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There are several fundamental design parameters that determine a race car's performance including mass, centre of gravity height, static load distribution, engine power and aerodynamic forces. A sensitivity analysis is performed on these and other parameters to determine their effect on vehicle performance. This is achieved by looking at specific manoeuvres such as straight line acceleration, braking and steady state cornering to determine the relative effect of the respective parameters. The results presented are determined for both the Leeds University Formula SAE car, figure 1, and a typical mid - late 1990's Formula One car. The results further provide an insight into the differences between high speed cars effected by aerodynamics and low speed cars where aerodynamics makes little or no difference to performance. Combining the performance for a set of manoeuvres provides an insight as to how to improve the overall vehicle lap time.

Considerable effort has gone into modelling the performance of the racing car by engineers in professional motorsport teams. The teams are using progressively more sophisticated quasi-static simulations to model vehicle performance. This allows optimisation of vehicle performance to be achieved in a more cost and time effective manner with a more efficient use of physical testing. Racing cars are driven at the limit of adhesion in the non-linear area of the vehicle's handling performance. Previous simulations have modelled the transient behaviour by approximating it with a quasi-static model which ignores dynamic effects, for example yaw damping. This paper describes a comparison between different cornering modelling strategies, including steady state, quasi-static and transient. The simulation results from the three strategies are compared and evaluated for their ability to model actual racing car behaviour.