Race Strategy Calculator

Awesome work! This needs to be stickied in the Online Events forum, in Clubs as well as Series. By the way, does it work in Open Office?


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Nice! I made something similar, but with a little different approach. It's for use during the actual race to calculate what pace you need to have in order to win. I tried to include some tyre data too, but it's too old and the data is not valid anymore... but the pace calculation is still working. If you're interested maybe we can merge our calculators?

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_nYaY13F28Nb2VYUXpCQW52RFk
 
Really really interesting. Your calculator contains functionality which I never thought about. I have tested it and it is really powerful. I'm interested to combine our calculators in the future. I will let you know when I find the time.

Maybe I can just send you a slimmed version and it could be put in a second tab or something?
 
Here is the new, improved and streamlined version of the endurance race calculator. Don't know if it's possible to add it in the same excel file as your strategy calculator? If it's not, maybe they can just be put in the same zip file or something, that's the easiest thing I guess.

Oh, and I upgraded the interface a little bit, now it looks more "Gran Turismo" (actually I stole the design from gran-turismo.com...)

You can download it here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_nYaY13F28NSzdBS1o5UWR4NEE (for Microsoft Excel 2007 or later).

This is what it looks like:

rc201.jpg


How it works:

The basics:
It's an excel file with macros (xlsm). I have only tested it in Excel 2007 and can not promise that it will work in any other version (although later versions should be fine I guess). The sheet is locked to prevent things from being deleted or changed by mistake, the only thing you can do is to insert or remove values from the black boxes, as well as clicking the different buttons.
If you want to have a sneek peak on how it looks under the hood you can unlock the sheet with the password provided at the bottom.

Instructions:

1. Here you fill in your lap times. It doesn't matter too much how you write it, 09:05.765 works just as great as 9:5.7 (only a tiny bit less accurate scince 100th and 1000th split seconds are missing). If some value is zero you can just put it blank (or write a 0), it doesn't matter. the blue bottom row displays the average lap time. Clicking the "add" button (+, marked in a yellow circle) will move all the data up one position (except from the first time which will be deleted) and the 10th row will be free to insert a new lap data. the add button does the same with the gap table (2). Clicking the reload button (circle with arrow, marked with red) will clear all data from the lap times.

2. Here you fill in the gap, as displayed in the game. You can work with exact values or rough estimates (if you're 1,5 laps ahead of someone at Nürburgring it might be hard to estimate the exact gap, so just put 1 lap and about half of what a general lap time is...). The plus and minus (left column) works just like in game, if you're in the lead it's -, if you're behind it's +. Clicking the reload button (red circle) will clear all data from the gap table.


3. This is the graph showing the lap times of you and your opponent. It shows lap by lap as well as the average times. Clicking the reload button (top right, green circle) will rescale the vertical axis to an appropriate value.
Horizontal axis shows lap number. Vertical axis shows lap time.

4. This is the race data table. If you're in a timed race (for instance, 4 hours of Nürburgring) you type the total time and the completed time in the appropriate boxes. If you're in a race with fixed laps (for instance, 300 km of Grand Valley) you put the total amount of laps and the completed laps in the appropriate boxes. Clicking the reload button (red circle) will clear all data.

5. This is the prognosis chart. it keeps track of the gap and draws a curve to predict the development. It also shows a line for the average gap, as well as a red dotted line for the zero value (which is where there will be a tie between you and your opponent). Clicking the reload button (green circle) will rescale the vertical and horizontal axis to appropriate values.
Horizontal axis shows lap number (will change accordingly to the number of laps that remains in your race). Vertical axis shows the gap in seconds (red "+" is bad, white "-" is good.)

rc202.jpg


The only thing to be careful about is putting values that's 0 in the gap table. In some cases the calculator thinks that 0 = no value at all, and in those cases the value will not be registered. It's not a big problem, scince the gap is rarely 0:00.000... but if you want to put a zero in the gap for whatever reason, I recommend that you put 0:00.001, because that value will be registered for sure.
 
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Really nice work eran0004. I have made a new zip that contains your program and a separate file with the explanations from the post above. I also added in my first post an extra piece of text about your program.

Thanks :)
It might not be very useful for solo A-spec races, but if you're a couple of friends doing an endurance together, or if you're watching an online race, it's pretty nice. It also works for monitoring your B-spec drivers of course.


By the way, I'm already working on version 2.1.

This is what's coming:
- I'm adding the ability to insert more rows for lap times (in 2.0 you're restricted to 10 rows, in 2.1 you can add as many as you like).

- In the lap time graph I'm adding a "rabbit" to chase, i.e. the time you need to aim for in order to win the race. Going below the "rabbit" means you're going fast enough to win, going above the rabbit means you need to improve more. It's similar to the "you need to improve by N seconds in order to win"-feature from 1.0.

- A minor fix to the automatic axis scaling of the graphs.
 
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