Originally Posted by Assa2:
“'Brake-By-Wire' is misleading. There's still the same 'mechanical' hydraulic link from the brake pedal to the front and rear brake calipers. The electronics are there to compensate and adjust the amount of rear-wheel braking dependent on the amount of engine braking the ERS is doing. Seeing as the majority of retardation comes from the front wheels though there's very little potential for mis-use of the BBW system in terms of preventing lock-ups or doing anything else clever.”
Uhuh,
I know the braking reg's have always been kept very "old-school" as a deliberate way to stop teams doing slippery stuff.
I always used to wonder why, instead of having a basic brake-bias adjuster, they couldn't have a system like the gear shifters where you'd just operate a lever or button before turn 1 and it'd set the brakes for turn 1 and then you'd press it again before turn 2 and again before turn 3 etc.
The rules, IIRC, specifically say that the brake bias adjuster must be completely manual and can't be automated in any way.
With the new rules, you might look at a circuit and find that the corners range from a hairpin where the brake bias is 80f/20r to a fast sweeper where the bias is 30f/70r and, that being the case, you could use either GPS or distance travelled to either harvest leccy (equivalent to
adding more rear brake bias) or use the rear brake compensator (equivalent to
reducing rear brake bias) to automatically set the brakes for a corner.
You probably
could police this simply by looking at telemetry though.
If there's nothing dodgy going on the telemetry should, obviously show the rear brake compensator only ever kicking in (to reduce rear braking) when the ERS is harvesting leccy on a corner entry, and by a proportional amount.
If the rear brake compensator seemed to be acting independently of the ERS then it'd probably mean something iffy was going on.
I can also see it being possible to use software to correlate gear and engine RPM with road speed and use that data as a "traction control" system.
At the start of a race or out of slow corners, for example, it'd be pretty easy for a computer to use gear and RPM data, compared with road speed, to detect wheelspin and then allow more and more energy to be harvested to help reduce engine RPM and, thus, reduce wheelspin.
That'd probably be legal, I think, cos you
are, basically, just taking the opportunity to harvest wasted energy and the fact that it'd also be reducing wheelspin would just be a happy coincidence.
That might've been what RBR was doing last year.