KyzrSoze
12-28-2004, 08:27 AM
Might the future hold driverless race cars?
John Phillips
October 2004
Lee Beard, NHRA Funny Car crew chief extraordinaire, called me from I-465, north of Indianapolis. "I'm driving this Viper truck thingamabobby," he said. "You know the one, with a huge Hurst shifter sticking out of the floor?"
"An SRT-10?" I asked.
"Well, could be," he said. "Wait. Soon as I get it into sixth gear, I can talk."
While I waited, I told him, "You can spin the tires all the way through second gear in that thing."
There was a pause, then he asked, "Why would I want to do that?"
Given his occupation, Beard is not big on wheelspin. Last May 23, one of his Dodge Stratus Funny Cars swallowed the quarter-mile in 4.713 seconds at 333.25 mph. In Funny Car action, neither of those statistics had ever been seen before. Such violence is hard to imagine. The car had attained 260 mph by half-track.
Beard, 51, is a man given to lengthy bouts of contemplation. Not long ago, he told me: "My decisions about clutch and fuel events are based on increments of time into a run. I know when they happen but not precisely where. Where is something I should know."
He thus began testing with global positioning systems. "What I basically wanted was fine-segment accel curves based on time and distance," he explained. "The NHRA has clocks at 60 feet, 330 feet, 660 feet, 1000 feet, and the finish. I needed something more like every 10 feet, preferably less. The goal was to tune the car for a steady pull over a long distance, rather than pulling super-hard for a spurt, then relaxing, then pulling hard again."
Given his car's performance this year, Beard must have learned something from the GPS, but he won't say what. "Somebody almost immediately ratted us out to the NHRA," he recalled, "and they made the system illegal [during races]. That took some of the interest out for me."
Beard is accustomed to such bans. In the late '80s, he installed traction control on a Top Fueler. The dragster was showing great promise until he was called in for a corrective interview. "They asked me, 'Do you know what this could mean for the sport?' I said, 'Yeah, it means I'll win this season.' They didn't laugh. But I understood their concern, because I did know."
In August 2003, I wrote a column about the importance of suppressing technology in racing. I came down on the side of The Flintstones—carburetors, stamped-steel wheels, Jimmy Spencer. I had hoped that readers who are mesmerized by computer technology would howl in protest, because I had such a cool rebuttal. No one howled. So here's my rebuttal anyway.
Back when CART (now Champ Car, as of '04) permitted traction control, at least two major teams—I promised not to reveal their names, but both were owned by men you'd recognize—went testing at a speedway whose name you'd also know. Their cars had been fitted with the latest GPS, which interfaced with the traction-control computer.
The drivers practiced until they were running laps that would place the cars at the front of the grid. Then the engineers programmed the traction-control computer to "memorize" engine speeds at every location the GPS could supply—13,500 rpm 50 feet before turn-in at Turn One, and 12,600 rpm 120 feet into the middle of Turn Two, and so forth, all around the track. Then they programmed the traction control to react to the GPS. At that point, the traction control wasn't watching for wheelspin. It was merely acting as an infinitely adjustable rev limiter, pulling spark and fuel out of the V-8 at given locations.
The driver went back out, flipped a switch that activated the system, and thereafter kept his foot flat. Never lifted. When the GPS "saw" the car going into Turn One, it told the traction control to reduce revs to 13,500, and when it saw the car entering the middle of Turn Two, it limited revs to 12,600, perfectly mimicking the driver's previous I-can't-go-any-faster lap. Except now he could turn such laps all day.
The idea, of course, was to log exhaustive data from every oval, and when the team later returned for real qualifying, well, it would be something akin to pimply fraternity brothers locked in PlayStation 2 combat.
At the time, there remained a zillion variables, of course. The driver had to be careful to steer pretty much the same line lap after lap—a line that might become unusable during the race, due to deteriorating tires and debris. And when the driver ran up on a clump of slower cars, he'd have to return to manual throttle control via a button on the steering wheel. But you can see where the world of unlimited technology was headed. Maybe it was lucky that CART was forced into a spec Ford engine, which made it easy to police the electronics.
"None of this is new," Beard reminded. "In F1, the engineers have already done all that, with far more precise plotting of the car's location—on the inside edge of a turn, outside edge, in the middle. And then they put a theoretical trace over that, showing what might be a quicker line or a faster exit, and they tell the driver, 'Hey, man, do this.' Because the shortest route through a turn isn't necessarily the fastest."
Unlimited-technology traction-control systems operate not only the throttle but also the brakes. All you'd have to do is take one blistering "sample" lap around the Nürburgring with the computer memorizing locations, throttle positions, engine revs, and braking points. And on the next lap, well, Juan Pablo's assignment is to steer and occasionally wave at picnickers.
Beard believes that more than one CART team not only tested with GPS but also tried to qualify with it, and he knows of an IRL team at Indy awhile back that was quietly busted for using a Delphi system "capable of landing a craft on Mars."
Okay, so none of this ever amounted to a driverless car. But the potential exists. Left unchecked, it soon would have meant that an F1 race wasn't Schumacher versus Räikkönen but Maranello computer programmer versus Woking computer programmer, both seated in an air-conditioned lounge somewhere in the infield. At race's end, the drivers would be hustled away and the programmers would spray Taittinger on each other's pocket protectors.
