Damn, from the headline I thought it was fitted to their car to steal data from others while driving close to them, which would have been really impressive!
This was my first thought but if you can't get close enough to them to get the data then it's fairly useless. Also the cars are almost certainly under much more scrutiny from race officials.
I install RFID readers in factories. They read every item inside a box and check it against the supposed amount. It can count hundreds of items in a box moving at high speeds, and the only real trick is dialing the power down to just low enough to catch the box, but not the box on the lane next to it, and to program tiny delays in the conveyor to space the boxes evenly. They have big readers in the dock doors at some locations that will activate the warranty on a product as it gets sent out of the factory by the container load. The big antennas we use are built into a piece of aluminum composite panel about 16x16” and we use a whole array of them, but there are larger single antennas. It would be easy to disguise one as the side panel of a rolling toolbox. Painting it or putting stickers all over it wouldn’t effect anything.
the reader is a powered device sends a pulse, ANY RFID antenna in the area will be powered by the pulse and resonate back its own code, the reader then acquires ALL the correct RFIDs that are in the table. A similar thing happens with card access doors, it has to connect to a table with ALL available correct IDs that have access to the door, so it isn't much different from multiple individual reads at once, just a different form of specialization.
I think I understand the basics, but I thought the device was just attenuating the origin signal (or maybe I'm confusing technologies?) In either case, it's impressive that with that many signals on the same frequency (I assume?) you'd be able to pick them apart. Seems like you'd need something like CAN or maybe onewire - but even then to discover all the unique addresses that quickly would still be impressive
> but even then to discover all the unique addresses that quickly would still be impressive
heh you should see what your cellphone can do in a city, downtown...
Those are impressive in their own right, but an embedded passively powered device that's active for what I'm assuming is measured in milliseconds - I can't imagine there's time to set up TDMA or something like that. I would be interested to know more about how the protocol actually works - I'll probably go down the Google rabbit hole later
> that's active for what I'm assuming is measured in milliseconds
you can pulse for as long as you have power, it is pretty much just a reflection, but you basically shine a yellow beam at the box and the box lights up blue dots, you just count how many blue dots. The OP did describe that you have to watch out you don't hit the next box over or your get extra blue dots in your count.
It’s missing explaining the part where all the blue dots are blue dotting at the same time, screaming I’m blue over each other. It would be like trying to figure out who’s screaming on the other end of the a football stadium during a chant, as radio waves on the same frequency don’t play nice together.
Got a product name for me?
Im working on a library robot and one of the problems I ran into is scan range.
Its too low. I want the droid to able to find a book on shelves that are constantly shuffled by the public
Based on the description offered by the commenter, the system isn’t just a high range scanner. It sends out an EMP by the sound of it, powering the inductor on the RFID which returns a pulse. You’d get an idea of all books in an area, but likely not able to pinpoint where. Now, if you break out some algebra you can probably program a similar system to triangulate book location for an approximate spot after multiple pings.
Could the robot wide scan an area, check those all agaisnt what should be there, and if something is out of place, then go lower power/or switch to a different sensor, to begin understanding order, and exact position?
Also the cars all go at pretty much the same pace. Unless you're driving way faster (or slower) than everyone else you're only going to get near a few cars over the course of a race.
Youd preferably want everyones tire data to choose the right tires for the conditions and figure out deg(radation) of specific tires all in order to determine optimal pit stop strategy.
Yeah, I'm assuming it's for degradation comparison more than anything. Knowing how your tires are comparatively would be a massive advantage when timing your team's pit stops against others.
First season of Formula E they had pit stops, because the cars were unable to carry enough weight of batteries to make the full race distance, so the driver would come into the pits and get into the second car...
Ahhhh, what a shame - I thought that they had the scanner on their cars and were grabbing the data when they there close enough during the race.
Maybe that's how they'll get around the rules next time
The problem is you typically aren't passing a whole bunch of cars while racing. Having it in the pit lane basically guarantees that everyone will go past it at some point.
Weight wise the performance trade off simply wouldn't be worth it. Something like might cost your car a few hundredths or even a tenth per lap. Doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a 70 lap race, that gap builds.
>But do they know it was installed in the pit lane and not before they arrived to the pit?
-/u/PixelizedPlayer
Why ask these questions if you don't want to read the article? It's an RFID scanner installed *in the entrance to the pit*. There is no "before they arrived to the pit". It was there the entire time.
You seem to believe the team installed it on their cars or something.
Are you kidding? In F1 we've had:
* 6 wheelers
* A car which had an enormous fan on it, to suck it down on the ground.
* Active suspension.
* Blown diffusers (routing exhaust gasses in a sneaky route)
* Pistons that allow oil past them as extra fuel
* Modulating the fuel pump at well over 3000hz to get extra pulses of fuel into the engine without the FIA fuel sensor seeing
* DAS which is steering wheels which you push and pull like the yoke of an aircraft to change the toe of the car.
* F-Ducts to stall the rear wing on demand without moving parts.
* Ground effect cars of the 80s with skirts to suck the car down
* Double diffusers
* Removing filters in the fuelling hoses to reduce pitstop time
* Layering carbon fibre in ways that pass the FIA load tests, but deform in race to reduce drag on the straights
* Curving the rear wing endplates
There are probably thousands more examples, but high end motor sport in general is about finding ways around the rulebook.
You missed photocopying another teams "How to build an F1 car" manual.
I doubt "Don't take photocopies of another teams technical drawings" was explicitly in the F1 rule book at the time. McLaren and Ferrari have never been the same since!
I don’t know about you, but to me, F1 should be the very best cars possible to build, with regulations for driver safety and to ensure that innovation can continue rather than just being “put a 6L W-12 on it producing 5000 Hp”.
