Design of a Racetrack Testing Data Analysis Method for Motorsport Tyre Development

The thesis is written during a curricular internship in Pirelli Motorsport Department. The collaboration helped the company introduce a new methodology to analyze track testing data, in order to improve the development of racing tyres. The goal of the thesis is to design a new methodology to analyze track data coming from GT car testing. The old methodology adopted was focused on highly analytical analysis, which covered specific and objective aspects of the tyre specifications. The new analysis framework is focused on aggregated data representing faithfully the global behaviour of the different tyre products, and it allows to precisely assess the progress done in the design and development process of GT racing tyres. The first innovation of the new framework is the choice of interacting directly with a database to build a coherent dataframe for the upcoming analysis. The choice relies on the common advantages of using a database: up-to-date information, adaptability, organization, coherence and consistency. The data coming from car telemetry of the test, trackside data such as lap times, tyre product data like specification and treadwear are combined coherently with the use of routines which execute SQL queries to build the final dataframe. Another innovation of the thesis is the preprocessing of the data prior to the analysis. In order to ensure data comparability in such a heterogeneous environment as Gran Turismo racing, scaling and normalization techniques are used. This will allow to analyze the data with the aim of assessing the global behaviour of the different tyre specifications, uninfluenced by external factors such as track evolution or different car configurations. At the end of the analysis, results on tyre performance, consistency and integrity are presented. The new synthetic-based analysis allows to correlate the global results with the analytical details already used in the old methodology. This approach allows to have better understanding of the tyre product and better correlation with the subjective evaluation of drivers and engineers. Another innovation is the possibility to study the spread of performance of the different competitors within the same tyre specification. This is possible since, once the global behaviour of the tyre is assessed, the details regarding each car can also be analyzed. The new framework developed opens the path for future developments also, such as the implementation of more complex models regarding tyre behaviour and the study of the correlation between outdoor and indoor testing results.