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Rev counter in track - who's smoking what at lotus
- Thread starter Magicman
- Start date
If 1K to 4K RPM isn’t useful then what is 7K to 9K that the car isn’t physically capable of reaching doing on the dial. By the same rationale it’s valuable space that could be used (with a little stretch) to accommodate the full 7K rpm range at the expanded scale - that’s what makes sense for a driver focused / track tach.
I understand the I4’s coming but does it have the exact same power band as the V6?
I understand the I4’s coming but does it have the exact same power band as the V6?
It's literally a problem that I've recognized when driving on track in a purpose-built race car with a digital dash. The older ones were fully linear, simple displays and they were not great for informing the driver while minimizing task load. Today many of the racing display companies use a curved tach bar to visually shorten the left end and prioritize the key rev range to the center.
Here's a Race Technology DASH2, which places the less important portions of the rev range vertical, and curves to horizontal for the important bits above ~3.5k.
Here's a Haltech IQ3, which solves for this problem by both curving the tach and shifting the whole thing to the left so that the key rev range is centered visually:
Here's an example of a scaled tach similar to the Emira, on a MoTeC dash, both upper left and lower right:
And for the really great one... a classic STACK instrument dash. This one compresses 0-4k RPM into a little band in the analog tach, and starts the actual information from the bottom of the range used when racing!
They've solved for the same problem with the slope on the left end. The Emira does that exact thing in the curved display for Sport mode.
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Fair enough, that’s irrefutable. You were right and I was wrong. Thanks for taking the time to find examples and explain, I’ve learnt something new.
No worries at all! It's a weird counter-intuitive problem that definitely only becomes apparent when you're in the moment on track with the thing, overwhelmed by sensory input, and you realize that there's a lot of stuff moving and flashing on the display and only a portion of it is relevant to your needs and interests.
Auto makers should really offer different dials themes like Apple does on their watch face! Some like it simple, some like it retro, some like techie…. Etc….Here's the Maserati MC20 display for comparison... Looks fantastic to me! Only thing I'd change is "gas" to "throttle" instead.
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Corsa mode:
Agreed! With a digital display like this, it would be fantastic if there were switchable options added in addition to the standard 3 layouts. There are a ton of digital displays with good layout options that they could crib from, and this is exactly the kind of "free upgrade" that over-the-air firmware updates enable in modern vehicles. There's just no downside to continuing to develop and backport updates and improvements to software into an existing fleet of vehicles. It doesn't prevent owners buying newer cars from the same brand when you're talking about a low volume manufacturer like this. Customers today understand intuitively that the software isn't inherent to the car, it is a separate thing that should be serviced and maintained/upgraded over time with any well-managed technical product, whether it's a phone or a vehicle. Customers are buying the hardware, and the software just enables the experience that the hardware promises to deliver.
I'd love to see them add a circular dial display as an option. There are a bunch of nice examples from other companies doing large TFT displays in the 7"+ class where you have the screen real estate to present a bunch of data at once rather than in different flippable pages (as in motorsport digital displays of the past).
Here are some examples:
AiM MXG (7")
Another AiM MXG page, less "race" and more traditional, with classic style warning lights in a bottom row:
Powertune Digital dash (7")
Bosch DDU 10 (7")
STACK ST9918 (7")
emiraspain
Emira Addict
were u late for work??? hah
emiraspain
Emira Addict
So... Ive used the AiM unit in the westfield sport 250 and if Im not mistaken, the FE Elise also uses an AiM unit. The westfield one was adjustable and you could, as I am sure you know, set it up in one of about 20 different ways to show all sorts of crap if you actually had the sensors to read the crap in the first place.
Personally I found it way to small and a bit tachy / tacky and I preferred the one Ariel use which is race technology, which has the added benefit of the shift lights.
Anyway, my question to you is the following:
When on track, do you really look at the rev counter in order to change gear.... ever? Surely its more the engine sound?
Im asking as I am NOT a fast track driver, although I have had the cars and hence you would think I would be, but maybe the self preservation society (italian job in case you were wondering) stops me, or pure lack of talent, who knows. However, on my few excursions onto the track I was not looking at the rev counter when I changed gear, ever... Perhaps the better drivers do this and the worse ones dont. I could just about handle the gear change lights, although I would have also liked an audible sound
"Change the bloody gear". "Shift up stupid" something like that may have helped me more
.I dont mind that Lotus are trying something different here, although it would look a bit more estetically pleasing if the 9 was replaced with an 8.
I also think they could simply eliminate all the range apart from 4 - 8 or 4 - 7 with the scale from 6-7 being perhaps twice as big as the rest. It would also be nice, as with the AiM, if when you change gear, the point at which the gear change was made, would stay marked temporarily on the tachometer. That was a nice feature and you can see if you actually "nailed' it or not...
The rev counter is useful when you are figuring out how you are optimizing your line in a given corner. As you start to repeat laps more and more cleanly, the fine-tuning of the racing line and the entry/exit speed for a particular corner start to gain a ton of importance, and the rev counter gives you a much better impression of whether you've optimized the line for putting torque to the ground at the transition point or corner exit than a speedometer will. The noise of the engine can tell you when to shift if you're very well-acclimated to a particular motor, but it won't tell you exactly how far into the torque band you've "solved the puzzle" for in terms of racing line and brake/throttle transition optimization through a particular corner or track feature. Setting very fast lap times is ultimately about how much you're able to avoid slowing down, rather than how fast you're able to accelerate. In a sanctioned race series usually everyone has more or less the same accelerative potential, and even with very well understood and executed racing lines it's the timing and smoothness of the transition from braking to throttle mid-corner that often separates the fastest from the merely fast. The timing of that transition point can change quite a bit depending on where in the rev band you are and how much torque is immediately available at a given RPM.
