SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Driving rFactor: A Fast Lap at Orchard Lake Grand Prix

As you can see by the graphic below, the ‘Lake is a track with a split personality: A good half of each lap is run on the Tri-Oval portion of the facility, and with that comes high speeds and not much need for maneuverability. On the other hand, the infield road course is a collection of tight, slow speed corners not concerned with high top speeds but certainly demanding of tight maneuvering skills. It would almost seem that you’d need two kinds of cars to conquer this track, but the key to setting up a car for the Orchard Lake Road Course is to look for what the two portions of the circuit have in common — a lack of need for high aerodynamic downforce. With all time and distance spent on the high banking, you’ll want a slippery car with a low drag count to achieve maximum speed. That means dialing out most of the front and rear wing on your car. On the slow corners of the infield road course, you won’t be going fast enough to take advantage of aero grip, so again there’s no need for big wing settings. But that’s where the similarities end. On the road course, you’ll want plenty of mechanical grip, often found by lowering tire pressures, and reducing spring rates to achieve more oversteer — just the things that the Tri-Oval doesn’t appreciate. Likewise with the drive train, the Tri-Oval will encourage the use of longer gearing to achieve maximum top speed, but on the infield those gears will sap the engine’s ability to accelerate the car hard out of the corners. If you optimize your car for the infield, remember that you may find it to be quite a handful on the Tri-Oval, and vice-versa. At the end of this article we’ve provided some sample setups for you to try for each of the cars evaluated here, but the ultimate solution to chassis setup is to match your own driving style to the track conditions. Don’t be satisfied with what’s provided here — do some test laps and tinkering, and see what works best for you.

Orchard Lake's Turns

A Word About Labeling Conventions. In order to keep everyone on the “same sheet of music”, I’ve devised the following convention for referring to the various corners on this circuit. The letter “T” is shorthand for “turn”, and the modifier of (L) or (R) refers to whether the corner is a left or right hand turn, respectively. The number I’ve chosen for labeling the turns is my own selection, and might not match up with anyone else’s, but is certainly good enough to cover the needs of this article.

And now, we’re off to the track!

Turn 1 (L): So, you’re down to second gear, and starting to turn in to arc the car smoothly to the apex....

The Track: Whoa, whoa, back up! Before we talk about turn 1, we need to talk about how we got there, because the “getting” to Turn 1 can make or break your lap times — or your car. To properly analyze our Turn 1 technique, we need to start our observation at the start / finish line, in the middle of the speedway’s tri-oval.

Start / Finish

Turn 1 (L): Recommended Gear: 2nd. Crossing the start-finish, you’re flat out in top gear, doing 160-180 mph. Aim to cross the start-finish in the middle of the track, and then start letting the car drift up to the outside wall as you scope out the transition point from banked speedway to infield road course. There’s some red and white kerbing up ahead on the inside of the track, and we need to make our transition angle to the infield pavement as subtle as possible. To do that, we’ll start up by the outside wall of the speedway, and then gently but firmly drift down to the “apex” of that transition kerbing. When we get there, we don’t want to have much turn in the wheel much at all, because the suspension is going to get pretty upset by the pavement transition and we’re just seconds from executing the hardest braking we’ll do for the entire lap. Since we know that cars stop faster and more predictably if they brake in a straight line, that’s just what we’ll be shooting for here. Each lap you take at Orchard Lake, you should be looking for that perfect dive off the banking and through the transition, so that when you clip that inside kerbing your car is pointed arrow-straight at the outside of the Turn 1 entry point. And you won’t be lifting through this process, so wimps need not apply.

Infield transition

Go To Page 3

Click here to go to top of this page.