Sport driving skills: A preliminary comparative study from outdoor testing sessions

The optimization of vehicle handling is a multifaceted process that extends beyond the vehicle's design and engineering. This work focuses on the fundamental role that drivers play in shaping the vehicle's overall behavior. While technological advancements have significantly impacted the automotive industry, defining new methodologies and approaches for vehicle controls, there is not yet a uniquely recognized procedure to objectively define the skills and weaknesses of pilots. This paper aims to present the preliminary results of an innovative study, based on an outdoor test campaign with a fully instrumented vehicle, driven on track by several drivers with different levels of experience. Starting from the collected data, a series of objective and generalized metrics have been defined in order to quantify different aspects related to the direct driver interaction with the car and to the trajectory repeatability. By analyzing the results obtained from these metrics, it has been possible to highlight the differences among the participants in the experimental campaign. In order to create a practical visualization of the goodness of the approach, a driver ranking has been defined and it is coherent with both the best lap times obtained by the drivers and their actual experience.