CHAPTER 9

Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and

Full-Vehicle Simulation

In designing a high-performance car, there are clearly some design aims that
stem from common sense. We need an engine with plenty of power, tyres
with good grip and a low overall weight. If we have a knowledge of the
competition, we might be able to list some targets that will give our car
an advantage. This is all well and good, but there is a distinct limit to
how much one can improve a car this way. We will never know all the
relevant details about the opposition, and if we simply try to emulate them,
we shall always be behind either commercially or on the track. In addition,
there is always the problem of resources. There is only ever a finite length of
time before the next deadline, whether it’s a race or a launch and always a
limit on expenditure too.
If we are to be rational about designing a car, we need to put numbers on
these quantities. When we say we would like to improve the design of a rac-
ing car, what we really mean is that we want to know which activities will
produce the greatest improvements in performance per unit effort in making
them happen. We need to know, for example, whether spending half our
time and budget on improving the engine will yield as much improvement
as spending it on improving the chassis dynamics. In a racing situation, it is
lap-time simulation that is used to answer these questions, and in this
chapter, we will develop an understanding of how it is done. However,
for performance road cars, we still need the same ability to predict the whole
vehicle performance, and full-vehicle simulation is the process by which this
is done. In a lap-time simulator, one enters all the relevant vehicle dynamic
data including the track, and the package will determine the lap time.
Changes can then be made and their effect determined. In full-vehicle sim-
ulation, again, all the vehicle dynamic data are entered, and the package is
then used to simulate manoeuvres. The performance of the vehicle in terms
of ride quality and comfort can be determined as well as dynamic perfor-
mance. The effect of changes in the design can be studied and improvements
made. In both cases, validation is an important step, meaning comparison of

Performance Vehicle Dynamics Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-812693-6.00009-2 All rights reserved. 319
320 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

the simulation with test data to confirm that the simulation is acceptably
accurate before using it for optimisation.

9.1 SIMPLE J-TURN SIMULATION

A ‘J-turn’ is a very simple ‘track’ consisting of a straight section followed by a
constant radius corner. It can be thought of as a kind of building block; once
a J-turn can be simulated, several can be joined together to form a general
track. We can simulate the sector time for a J-turn relatively, and here, we
shall assume that
• the engine has all the power we need and so forward acceleration is
limited only by friction on the two driven wheels,
• the brakes provide enough torque to lock up the wheels and so deceler-
ation is limited only by friction on the four wheels,
• we will ignore all the chassis dynamics such as weight transfer,
• aerodynamics is irrelevant.
We start by looking at the track and how the driver will drive the car
around it.
In Fig. 9.1 above, we can see the J-turn has a constant 20 m radius at the
end preceded by a 50 m straight. The corner clearly has a maximum speed; if
this is exceeded, the tyres will not be able provide the lateral acceleration
necessary to keep the car on a 20 m radius corner, and the car will spin
out. Our first step is therefore to determine the maximum cornering speed.
We then consider the straight. When the car leaves the start line, we know it
to have zero velocity, and its maximum longitudinal acceleration is simply
0:5
μ; assuming only half the wheels have engine torque applied, we can

Velocity
50 m Straight – 20 m
constant radius
A
V1

B C
V2

S 1 S2 S3 Distance

Fig. 9.1 A J-turn velocity diagram.

 Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and Full-Vehicle Simulation 321

produce the line from the origin to point ‘A’. We also know the maximum
deceleration, 1:0
μ, and therefore the gradient of the deceleration line
from S1 to S2. Since we know the speed with which the car must enter
the corner, we can draw in the two lines, and the point in time at which
they cross is the point at which the driver must go from wide open throttle
to full braking, normally called the ‘braking point’.
First determine V2:
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
V2 ¼ ðLa^tacc RÞ

Since the maximum lateral acceleration is given by μ g and the maximum

braking acceleration is also given by μ g, we can write
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
V2 ¼ ðμgRÞ
The numerical values for points on the diagram can then easily be deter-
mined using equations of uniform acceleration. This model is very simple;
the only parameter to input is the friction coefficient of the tyres, since we
haven’t specified the weight, the tyre size, the engine power, etc.

9.2 EXTENSION OF THE J-TURN SIMULATION TO A

GENERAL TRACK
The above analysis can be extended to deal with a general track by consid-
ering the track as a collection of J-turns.
Fig. 9.2 above shows that any circuit can be thought of as being com-
posed of several J-turns one after another. In this way, the analysis above
can be used for a general circuit.

9.3 CORNERS OF VARYING RADIUS

If more accuracy is required, one can subdivide each corner into a series of J-turns
allowing a simulation of corners with varying radii. Fig. 9.3 shows this.
The approach taken here is much extended in a paper by Dominy and
Dominy [18].

