If you’re a YouTube fan, you’ve probably heard of Shmee150, one of the most popular automotive channel on YouTube. Shmee150 is the personal brand of Tim Burton, a car enthusiast and entrepreneur, who has recently decided to embark on a new adventure in motorsport!

Jon Holman, one of Racelogic’s engineers, joined the Shmee150 team at Rockingham last week during one of their test sessions in preparation for the 2017 Mini Challenge Championship. Jon was on hand to help Shmee improve his lap times and race craft by installing our new VBOX HD2, and then analysing the video and telemetry data to identify where improvements can be made during a lap. Shmee was also joined by Charlie Butler-Henderson, current driver and 2015 champion in the series, who has been coaching Shmee during his motorsport journey, offering advice gained from his experience in the Mini Challenge cars.

Check out the video.

VBOX LapTimer firmware version 1.13.2288 has been released today. It introduces a range of new features, including additional display modes for live G-force. You can downloaded the firmware here.

Release notes:

• Live speed display now has a smoothing function (Menu > Display Menu > Speed Settings)
• New live speed bar for improved accuracy when testing at a dedicated speed range.
• New live G display including max G (Lat and Long G) added.
• New live G display bar (Lat and Long) has been added.
• ComboG LED mode added to the predictive lap timing mode.
• Predictive Laptiming crash after setting user start/finish lines has been fixed.

The Online User Manual has been updated to explain how these new features and displays work.

Once you are in the groove, it can be very difficult to work out where you can gain time around a track. You feel you have more or less optimised your braking points and you are hitting your apexes, but you can’t help but feel there be more time to be found?

The answer could lie in how well you are using your tyres, and once you understand the principle, this fact can be easily spotted in amongst the wiggly lines of a data logging trace.

If you are braking on the limit, you will have no grip left for cornering and vice versa. The trick here is to combine the two, because then you get more out of the tyre.

How is this possible? Well, if you can recall those mechanics maths lessons at school about force vectors, the way you add up forces which act at 90 degrees to each other is to square them, add them up, then take the square root of the result, good old Pythagoras’ Theorem in action.

For example, if your tyre can generate 1G and you are braking at ½ G, you would think that you could only corner at ½ G at the same time. In fact, you would have 0.87G of cornering ability left due to the way forces are combined, so it is vital that you learn to make the most of this phenomenon.

What does this mean for racing? Well, it means that if you can cleverly combine braking and cornering you can extract more grip from the tyre than if you just brake in a straight line and then turn, and this will gain you lap time.

The trick is to study a channel named ‘ComboG’ in professional analysis packages such as Circuit Tools from RACELOGIC. The software does the maths for you by a vector combination of the two forces, and is a great indicator showing you how hard you are working your tyres. During the braking, corner entry and apex phases, this channel should give you a good idea of how much you are optimising your tyre’s potential grip.

In reality most of us combine these two naturally whilst racing, but how sure are you that you are absolutely getting the maximum out of your tyres at all times?

As you release the brake and start turning into the corner, it is tricky to maximise the tyres during this crucial phase. Most drivers use the maximum grip during constant braking and constant cornering, but very few during the transition.

Have a look at these two traces from the tricky Brooklands corner at Silverstone, you can see the ComboG dropping off briefly during the turning in phase. This could mean that the driver was braking too early, or he wasn’t turning in sharply enough, or most likely a combination of the two. Once you learn to use this powerful channel, you will begin to quickly spot areas where you can gain lap time by working the tyres harder.

New tracks have been added to our track database. You can download the full track library here.

Please make sure that you set up the following new tracks manually until a new version of VBOX Video HD2 setup software (higher than 1.1.121) or Video VBOX setup software (higher than 3.26 b432) has been released. Using auto-map in the scene will cause no map to be shown.

• Argentina - Circuito de Rosario
• Brazil - Autodromo Internacional de Cascavel
• France - Anneau Du Rhin C, Geoparc short, Geoparc long
• Germany - Estering
• Russia – Smolensk, Grozny, Sochi
• South Africa - Dezzi Raceway, Raceway East London
• South Korea - Inje Speedium
• Spain - Albacete
• Sweden - Falkenberg Raceway
• United Arab Emirates - Dubai Hill
• United Kingdom – Ingliston, Aintree Sprint, Carver Barracks, Castle Combe Western Sprint, Nutts Corner, Rushmore Arena
• United States of America - Thunderhill East, LVMS Exotics Racing

Full tack list