High performance maneuvering for race vehicles

A primary task in the automotive industry is to explore the dynamic capabilities of a vehicle and thereby improve its set-up so as to drive the fastest possible lap-time on a given track. Most companies use software tools helping their race car designers in gaining information on the vehicle performance before it is built. The basic idea is to build a mathematical model to obtain important information on the dynamic behavior of the car and then make important analyses before construction of the prototype. Through the use of reduced-order models, numerical strategies, and optimization we seek to understand and exploit vehicle capabilities. Yhese techniques have been developed and tested on a complex model of a race car. Videos of the maneuvering capabilities of such race car will be presented. Also, we will show the results obtained from a virtual formula competition which testify the effectiveness of the developed techniques.