9.4 FULL VEHICLE SIMULATION IN ADAMS CAR

At various points in this textbook, reference has been made to the Adams
multibody code. So far, this has always been to the code known as Adams
View. In fact, Adams is a suite of packages designed to complete a range of
322 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

Fig. 9.2 Any racing circuit can be divided up into a series of J-turns.

Fig. 9.3 J-turn approximation of varying radius corner.

complex dynamic simulations. The internet-based research will guide you

to web-based material about the package and its supplier.
One of the members of the suite is Adams Car and, as it name implies, it
allows the user to simulate vehicle performance. Learning such a package
and becoming proficient in its use is a considerable undertaking and not
within the scope of this text. However, packages like these offer tremendous
potential for the simulation of vehicle performance. One can never replace
 Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and Full-Vehicle Simulation 323

all the knowledge we gained in Chapters 1–8 because one needs to have that
level of understanding to know why any given vehicle behaves as it does.
The limit on turn in response is a good example; you can’t exceed the the-
oretical limit. However, armed with all this understanding, the availability of
packages such as Adams Car makes for rich simulation possibilities and no
doubt goes a long way towards explaining why current levels of refinement
on road cars are so good and why racing cars are so fast.
Adams Car is divided up into two modes of use, the ‘template builder’
and the ‘template user’. As a template user, you can call up different subas-
semblies from the library such as the one in Fig. 9.4 and link them together
to build an entire vehicle.
Fig. 9.5 shows a full-vehicle assembly in Adams Car. It is made by linking
a collection of subassemblies together. Once ‘assembled’, the vehicle can be
put through a whole range of manoeuvres and events. It can be made to
perform a step steer, for example, or a lane change or follow a prescribed
path. A user enters the details for the manoeuvre and the package then deter-
mines the vehicle response, and this can be viewed as a movie or studied in
detail with graphs of any parameter one might care to track. If you become a
template builder, then it is possible to produce new vehicles of whatever
design you wish to analyse. Fig. 9.1 shows a vehicle on a rough road and
is a very advanced simulation.

Fig. 9.4 A front wishbone assembly in Adams Car. Adams, Adams Car, Adams View and
other MSC product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of MSC Software
Corporation and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Image
provided courtesy of MSC Software. 2017 MSC Software Corporation.
324 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

Fig. 9.5 A full-vehicle assembly in Adams Car. Adams, Adams Car, Adams View and other
MSC product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of MSC Software Corporation
and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Image provided courtesy
of MSC Software. 2017 MSC Software Corporation.

In addition to manoeuvre simulations, Adams Car can perform other

design optimisations, for example, it has a 4-post rig emulator and suspen-
sion kinematics analysis built-in. There is also a very sophisticated optimi-
sation functionality that allows multiple variables to be solved at once.
In Fig. 9.6, we see an off-road vehicle whose development was assisted
by two of my MSc students as part of their dissertations at Oxford Brookes
University. The vehicle is extremely rugged, but the development of refined
handling is still important.
Fig. 9.7 shows a simulation developed in Adams Car, and in Fig. 9.8, we
see one of the parameters of interest in a graph showing experimental data
and computer simulation on the same axes. The preparation of computer-
simulated data that agrees well with real-life telemetry from the car in hand is
the final step in the process of being a successful road car vehicle dynamicist.
Once simulation of this quality is produced, it can be used to make improve-
ments to the car by changing its design and finding a parameter set that gives
the desired performance. Once this is done, it is a reasonable expectation that
 Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and Full-Vehicle Simulation 325

Fig. 9.6 Six-wheel off-road vehicle manufactured by Arctic Trucks. Reproduced by kind
permission of Nolan McCann and Arctic Trucks.

Fig. 9.7 Simulation in Adams Car of the truck in Fig. 9.8. Reproduced by kind permission
of Nolan McCann and Arctic Trucks.

Fig. 9.8 Correlation between test and simulation for truck yaw velocity. Reproduced by
kind permission of Nolan McCann and Arctic Trucks.
326 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

when the changes are also made on the real car, it too will improve as the
simulation did. This process is applied equally to racing as we see in the next
section. The two huge advantages offered are that firstly a vast number of
parameter setups can be examined, far more than practical by testing alone,
and secondly it is much cheaper than extensive testing. With simulations of
this quality made possible, testing should really be a process of confirmation
rather than experiment.

