Pierre,
YOU ARE MY NEW HERO! You must got GEEZ, and are already
doing lapping sessions with 15 laps on the screen at once!
DUDE!
Here's my suggestions for dealing with the information
overload syndrome, and focusing on the really important
stuff:
First, it's obvious that you really can't study all 15 laps
at one time. Heck, it takes all my focus to drive one car;
I can't imagine trying to drive 15 at once. Likewise with
studying the data. One at a time to work on, and one
additional lap up to represent the best effort, so you have
a good basis for comparison.
The first order of business then, would be to find the
single best lap. There's two ways to define this. Either
the fastest lap, or the lap with the highest Overall
Rating. Usually, they will be the same. Since time is
harder to determine (unless you have a printout of times
from the track) I would suggest pulling up the Statistics
screen for each lap, and finding the lap with the highest
overall rating. Once you have this close all the other laps
except this "Best" lap.
Shortly we'll start comparing other laps to the best, but
before we do that, let's study the single best lap for a
minute, and note a few metrics. What's the Overall Score?
Is it really high (in the 90's), average (85ish), or low
(70's). Now check your Usage against your Overall Score.
In most cases Usage is right around the Overall number. If
it's much below, then don't worry, it will improve naturally
with pretty much all the other individual points we find.
But if it's much higher than the overall number, then we
need to really focus on the Smoothness and Aggressiveness,
as one or the other or both of them are pulling the Overall
Score down. Looking at them should show which one it is.
While you are at it, I like to note if I'm higher in
Smoothness or Aggressiveness. My style is generally higher
in Smoothness, but I'm faster when I'm higher in
Aggressiveness. This varies by driver however, so look and
see which you might want to try to focus on in the future.
Finally, let's look at the color coding of that best lap. I
recommend starting with the ACCEL color scheme, the standard
old RED-GREEN map. This shows exactly how early you step on
the gas coming out of turns, and when you transition to
brakes going into turns. There's a ton to be learned here.
If you have a habit of late braking you'll often find that
you don't get power down until you are almost completely out
of the turn. Early braking is your friend as long as you
use it to early accelerate out of the turn. Look at your
turns and see how you are doing with these things. I find
this easier to use and more instructional than the Usage
(Blue-Purple-Red) color coding. It's easy for your brain to
wrap around the idea of being on the gas at or before the
apex, and to see the software illustrate exactly where you
are actually doing it (versus where you had previously
perceived you were doing it).
Also, if you find yourself "cheating" the chart, which
happens with some experienced GEEZ users and even those who
have never used GEEZ, but are really excellent drivers, then
you can adjust your color scheme for that. By "cheating"
the chart, I mean, you apply just the tiniest bit of
throttle very early in the turn, just enough to turn on the
GREEN on the map instead of the RED, but not enough to
really be accelerating in any meaningful way. The solution
to this is to alter your ranges in your color scheme. I
like to set a gray "coast zone" between the green of gas and
the red of brake. So instead of displaying green when the
g's are above 0, I'll set the color scheme to show green
when the g's are above say 30%. Likewise, set red for above
30% of braking. This leaves that middle area, from +30% to
-30% to be the standard color, which is typically gray. The
point is, you can see when you *really* accelerate, not just
when you barely tip the throttle. If you want to see both,
you can set up (for instance) dark green from 0 to 30% gas,
and bright green for over 30%, and dark red from 0 to 30%
braking,a nd bright red for over 30%. This gives you a four
color look, with the darker hues showing when you first tip
the throttle or the brake, and the brighter colors showing
when you exceed 30%. You can also adjust this to use 50%
threshholds, or whatever suits your driving habits the best.
The point is that you can learn a lot about your
throttle/braking usage just by looking at your best lap and
color coding it for various amounts of gas and brake, and
seeing where these points happen in relation to the
different turns on the course.
Now once you've done that with the best lap, begin comparing
the other laps, one at a time to the best lap. Do you
notice any trends like your slower laps are the ones where
you brake later, and then are unable to get on the gas early
enough? Or do you see the opposite, that your slower laps
are ones where you brake too early, then have to coast up to
the turn because you essentially over-broke? Note if the
trend is consistent, or if you bounce around. Be sure to
compare several laps to your best, to see which trends are
actually troubling, and to see if the trends tend to improve
as the lapping session goes on. While you are at it, notice
if your laps in general improve through the session, or
decay, or peak somewhere in the middle.
All of this is stuff that will help you to notice the good
points and not-so-good points in your driving more clearly.
In this example, we've really focused on gas/brake, but you
can do the same thing with Usage, or the stopwatch for
segment timing, or any number of other tools. I like using
gas/brake, because it's the easiest to grasp, and can make
the biggest difference. But as you progress, you'll
eventually crush the red/green thing and be ready to dig
into some of the deeper issues. That's the real power
behind GEEZ. The more you dig, the more you find! And when
you really start digging deep into GEEZ, looking for tenths
here and there, you'll be amazed to find that you can start
at the beginning again, looking at the basics and find
new/old habits that have crept back in.
Again, I have to compliment you Pierre on getting such an
aggressive start with GEEZ! I suspect you've either used
another Data Acquisition system in the past, or spent a lot
of time with the tutorials, or both?
THANKS for your question! Hope this helps!
--Byron
888-909-0818
"Pierre V. Villeneuve" wrote:
>
> Hi Geezers,
>
> Last weekend I used my Geez sensor for the first time at the track (Streets
> of Willow). I had a total of seven 25 minute sessions each with an average
> of 15 laps. Thats about 100 laps overall! Hey so sure I had a great time
> zipping around the track, but now that I'm back home I'm having a hard time
> making sense of all this data. I can just about fit all 15 laps of one
> session on my screen (after splitting the 25 minutes of data into individual
> laps) and so there it is all in front of me. I've got a nice color coding
> scheme that points out where the usage metric is low and the various
> accelerations are high. There is so much to look at now that I am having
> trouble seeing which parts of the track were giving me the most trouble and
> which parts I was doing well at. How do you multi-lappers deal with all the
> info?
>
> Pierre
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