OptimumLap is a FREE, simplified, vehicle simulation tool that estimates a vehicle’s performance on a given racetrack.
And it gives you accurate and useful results in minutes.
Vehicle Dynamics Simulation, Simplified
To make OptimumLap, our engineers reduced the vehicle to its most fundamental components. They found that a vehicle can be defined with only 10 parameter—and each parameter represents a specific aspect of the car (such as engine, tires, or aerodynamics). This makes it easy to see how each parameter impacts the vehicle’s performance, so you know where to focus your time and resources.
Design
With just a few inputs, you can build virtually any land vehicle in minutes. The values for all inputs are easy to measure, or they’re readily available online. Once a vehicle is defined, OptimumLap offers a range of graphs to help you understand the vehicle’s performance characteristics, and validate it to measured numbers. The OptimumLap database offers several vehicles for download that can be used as templates for new vehicles or for comparison studies. And, logged data can be imported to generate a track.
Simulate
The vehicle model used in OptimumLap is a point mass, quasi-steady state model. Mathematically, this is overly simplistic, but in reality, this model is very powerful at analyzing the global performance trends of a vehicle without having to capture or model more detailed effects. The advantage? A vehicle can be characterized by very few inputs, which saves you time to set up and conduct a simulation.
We’ve taken great care while simplifying the vehicle model to ensure accurate results. Even though the model is a point-mass model, meaning that no weight transfer or transient effects are taken into account, the simulated results still correlate well with logged data. Validations have shown that apex speeds, end of straight speeds, energy consumption, and total lap time all match.
Analyze
Like any simulation, OptimumLap will generate large amounts of data. To help you quickly understand the data, OptimumLap has interactive graphing tools so it’s much easier to compare vehicles and race tracks, and it highlights subtle features in the data. And you can quickly and easily investigate relationships and identify trends among the 60 output channels. All data from OptimumLap can be exported to Excel for further processing and analysis.
Understand
We built OptimumLap to encourage you to use simulation results to make decisions. Its tools lets you study effects of engine power, gearbox characteristics, aerodynamics, tires and suspension, and mass. The results will help you define the specifications for the detailed design of different sub-systems.
For example:
Do you need more longitudinal or lateral grip?
How much drag can wings add before they start to negatively affect performance?
Which final drive ratio minimizes the number of gear shifts?
What is more important: Reducing weight or increasing power?
How much drag can wings add before they start to negatively affect performance?
Which final drive ratio minimizes the number of gear shifts?
What is more important: Reducing weight or increasing power?
These are just a few examples of how you can use OptimumLap to make your job faster and easier. We’re excited to see what types of analyses you’ll develop. And remember, OptimumLap is available free of charge—our gift to you and the industry so anyone can benefit from vehicle simulation.
Always Free