9.5 LAP-TIME SIMULATION IN CHASSISSIM

In racing, a very important use of vehicle dynamics is to produce lap-time
simulations. For example, consider a circuit consisting of an oval with
2 mi straights connecting just two corners, each of 180°. Clearly, here,
the terminal velocity will dominate, and the winner will simply be the
car with the highest top speed. However, if the circuit were changed
to include far more corners so that the cars are never at top speed, things
would be very different. Here, a team would do better to swap to a lighter
engine with less power and produce a chassis that corners better. The
only way to answer the all-important question of what combination of
dynamics parameters will make for the quickest lap of the track in hand
is to undertake lap-time simulation. We saw above an introduction to
lap-time simulation using a J-turn. Simple lap-time simulators follow a
very similar approach and use static equilibria at each point on the track
to estimate the speed over a very small local sector. Coding is required to
determine whether the throttle should be fully open or the brakes fully
on, depending on the distance to the next corner entry and current speed,
nothing in between these two settings is used. More advanced lap-time
simulators determine the transient conditions too. For example, the tran-
sient roll of the chassis can give an overswing to the roll displacement and
then a consequent change in lateral force at each tyre in response to the
vertical load on it. For this reason, such simulators are called ‘transient’
lap-time simulators.
ChassisSim is an example of a transient lap-time simulator. The internet-
based research below will guide you to material about the package and its
supplier. In essence, the package is simple, one enters all the vehicle dynam-
ics parameters from very major parameters such as vehicle weight, cornering
stiffness, polar moment, engine power and torque curves right through to
effects such as camber gain, suspension geometry and aerodynamic map.
The package comes with a library of parameters that can be used and mod-
ified, in a similar way to Adams Car above.
 Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and Full-Vehicle Simulation 327

Fig. 9.9 The front end GUI for the lap-time simulator ChassisSim. Reproduced by kind
permission of Danny Nowlan—ChassisSim.

The graphical user interface shown in Fig. 9.9 allows the user to call up
existing library circuits, cars, etc. and edit them to suit the case in hand.
After this, the control panel on the right is used to run simulations from
which the results can be studied. Fig. 9.10 shows the track map for a sample
simulation.

Fig. 9.10 Track map—ChassisSim. Reproduced by kind permission of Danny Nowlan—

ChassisSim.
328 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

Fig. 9.11 Plotted data for the simulation. Reproduced by kind permission of Danny
Nowlan—ChassisSim.

Fig. 9.11 shows output data for the simulation in hand, and the distance
along the bottom axis refers to the distance from the start of the above
circuit. In this case, speed, steering input and throttle are shown, but all
dynamics parameters of interest can be plotted.
In the top line, we see the speed trace for the racing car, and it is clear that
the car is never in equilibrium, accelerating all the time, and that it spends a
minority of the time at terminal velocity. Using tools such as ChassisSim,
vehicle dynamicists are able to determine exactly what set of vehicle param-
eters will result in the shortest possible lap times, something that is not
otherwise easily answered. Issues such as damper settings bring advantages
in one situation but not in another; exactly how all these play out for a par-
ticular circuit is not easy to anticipate. The existence of transient lap-time
simulators such as ChassisSim makes for excellent design opportunities in
racing and goes some way to explaining why racing packs are generally
so close in performance.
The final step in the process of being a successful racing vehicle dynami-
cist is to overlap computer-simulated data with real-life telemetry from the
car in hand, just as above from road car simulation. This is shown using
 Lap-Time, Manoeuvre and Full-Vehicle Simulation 329

Fig. 9.12 Comparison of lap-time simulation with real data.

ChassisSim in Fig. 9.12. In the figure, we see graphs, including throttle posi-
tion, the steering wheel position for a neutral car overlaid with the actual
position and roll angle. Once a good level of agreement has been developed
between measured data and simulated data, then one can make adjustments
in the model, find changes that bring improvements and then reasonably
expect that when these changes are made on the real car, the same improve-
ments will result.
Thus, lap-time simulation can be used to determine the overall best
package for a given circuit. This certainly makes it seem as if, in vehicle
dynamics, only lap-time simulation is needed, but of course, this is not
the case. Lap-time simulators determine what the lap time will be, whereas
vehicle dynamics determines why.
And finally, to quote from the introduction at the start of this book,
‘The issue is that until you put numbers on things you’re wasting your time, you’re
just playing about’

We have, at last, reached the point.

330 Performance Vehicle Dynamics

9.6 INTERNET-BASED RESEARCH AND SEARCH

SUGGESTIONS
• Visit or search on mscsoftware.com and select the material about Adams
Car. Research the case studies and sales support material.
• Visit YouTube and search on Adams Car.
• Conduct a review of major packages offering full-vehicle simulation and
understand the differences between what’s on offer.
• Search on ChassisSim and investigate all that is on offer within the pack-
age and from its vendor.

9.7 DIRECTED READING

In addition to the text listed at the end of each chapter above, a number of
other texts are of general interest in the field. These are texts that provide
good coverage in some area and should be used to supplement the directed
reading for each chapter:
[19] Bastow, D. and Howard, G., ‘Car Suspension and Handling’
[20] Beikmann R. ‘Physics for Gearheads’
[21] Dukkipati R. V. ‘Vehicle Dynamics’
[22] McBeath. ‘Competition car Data logging’
[23] Reimpell J., Stoll H. Betzler J. W. ‘The Automotive Chassis’
[24] Smith. C. ‘Tune to Win’
[25] Wong J. Y. ‘Theory of Ground Vehicles’