Racing lines

[raymondu999]

Hey all. I've read somewhere recently that starting from 2009, different racing lines (and also different attacking lines) returned. WHat was it actually in previous years that made them go away? I mean surely we have varying driver styles in the field. Button, let's say, would have a different style to Hamilton, and each driving style would have a slightly different line to reach the optimum speed for each style? What made these go away?

Next, how is it that drivers are able to just kind of "feel" their way around a track's racing line? Is it just pure racing experience? Also, say you had an absolutely 100% accurate scale drawing of a track, accurate to the width of the track. Would you be able to know without driving through the circuit the optimum possible racing lines?

Thanks

[epitaf]

With respect to the scale drawing idea, I think you could predict the racing line. The fastest racing line is obviously the one which has the highest average speed over an entire lap. With this in mind, you'd look to maximise the speed through each corner and optimise the exit speeds from each.

If you know how much grip you will have for a given speed, then you can calculate the maximum possible turning radius for a car at that speed, or more usefully the opposite, when given the radius of the corner, you can calculate the maximum speed that the car can drive through that corner.

Then it'd just be a matter of stringing all the corners together and making a few compromises where corners are too close together etc, but I think an engineer could feasibly tell a driver which line to take and then the driver just finds "his way" along the route he's been told is the fastest.