Originally Posted by
Weston@HPTuners
Update: RaceRender 3.5.4 now offers two new built-in Field selections to accommodate this: "(This Lap vs Best Lap)" and "(This Lap vs Cur Best Lap)" will estimate the time delta for the distance into the current lap versus that of the overall best lap, or of the best lap so far, depending on which option you choose. It will be reported as a number of seconds, with negative values indicating that you are decreasing the expected lap time (ie getting faster) and positives indicating a longer / slower expected lap. To display this as text, create a new standard Timer or Text Data display object type and set its Field selection to one of these options; alternatively, you could also use a gauge, bar graph, etc.
Ideally, the data system would provide its own time delta data that's optimized for that specific system, but many don't do this, leading some of you to ask for RaceRender to figure it out. So, this is a universal approach to estimate these lap time deltas, which aims to work across a large variety of data systems, under the expectation that each driven lap will take the same route. It is not a full predictive lap timer like you get with TrackAddict or many other data acquisition products, but rather a lighter-weight algorithm that's a simpler and more practical approach for this use case. It should appear to be more responsive than a typical predictive lap time, but can also have more fluctuations and error. Inevitably, a one-size-fits-all strategy wont be optimal for all situations or all data systems, and if you do weird things or give it bad data, you'll probably get weird results, but otherwise it does seem to work pretty well. For any text displays, you may want to reduce the display time precision to just 1 decimal place, to limit the fluctuation that can appear.
When I compare RaceRender's new "(This Lap vs Cur Best Lap)" calculation to TrackAddict's logged "Predicted vs Best Lap" data channel, which is the output of its predictive lap timer using a completely different algorithm, they do a decent job of staying pretty close together... RaceRender's calculation will appear to be much more responsive and fluctuate a bit, while TrackAddict's numbers will be more steady and accurate. If you're a TrackAddict user, you now have the option of using either method in your RaceRender projects. In either case, a good corner vs a blown corner tends to be pretty evident in the data (assuming that you did a better job there on your best lap).