All of our previous installments have dealt with finding and driving whichever Line will be the fastest for you in your car. This article will look at the line from a different perspective: what line to take to maximize your options in a corner. By that I mean taking a line that allows you to brake, swerve, or otherwise deal with something unexpected part way through the corner.

The Safe Line is a Late Apex Line

The essence of a safety line is a late apex. This is one of those instances where yes, it pretty much is that simple.

So now you probably want to know why it is a late apex. The reason is that when you apex late, you have done most of your turning in the beginning of the corner. This gives you much more leeway in the second part of the corner to brake, steer, or accelerate as the car is not turning nearly as much. Not turning means any weight shifts will be less likely to cause a catastrophic under or oversteer situation.

A River in the Road as an Example
Think about it this way: say you are driving through a corner and you see a stream or river of water going across the road. Even at moderate speeds, you are likely to hydroplane, or at least experience a decrease in traction from the dry part of the road. This means that as your front tires enter the water, they will lose traction, causing the car to understeer. Then, when they leave the water and hit dry pavement again, they will suddenly have much more traction. If you are turning, this means the front of your car will suddenly shift as the front tires regain traction. But of course your rear tires do not have that traction, so you may very well begin to oversteer.

So how to deal with the above situation? The safest approach is to drive STRAIGHT over the water with NEUTRAL THROTTLE. And this is where the Safety Line comes into play. Really what you are doing is placing a mini straight right in the middle of the corner - for as long as it takes both the front AND rear wheels to cross the water. You are obviously not turning when you are going in a straight line, so you need to make up that lost turning elsewhere in the corner if you are to stay on the road. Hence the need to apex late, thereby turning more in the beginning of the corner.
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At the last SCDA track day at NHMS on May 21, iRacing set up a trailer with several stations for people at the track to try. I did, and I am definitely hooked.

How Real is it?
So the key question of course is how realistic is iRacing? The short answer: EXTREMELY!!

There are 3 major parts of any driving simulator: 1) graphics, 2) car dynamics, and 3) feedback. All 3 components were outstanding.

Graphics
Visually, iRacing is very impressive. I’m not sure whether the setups they had were standard graphics or full blown HD, but I do know that their version of Watkins Glen was about as close as I could get to my actual experience at The Glen given the limitations of looking at a computer screen and not out of an actual windshield. Even the off-track components (things in the background) were very realistic, so there is no visual surprise or adjustment period going back and forth between iRacing and actually driving on the track.

Car Dynamics
I was driving a Formula Mazda, which I don’t have any actual experience with. That said, vehicle dynamics were exactly how I would expect an open wheel car to behave.

iRacing also includes damage, which is a HUGE step up from older driving simulators like Gran Turismo 4. In iRacing, there is no cheating by slingshotting around a corner by riding the outside wall or guardrail - that will anger your car greatly, and the rest of your driving session will be decidedly different from before your off-track venture.

Feedback
This is where iRacing really shines for me. All of the stations they had setup included the new Logitech G25 racing wheel and pedals. This pedal and wheel set is beyond phenomenal - the quality of the wheel (down to the hand stitched leather of the wheel) is better than some aftermarket wheels I have considered for my Miata. The force feedback system is also phenomenal. The wheel does exactly what you would expect, and so do the pedals! I was actually able to threshold brake! This is HUGE, and something I simply cannot with my current GT4 setup.

The only thing missing for feedback is, of course, the lack of g forces. But, I really don’t anticipate any affordable take-home technology on this front anytime in the near future, so iRacing is about as good as it gets short of a NASA anti-gravity chamber in your living room. There is also the aspect of fear that is absent, as you personally will not be injured if you mess up in the game. I guess you could hire someone to break your arms or legs depending on the severity of the crash, but that will probably occur about the same time you have your own anti-gravity chambered delivered. Read the rest of this entry »

So last Thursday I headed up to NHMS with the SCDA. Pretty much the entire infield was under construction, I believe so that the fencing can be updated. This meant that the Turn 1 and Turn 2 chicanes were unusable. We ran the South Oval, but a series of chicanes had been erected out of cones. I presume this was done so that people wouldn’t go into Turn 3 at extremely high speed. That braking zone can be problematic enough at the 80-100mph that people normal enter at. Were you able to carry the speed from the South Oval, entry speed would be MUCH higher, with pretty much zero room for error if you (or your brakes) fail.

