From Pit Lane
Craig English, Daytona Prototype Data Engineer

2007.06.18: Craig English is the data engineer for AIM's Daytona Prototype program. His job covers all the intricacies of car setup, from baseline preparation in the shop to split-second strategy decisions in pit lane. He had his hands full with a six-hour race at Watkins Glen:

Getting Ready
I do a lot of the car setup and car engineering. A lot of that takes place at the shop before we even get to the track. We establish our baseline setup, so when we unload, we're ready to hit the track.

Riley has been really good with sharing track information from either last year's setup or this year's setup, which helps us. We can take that data, put it in the Bosch lap-sim program and it will simulate a lap of the track. We can get an idea of what gears we're going to be in in certain corners, if we're going hit over-rpms on straights. You can play with springs, sway bars, basically all the variables you would have when you get to the race track.

On Track
When we get to the track, we take a real lap from the car and compare it against the lap-sim data and see where we're on and where we're off. Obviously, a bit of hands-on experience is necessary because you have uphills and downhills, where the lap-sim thinks it's just a flat track. So you have to take some of that experience into consideration when you look at the data.

Once we get to the track, my role switches a little bit to look after the data. I work with the drivers and monitor the performance of the car, see where we're making time up, where we need to work to find more time. As a collective group, we get together and see what direction we need to go from session to session to make the car better.

You always combine empirical data with collective knowledge and experience. You don't just race by the numbers; you also have to race with some intuition. That's where we have a nice wide range of people with experience here and it works really well. Everybody has some good input. As a group, you always try and take as much collective knowledge as you can and put it into some ideas to test on the car.

The Riley responds to standard inputs, so when you make a change, it does what you would expect, so that typically means the chassis is stiff enough. Some early formula cars have very soft chassis, so when you make changes on those cars, the chassis flex actually masks what you expect for the outcome. But this car is very predictable and responds as you would expect, so it makes our job a little easier.

The Glen
Watkins Glen is a fairly high-speed track. You want high downforce , but because it does have some fairly long straightaways, there is a tradeoff between how much drag and downforce you generate, which will help your minimum corner speed but it will take away from your top speed on the straights. There's always a balance or compromise between lap time – how much time you'll make up in the slow-speed corners, medium-high speed corners with downforce – compared to how much you'll lose on the straightaway. So you just have to find that balance between downforce, drag and lap time. This is a track where you do need a fair bit of downforce to get through the high-speed corners, like through the Boot and the left-right combination onto the front straight, but you can't have so much that you're three or four mile an hour off on the back straight, where you're going to get passed going into the Keyhole.

Strategy
This is a six-hour race, so the key is to keep it clean, just stay on our strategy pace and not make any mistakes.

All of us sit down and we lay out some different thoughts on strategy. Fuel mileage here can come into play. We also review results from last year and the year before and come up with a prediction on what we think is going to happen this year. If we get some rain, how is that going to affect the strategy? A lot of preparation goes into that. We sit down as a collective group and throw ideas around as to what the best approach is.

You can have strategy B and C and you can switch back and forth three or four times during a race. You adapt as you go. It's like anything – if you drive down the road and something comes at you on the highway, you have to respond and react accordingly. We have the same approach when we're on the track.

Post-Race
We had all three drivers running in the top five, all three drivers were competitive when they were in the car. We had a really good last stint – we didn't fall off pace, we stayed up with the leaders from the start to the finish and that was a big improvement from a performance point of view. Unfortunately, we had a little event at the end that caused us to come in early, but up to that point, it was a pretty promising run.

Overall, we're disappointed, but you've got to take the positives from it.

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