune, we’ll explore how to interpret the numbers and get the most out of the tires.
Part Two
In Part One of this subject, we went over how to get accurate and useable pyrometer readings into the TrackFacts tire temperatures chart, Now let’s have a look at how to decipher all those numbers and interpret the stories they’re telling us about how well the tires are — or aren’t — working on the car.
In an ideal straight-line environment, a properly inflated and aligned tire will show identical temperature readings across the entire tread. For illustration purposes, let’s imagine the readings show 186° on the outside shoulder, the middle of the tread, and the inside shoulder. (In this lesson, for clarity we will always use that same sequence: O / M / I .)
However, in the real world track environment, it’s rare to see numbers like that. Let’s start with a basic: inflation pressure (PSI). To keep things simple, we’ll imagine we’re checking a rear tire on our track car. The “perfect” tire noted above showed an ideal correct pressure — even temps all across the tread. But what if those pyrometer readings were 180° / 198° / 182° (remember, Outside / Middle / Inside )? The hotter middle bracketed by nearly identical sides indicates an overinflation condition — the tire is “ballooning”, working too hard in the center area of the tread and telling us to drop a pound or three. Conversely, if the temps read the other direction, i.e., 198° / 182° / 196° (again, O / M / I ) we can determine that this tire is under inflated, “caving in” on itself and overworking both shoulders; it needs more PSI to produce its optimum traction.
Now, let’s move up to the front of the car, where things get a bit more complex…
Besides just rolling along and keeping the front of the car from scraping on the asphalt, the front tires have a lot of extra work to handle: they have to turn the car, plus (thanks to weight transfer) they carry the brunt of the braking loads as well. Reading and understanding their numbers can be crucial.
Example: we’ve stuck the pyrometer probe into the left front tire, and gotten temperatures reading 205° / 190° / 174° O / M / I. The first thought might be “Man, the driver is hammering the snot outta the car!”. But look more carefully at those numbers, particularly that inside shoulder at 174°. The inside third of the tread isn’t working much, while the outer part is being considerably taxed — and the temp of the middle area of the tread reads just about midway between the edges’ numbers. What’s going on? Such a steep upslope in temperature from inside to outside is a pretty good telltale of insufficient negative camber — the tire is standing up too vertical and is “rolling over” onto the sidewall under cornering load, stressing the outside shoulder and jacking up that temperature; the suspension needs to be adjusted to lean the tire towards the center of the car a bit more than it currently is, putting the tread flatter on the road during hard cornering.
Again, as we did above, let’s invert the numbers; now we read 174° / 190° / 205° O / M / I on the same tire. What is that telling us about the load? Correct — too much negative camber on this tire, and it needs to be “stood up” a bit more.
There’s a plethora more that can be understood from watching tire temperatures; for instance, too much toe-in or -out will show with one edge of the tire hot but the center and other edge showing fairly close readings. A ton of information is sitting in a TrackFacts pyro chart.
As can be seen, tire pyrometer readings can be a great tool to use to fine-tune the tires so they put the maximum amount of tread in contact with the track surface, and spread the loads to also maximize tire life; a tire that’s using all its tread on the track will grip better, make the car feel more drivable, and last longer in a race before “going off”. Keeping a good running record of this data in TrackFacts will also provide a baseline for setting the car up at various tracks and having that repeatability to make driving the car much more rewarding. Keep a handle on the information and go faster!
Provided by Darren Young • long time racer/coach • lead instructor, BMW CCA So. CA