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Making your car go faster: Part 1.1-- the driver (long)

>(note to bmw digest: this mail bounced, as did part 2). I will cut in half
>and resubmit):
>
>Posters, including Scott Hung and Carl Buckland, have made intelligent and
>thoughtful comments on improving HP and handling. People like these two and
>others make this digest incredibly interesting and useful as technical
>information gets passed around. 
>
>It occurred to me that not everyone might understand how or why some changes
>affected your car. In particular, suspension changes are something of a black
>art that I know I spent years learning (and I'm still learning) about. I got
>to thinking that a little background might be helpful to some readers, and
>made me realize that one go-fast modification doesn't get discussed much on
>this list: the driver. 
>
>I further realized that there were a number of things I could write about,
>and so I decided to break it up into sections. In this part, I focus of
>making the driver faster. In the next part, I'll discuss how suspension
>changes affect handling, and why changing your suspension can make the car
>faster. In the third part-- well, I don't know if there will be a third part.
>Guess we'll have to see... 
>
>CAVEAT: All this stuff is opinion. I'm probably wrong on a whole bunch of it.
>All of it is true as far as I know. If you bother to read it, treat it like a
>grocery store: take the stuff you like and skip the stuff you don't. As
>always, I solicit your feedback, both positive and negative, and corrections
>of fact or alternate opinions. Your actual milage will vary. Not legal in
>California. See your doctor before beginning any exercise program.
>
>First, however, I wanted to weigh in on philosophy of going faster. There are
>three kinds of "going faster":
>
>1) Looking faster (the "showcar" mentality)
>2) Going faster on the street
>3) Going faster on the track
>
>I'll leave the discussions of 1) for european car magazine, since they devote
>a large portion of their editorial budget to this type of car (cross-drilled
>brake rotors "for cooling (sic)" and trick shift-knobs).
>
>Number 2) can be divided into two camps: stop-light warriors and the
>Mulholland Drive set. Stop light warriors want maximum acceleration: in
>short, they want their BMW to act like an American muscle car. Frankly, IMO,
>if you want accel, go buy an American car with a V-8. The Mulholland Drive
>set are the cafe-racers of the auto scene: they like to drive really fast in
>the twisties on public roads. The problem with that is that in an E36 M3, the
>to drive the car close to the limits requires speeds that are just too
>dangerous for public roads. I live in the foothills of the Cascade mountains
>here inthe sunny Pacific NW, and twisty roads are everywhere. I can drive at
>insane speeds without ever getting close to the limits of my car. It just
>isn't safe.... That said, making your car handle better (see 3) will make it
>more fun to drive quickly on the street.
>
>Let's talk about number 3). First of all, there is a continuum from a totally
>stock car driven occasionally on the track (driver's schools) to dedicated
>race cars. At the one end, you have the car exactly as the Gnomes from Munich
>designed it: comfortable, safe, predictable. At the other end (the IMSA M3
>race cars, for example), you have the car totally optimized for speed:
>uncomfortable, dangerous in less than expert hands, far less predictable. A
>car set up to handle ideally for an expert driver would be suicidal in the
>hands of a merely competent driver. Along this continuum is your car. Every
>substantive modification you make to your car (ie, shift knobs don't count)
>moves your car one way or the other on this continuum. The point you're
>aiming for is defined by your requirements (daily driver, AC, radio,
>backseat) and desires (lower lap times, winning BMW club races, etc). That
>said, there are three things you can do to make your car go faster:
>
>1. Improve the driver. 
>This is the cheapest and fastest way to more speed. Michael Schumacher could
>get in your stock 325i and beat everybody on this list around Laguna Seca in
>their modified M3s. There are lots of reasons for this which have to do with
>the strategy of attacking a track (knowing where to go fast and where to go
>slow), the learned ability to find the limits of a car and drive it there
>(did you see Herr Schumacher SLIDING his F1 on worn tires for fastest lap of
>the race after Alesi pitted at Monza?), providing the car with smooth inputs
>to prevent scrubbing off speed or upsetting the balance of the car, etc. 
>
>How do you improve the driver? Knowledge and practice. Knowledge can come
>from BMW CCA/ACA schools, professional schools (Russell, Barber), books and
>videos. Two books I highly recommend are Paul Frere (Sports Car and
>Competition Driving) and Alan Johnson (Driving in Competition): both
>classics. I read Frere (known to many by his work for R&T) in 1970 and it
>forever changed my driving style. Alan Johnson (multiple SCCA champion)
>described how to break the turns in a race track into three kinds, and how to
>order them by importance. Another key area of knowledge can be found in The
>Physics of Racing, by one of my co-workers, Brian Beckman. While physics can
>seem daunting to the non-technical, it's an important part of understanding
>vehicle dynamics, an understanding of which is necessary to drive a car at
>its utmost.
>John Browne
>BMW CCA
>BMW ACA Puget Sound Region
>M3 LTW (PeeKay)
>Suburban 2500 (Godzilla)
>326 iX (Spunky the brave little car)
>
>copyright (c) John Browne; all rights reserved