All this to say... from my perspective it really seems as though they've set up the Track dash mode as an actual Track-useful mode rather than just a page that looks more "extreme" for the purposes of excitement. It seems to give a reasonable amount of information oriented to a driver's needs on track, which are different from the information needs in regular driving. I will have to experience it to see if the four growing "petals" style of shift light indication is useful compared to a more traditional bar, but it looks interesting. I'm sure Gavan Kershaw and others had a lot of input on it based on their experiences in motorsport.
The one thing that I don't see on the Track display that I would personally like to see is an oil temp gauge. Water temp only gives half the story on thermal management. Oil pressure would also be very welcome, it's a great indicator for a number of different kinds of failure, and having that information available in an instant can be the difference between an inconvenient tow and a painfully massive repair bill. It would be amazing if gearbox temp was also available, but that's wishful thinking. Normally you only see that on tow vehicles or purpose-built race cars.
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It's true that it can be optimized, but it's also not a problem when it's not. There are other ways to indicate, including color change, shift lights, etc.
Here's a linear tach on my old race bike:
On my newer race bike I have a digital gauge and I prefer the non-track mode, but notice it changes colors and has a shift light. I don't even need to see the numbers.
I definitely think you guys are overthinking it. 99.9% of the time I don't even need to look at the dash, I only look at it when I'm trying to optimize something to know how close I am to redline, but even then... you take the same line/corner hundreds of times and it's ingrained. Just my opinion though...
To be fair, the "linear" tach on your old race bike is visually optimized for the 10k to 16k sweep, because that's what's across the top of the dial. That was an intentional design choice. If it were rotated with the zero on the left, the 10k at 3'oclock and the 16k somewhere under the bottom of the dial past 6'oclock, you'd find it far less useful.
On your newer bike you're getting a lot of info on that display, and certainly the changing shift bar indicator gives you a ton of info about where you are compared to redline. That makes great sense for a short-geared race bike where you're running up and down the gears a lot, and you're pretty much always in the torque band if you're riding it properly. You're also significantly traction limited when cornering a motorcycle, which is where the magic of modern traction control comes into play... usually race bikes have abundant excess torque available in cornering scenarios and can overwhelm a fully loaded rear tire at will with the right wrist unless TC (or rider skill) intervenes.
In a car with longer gearing and without gratuitous amounts of extra power on tap, you're thinking about and managing a lot more in order to figure out how to maximize time-under-acceleration out of the corner. At minimum it gives you a reference for what you're doing when you start working on a corner as a "project". With far more traction than torque (compared to a bike) the driver's choices about brake/throttle transition are more time and rpm sensitive in order to figure out the fastest way through, because unlike a bike, in a car you can go full throttle pretty immediately once the steering starts to unwind. Once you know the track really well it's far less necessary to check the tach reference, because it becomes part of the driver's track memory, but in the process of figuring out how to extract the fastest lap times on a particular track with a particular car, a lot of this info is useful. People talk about certain cars being "momentum cars" requiring a lot of skill and smoothness to go fast, but honestly all cars are fastest when the same driving optimizations are applied to exploit the full extent of the traction envelope for as long as possible through each corner.
I've beaten this topic into the ground. Apologies to everyone who felt compelled to read all these responses.
Honestly I think this is a huge improvement over my current M2 Competition's instrumentation.Why does the track mode tach need to rev to 9k anyway when the car redlines at 6800.
View attachment 7011
The Emira's instrumentation looks clean and well presented. I also love that it tells you what gear you're in and when to shift (not that I really need that, but it's nice to have).
I still to this day don't understand why, for M cars, BMW doesn't do a center tach. I never use the analog speedo because I have the digital speedo pulled up at the bottom of the cluster. So my eyes are never looking where it should. Always to the right and the bottom of the cluster, not straight on.
In my M4 Comp, I never even use the cluster, I think the steering wheel gets in the way and there's too much stuff going on -- so much so that I just use the heads up display. I had an S2000 before and really just loved the focus on RPM & Speed.
So yeah I like the Emira instrumentation as well.
I loved the display in my STIs. Clean, easy to read analog gauges with the tach dead center and even had a programmable shift light.
Not my video, but same gauges:
The point is it's an entire sweep and yes, it's optimized for the upper RPM... just like most cars(?)
Here's an R6 gauge cluster:
Here's an example of one of the cars I've tracked, I won't bore you with gauge clusters of all of them. Would you consider that optimized?
The point I'm making is that I rarely have to look at it. Only for optimization. You develop an ear and a feel. On a bike especially, my head is usually pointing somewhere other than the gauge cluster.
Here's a pic, where you can see where we're looking (not the gauge cluster
):I'm not sure about your point about torque... there are plenty of smaller bikes that are power limited, compared to traction. No different than a car... anything at the limit can be upset with undue power input.
I have experience with both bikes and cars and there are "momentum bikes" as well. Again, everything you're saying applies to both, I'm not sure what it has to do with the gauge cluster anyway. There's actually a lot less task loading in a car. Everything happens so much slower
No apologies necessary... always fun to have this type of dialogue. To me the gauge cluster doesn't matter much and that was the entire point. You get used to anything and once you get to expert level it's all automatic anyway. You just get so tuned into everything. Honestly, the backwards fuel gauge bugs me more than the linear RPM gauge! LOL
That dash! That sound! Off to the classified ads!
emiraspain
Emira Addict
ive never owned, but drove a DBS for the weekend, years ago and yes its weird seeing the rev counter that way, its also weird as it stays very low or at least mine did...V12 of course.
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