Success ballast effect on lap time

[dhdev]

Success ballast is used in many formulae to penalise quicker cars/drivers, in order to level out the playing field. So I assume the ballast quantity is designed to produce a certain lap time increase. But does anyone have any numbers for this? I've searched online, but can't find any sources of information. For example in BTCC is the 54kg maximum success ballast intended to slow a car by 0.1s/0.5s/1.0s per lap? There are generalisations/estimates made for F1 that "x"kg of fuel costs "y"seconds per lap, surely other race series must have this information?

Thanks.

[Kraken]

It's one of those "how long is a piece of string" questions. It will have more effect on a circuit with lots of braking, acceleration zones than it would on a fast flowing track. You can only really quantify it to an amount of time for a particular track/series combination.

3/10ths per lap per 10kg is the most often quoted amount but it's a huge generalisation. The only thing that really matters is that if you take two equal cars and put 50kg in one then that one will be at a disadvantage.

[roddo]

I work on 1/10th for 10kg

[CedricN]

roddo said:

I work on 1/10th for 10kg

I did some lap time simulation in a lap simulation tool on my own car and ended up at that value, on a 1min 20s lap. It will of course be different depending on how tyre grip limited you are etc

[dhdev]

CedricN said:

I did some lap time simulation in a lap simulation tool on my own car and ended up at that value, on a 1min 20s lap. It will of course be different depending on how tyre grip limited you are etc

What power and weight is your car used in the simulation?

[CedricN]

About 185 to 245 hp and 1260 kg, i tried some different configurations. The program is called optimum lap and is free to use if anyone wants to have fun

[dhdev]

I downloaded Optimum Lap (thanks for the headsup) and did some quick and dirty simulations. It seems that weight doesn't have as big an effect as I thought it would. 100kg weight loss on a track e46 M3 (1400-1300kg) gave a 0.6sec reduction in lap time at Snetterton 300.

[DanielSan]

Not helpful with time, but if i remember rightly the main aim with the BTCC ballast wasn't too massively slow the lap time down, more make the car work it's tyres harder through the race and slow it down that way.