Lap Simulation

I thought I’d share a little personal project that I’ve been working on for a while now, writing my own lap simulation code in MATLAB.

Essentially its a point-mass model using various vehicle parameters to calculate loads on each corner. The solver starts from zero velocity and iterates until a solution has converged.

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Of course one of the things I’m most interested in is the aerodynamics. I’ve included the ability to interpolate aero coefficients from a non-linear ride height map, as well as vary the coefficients in yaw.

Without much access to real data, I used telemetry that I logged from a popular racing simulator / game to create track profiles from speed and lateral acceleration. Vehicle parameters I have been able to piece together from various sources. The results aren’t perfect by any means but in general they match well with what real data I can find to compare to.

I don’t have a ton of use-cases for the program right now beyond hypothetical setups, but its been a fun project and helped me to dig deeper into both vehicle dynamics and programming. I may post some updates here as I continue to work on it.

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