I could be wrong about all of this. It might have been Moët.
John Phillips
October 2004
Lee Beard, NHRA Funny Car crew chief extraordinaire, called me from I-465, north of Indianapolis. "I'm driving this Viper truck thingamabobby," he said. "You know the one, with a huge Hurst shifter sticking out of the floor?"
"An SRT-10?" I asked.
"Well, could be," he said. "Wait. Soon as I get it into sixth gear, I can talk."
While I waited, I told him, "You can spin the tires all the way through second gear in that thing."
There was a pause, then he asked, "Why would I want to do that?"
Given his occupation, Beard is not big on wheelspin. Last May 23, one of his Dodge Stratus Funny Cars swallowed the quarter-mile in 4.713 seconds at 333.25 mph. In Funny Car action, neither of those statistics had ever been seen before. Such violence is hard to imagine. The car had attained 260 mph by half-track.
Beard, 51, is a man given to lengthy bouts of contemplation. Not long ago, he told me: "My decisions about clutch and fuel events are based on increments of time into a run. I know when they happen but not precisely where. Where is something I should know."
He thus began testing with global positioning systems. "What I basically wanted was fine-segment accel curves based on time and distance," he explained. "The NHRA has clocks at 60 feet, 330 feet, 660 feet, 1000 feet, and the finish. I needed something more like every 10 feet, preferably less. The goal was to tune the car for a steady pull over a long distance, rather than pulling super-hard for a spurt, then relaxing, then pulling hard again."
Given his car's performance this year, Beard must have learned something from the GPS, but he won't say what. "Somebody almost immediately ratted us out to the NHRA," he recalled, "and they made the system illegal [during races]. That took some of the interest out for me."
Beard is accustomed to such bans. In the late '80s, he installed traction control on a Top Fueler. The dragster was showing great promise until he was called in for a corrective interview. "They asked me, 'Do you know what this could mean for the sport?' I said, 'Yeah, it means I'll win this season.' They didn't laugh. But I understood their concern, because I did know."
In August 2003, I wrote a column about the importance of suppressing technology in racing. I came down on the side of The Flintstones—carburetors, stamped-steel wheels, Jimmy Spencer. I had hoped that readers who are mesmerized by computer technology would howl in protest, because I had such a cool rebuttal. No one howled. So here's my rebuttal anyway.
Back when CART (now Champ Car, as of '04) permitted traction control, at least two major teams—I promised not to reveal their names, but both were owned by men you'd recognize—went testing at a speedway whose name you'd also know. Their cars had been fitted with the latest GPS, which interfaced with the traction-control computer.
The drivers practiced until they were running laps that would place the cars at the front of the grid. Then the engineers programmed the traction-control computer to "memorize" engine speeds at every location the GPS could supply—13,500 rpm 50 feet before turn-in at Turn One, and 12,600 rpm 120 feet into the middle of Turn Two, and so forth, all around the track. Then they programmed the traction control to react to the GPS. At that point, the traction control wasn't watching for wheelspin. It was merely acting as an infinitely adjustable rev limiter, pulling spark and fuel out of the V-8 at given locations.
The driver went back out, flipped a switch that activated the system, and thereafter kept his foot flat. Never lifted. When the GPS "saw" the car going into Turn One, it told the traction control to reduce revs to 13,500, and when it saw the car entering the middle of Turn Two, it limited revs to 12,600, perfectly mimicking the driver's previous I-can't-go-any-faster lap. Except now he could turn such laps all day.
The idea, of course, was to log exhaustive data from every oval, and when the team later returned for real qualifying, well, it would be something akin to pimply fraternity brothers locked in PlayStation 2 combat.
At the time, there remained a zillion variables, of course. The driver had to be careful to steer pretty much the same line lap after lap—a line that might become unusable during the race, due to deteriorating tires and debris. And when the driver ran up on a clump of slower cars, he'd have to return to manual throttle control via a button on the steering wheel. But you can see where the world of unlimited technology was headed. Maybe it was lucky that CART was forced into a spec Ford engine, which made it easy to police the electronics.
"None of this is new," Beard reminded. "In F1, the engineers have already done all that, with far more precise plotting of the car's location—on the inside edge of a turn, outside edge, in the middle. And then they put a theoretical trace over that, showing what might be a quicker line or a faster exit, and they tell the driver, 'Hey, man, do this.' Because the shortest route through a turn isn't necessarily the fastest."
Unlimited-technology traction-control systems operate not only the throttle but also the brakes. All you'd have to do is take one blistering "sample" lap around the Nürburgring with the computer memorizing locations, throttle positions, engine revs, and braking points. And on the next lap, well, Juan Pablo's assignment is to steer and occasionally wave at picnickers.
Beard believes that more than one CART team not only tested with GPS but also tried to qualify with it, and he knows of an IRL team at Indy awhile back that was quietly busted for using a Delphi system "capable of landing a craft on Mars."
Okay, so none of this ever amounted to a driverless car. But the potential exists. Left unchecked, it soon would have meant that an F1 race wasn't Schumacher versus Räikkönen but Maranello computer programmer versus Woking computer programmer, both seated in an air-conditioned lounge somewhere in the infield. At race's end, the drivers would be hustled away and the programmers would spray Taittinger on each other's pocket protectors.
I could be wrong about all of this. It might have been Moët.