November 2022
30Nov
Tyres
The rumour mill is alive and well at the moment, and the latest speculation is that there may not be any more Pirelli Ultrasoft tyres. No more. Gone. Not being made.Ever?
We dont know, but it doesnt look good at the moment. What are the alternatives? Well, I tried the Avon HC3 compound tyres, and I found the Ultrasofts were around 2s quicker. Now, that may be down to the setup of my car, which is optimised for the Ultrasofts. Other people might find them quicker than the Pirellis. Certainly it splits the Hillclimb camp, with intense rivalries between the two different brands.
And with Avon closing in 2023, what happens in 2024? There are also stories of Yokohama closing their european factory, and Hankook also struggling to meet demand.
So what are we to do? What are the implications?
Well, for some, it might mean a curtailed season would work out best. Just do the minimum rounds, dont wear the tyres out unnecessarily. For those teams like the factory SBD team, where the car is shared, then it means twice the headache. Double driving on last seasons Ultrasofts is going to double the rate of wear, and do you want to jeapordise the run offs by putting km's on your good qualifiers?
It will be an interesting year, to see how drivers cope with the challenge.
21Nov
MUK Trophy
This is my bronze award for finishing in third place in the championship. Its quite impressive, very heavy, even with a carbon fibre base, and a little plaque engraved with 3rd Overall on it. Well worth the license fee. I also picked up a few other trophies on Sunday, but they're not so impressive to look at, so we'll keep this one up for the time being. I collected the Saxon award for having the highest aggregate score in England's events; and my trophy for winning the 1600T class in the HSA Championship.Sadly there are no class awards anymore in the BSC, they've all be taken away. There used to be great kudos in winning your class. Now all the Top 12 drivers get is a tiny crystal glass championship momento, and a permanent number for the following year.
14Nov
Revolution appearance
Good to see the car was shown in an article on Knockhill Race Circuit in the latest Motorsport UK Revolution magazine.Speaking of Knockhill, the rumour is that the circuit wont be on the 2023 calendar, however it may be back again in 2024, due to the work undertaken by the WSCC members. Bravo guys. The calender wouldnt be complete without a visit to Scotland. Hopefully it will be a two day event rather than the one we had this year.
All the data from 2022 is now imported in to SQL Server, and I've installed the Machine Learning pack with R and Python so I can try that out. There are 3.2 million rows of data in total, as I deciced to export all the LifeVIEW data files at 100Hz export rate. Lots of detail, and now I can start trying the ML features.
8Nov
Number crunching
While I wait for the ECU to be worked on, I'm working out ways myself of getting the logged data from the ECU in to SQL so I can do some analysis on it. This week I've tried using an influxDB database, importing the data over http using a Python script that I wrote, but it's A) slow to import, and B) doesnt give me much scope for running queries against it once the data is imported. So I've gone back to using my own SQL Server instead, hosted on my desktop PC. This already holds data from 2021, so I'll simply add to it.To make the process simpler, I've written a Python script that takes the CSV files created by LifeVIEW, and adds two additional columns, for the filename and run data/time. Once imported these additional columns allow me to identify when the data was captured and the original LRD file that the data was exported from. I'll share the .py file once its finished.