There were 3 chicanes that were setup, using pretty heavy duty cones. We were warned in the driver’s meeting NOT to hit them - someone with the Porsche club had done over $10k worth of damage to their car by hitting one. (granted even if the cone caused my entire car to explode it wouldn’t come to $10k worth of damage, but the point was well taken)

The chicanes themselves were not nearly as remarkable as that they were marked with cones. People would of course drive the fastest line through the chicanes, which is right up against the edge of the track. People would then overshoot slightly and lightly tap the cones demarking the chicane. The cones would of course move all over the place when this happened, meaning the track and thus the line could change drastically over the course of each session, or even from when you entered the chicane to when you exited.

I imagine that this setup is temporary while they fix the fencing, but of course I don’t represent NHMS so we shall see. Regardless, it certainly taught you to look ahead, literally so you would know what the course looked like!

A Wisconsin Appellate Court handed down an interesting decision recently in State of Wisconsin v Sveum. They held that it is not a violation of your Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures for the police to track your with a GPS transmitter affixed to its exterior without a warrant.

While at first blush that holding sounds rather draconian, I must admit that the reasoning is sound. The basic idea is that you do not have an expectation of privacy while in public (at least insofar as being “seen” is concerned). From that it naturally follows that the police can follow you, and your car, without a warrant while you are driving on public roads. And if they can do that with their eyes, they can do the same thing by using the GPS as their “eyes.”

Of course, this doesn’t address the issue that they have physically affixed something to your personal property (your car), which is distinctly different from simply observing you. Interestingly, Sveum’s lawyer did not bring this issue up, and actually conceded that it was legitimate for the police to monitor his movements in public. The real fight in the decision hinges on the idea of “curtilage,” which is the idea that in and around your home, you have a reasonable privacy expectation. In other words, if you or any of your possessions cannot be seen from a public area, you have the legal expectation of privacy in that area. So basically any room inside your home, or your yard if it is surrounded by a fence or some other visual obstruction. Sveum’s main argument was that the GPS device allowed the police to track his car while it was within his curtilage - namely within his garage. The court rejects this because it could either 1) be obtained similarly via a traditional stake out and 2) even if that evidence was suppressible, that doesn’t not mean the rest should be suppressed too.

The court is not completely cold, however. They conclude that there is no Fourth Amendment violation by the Police’s actions here, but don’t like the idea that the Police can do this nonetheless. They call for the Legislature to pass a statute proscribing or regulating such tactics. That is an interesting separation of power situation.

One thing of note is that while the police can follow you about at will, a regular citizen cannot. If they do, that is known as “stalking.” And the great irony is, that is precisely the crime that the GPS tracking device was used to prove, and for which Mr. Sveum served time in jail.

Chief Executive of Serco, Tom Riall, has installed more than 5000 speed cameras across England since 1992. The company claims it helps save over 100 lives every year by erecting these speed cameras. The speed cameras of course have the side benefit of generating revenue for the state, and being a general pain to the common motorist. This latter aspect has hit Riall full force, as he was caught by a speed camera doing 102mph in a 70mph zone. He was fined $450 and his license was suspended for 6 months.

Sometimes you reap what you sow…

In a recently reported case, the state Supreme Court of Minnesota recently handed down a rather ground-breaking ruling regarding the use of the “Intoxilyzer” - a version of the “Breathalyzer.” The defense argued that it should have the right to examine the source code of the Intoxilyzer to determine whether the readings it gives are valid. The court agreed, and ordered the Prosecution to hand over the information. The order is problematic, however, as the company that makes the Intoxilyzer claims that the source code is a trade secret and does not want to hand it over. This puts basically every pending and future DUI prosecution based on evidence obtained using the Intoxilyzer into jeopardy.

This is a very interesting turn of events in the world of DUI, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been an issue previously. The right of a Defendant to challenge the evidence against him/her is the cornerstone of our legal system, and it would seem that a defense attorney would attack the Breathalyzer directly.

The interesting thing from this case will be the fallout and how that is dealt with. In the interim, the state could resort to urine or blood samples, which of course raise their own problems of privacy rights, and whether police officers will be adequately trained to perform such procedures. In that regard, the Breathalyzer might be the more desirable option for Defendants. But companies making breath-alcohol devices are now in a serious bind: either disclose their source code and risk exposing their trade secrets or keep the code secret, but render their device inadmissible in court. Breathalyzers have pretty much no use to anyone other than the police, and if the police cannot use the evidence obtained from them in court, I don’t see such devices being viable any longer.

What can be done is what is done with any trade secrets case: allow the defense attorneys to see the code and/or their experts or a neutral expert provided by the court. This is often the way trade secrets cases are tried in civil court when two companies are going at each other. And, as you might imagine, having to do Discovery in this fashion is VERY cumbersome and expensive. Possibly to the point where only the wealthiest DUI defendants will have the means of pursuing this defense and/or it will be too costly for the state to pursue every such case.

But we’ll just have to see, won’t we?