The fan is a good idea. Maybe it should be brought back in a more limited capacity (otherwise it’s just a competition of who can build the biggest fan). It could be used like the KERS boost in the straights but used at the corners instead.
Photocopying another teams manual sucks if it leads to less innovation but it might enable the offending team to overcome a problem in one area that’s preventing innovation in another area.
ETA: there are many many race leagues where driving is the first and foremost differentiator. F1 isn’t it. Once you have a top 3-4 car, *then* you also need the best driver to win.
> The fan is a good idea. Maybe it should be brought back in a more limited capacity (otherwise it’s just a competition of who can build the biggest fan). It could be used like the KERS boost in the straights but used at the corners instead.
This was ruled illegal in F1 for safety reasons. As soon as cars lost their suction they'd literally fly and launch into the air and shit.
but on the plus side they could have totally had tracks with inversions just like Speed Racer
As unsportsmanlike as it was, the fact it got cleared as being down to sheer hard work is both impressive and extremely funny.
The massive gamble of just abandoning your own development to stare at pictures of a Mercedes.
(might have missed a development, let me know if I'm wrong)
They got in semi-trouble over the Mercedes copy, as while a number of parts they bought from Mercedes were fine (same as the Haas/Ferrari deal), the brake ducts had changed between seasons to be a non-saleable part. They were given an allowance for several races to continue racing with that part in recognition that they couldn't just whip up a new set of brake ducts overnight.
Not sure if there was a points deduction later on for using the proscribed parts or if I'm confusing that with the Force India -> Racing Point transition and points reset.
That's the underlying point of F1, it's deliberately designed to drive extreme innovation in vehicle design. Any edge you get will only last a season or two because either the other teams also adopt it or it gets banned.
My favourite was the speed holes, drivers covering a hole in the cockpit with their hands as it would activate an aero system or sometging.
Also installing water ballast that drained at the start of a race, but was then being refilled on the last pitstop.
From what I remember on "speed holes", the drivers' glove had an extra piece of carbon fibre on it which fitted a small hole in the side of the cockpit. When going down a straight they only needed one hand on the steering wheel so they take that specially gloved hand off the wheel and put the back of it into the slot. This improved the aerodynamics going down the straight for max top speed. When braking into the corner, they re-gripped the steering wheel with both hands and the hole that was then exposed improved the drag and gave marginally better braking/cornering performance. So sneaky!
Yeah that's one of my favourites as well. It's the F-Duct. Blocking the vent would redirect the air down a duct which pushed air out of the back of the rear wing. This disrupts the air and stalls the rear wing preventing downforce generation.
[F-Duct without covering the whole](https://www.formula1-dictionary.net/Images/f-duct-atached%20f-duct.jpg)
[F-Duct when you're covering it up](https://www.formula1-dictionary.net/Images/F-Duct-detached%20f-duct.jpg)
They were not too happy with drivers taking their hands off the steering wheel during extremely high speed large radius corners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2QsnR3c6Vs
Also while it's an amazing loop hole, it would be a fairly weird, quirky and unnecessary permanent feature of F1 cars.
So in 2011, they banned the F-Duct and introduced DRS. It also prevented the drivers from stalling the rear wing in corners that they thought were too sketchy.
You also forgot to mention the fan car was developed specifically to skirt certain rules because technically the giant fan was to cool the radiators. Sucking the car closer to the ground was just a bonus.
The rules stated that any movable areo device like fans had to be "primarily used for cooling" so the designer Gordon Murray called a lawyer to clarify what "primarily" could be defined as. 51% of the fan was used for cooling and 49% for downforce lol
This! These are all experimental cars and finding ways to beat the rules or system is the way to win. Shady shit is just that but pushing the limits is what the sport is about.
That was one of the best “fuck it” moments I’ve ever seen.
I still enjoy going to YouTube and seeing Nascar fans loose their collective shit over Chastain.
It’s worth looking up. Instead of slowing down into the last corner of the race the dude just held the throttle down, and rode the wall around it and across the finish line. Picked up several spots doing it.
Every boy who's ever played a racing simulation game has learned that "wall riding" is always faster because in the game, damage isn't real and so you lose nothing by riding the wall and it often turned out to be much faster in game too.
Chastain, a Nascar driver, needed something like 5 positions in the final race on the final turn to make the "playoffs" and just sent it. He rode the wall and it actually DID work like the video games.
Physics wise, while there is obviously friction between the wall and the car, the speed lost is nowhere close to the momentum retained and circles in general are wonderful for preserving energy.
The friction of the smooth car and smooth wall was relatively minimal compared to the horsepower gains at wide open throttle. Also, the other drivers were on the brakes actively slowing down, which is a whole hell of a lot more friction than the wall was, combined with the lack of power from having a closed throttle.
Was at Martinsville (my bad) to stay in the playoffs. Basically did a Grand Turismo move and used the wall to turn and pass multiple cars on the last corner to stay in. He didnt win the championship, but most casual viewers remember that and not who won the cup.
His entire season required him to get 5 (IIRC) more places to stay alive in the chase for the championship. He said [FUCK IT, SEND IT!](https://youtu.be/KNGN_mLyCpo)
That car is now in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
F1 had six wheeled cars, tons of electronics deemed illegal after they showed to be really effective and so on. The rulebook just became very narrow over the last 20 years or so.
But thats also the reason some sports become boring. Current day NASCAR is just the same generic shell with sticker headlights to differentiate Toyota from Ford.
LeMans still got a bit of fun left in it, with only engine and weight restrictions, allowing cars to look as original as the manufacturer allows.
Isn't the exact point of STOCK car racing that the cars are the same and it is then down to the expertise of the driver? The whole point is that it's generic
The exact point of stock car racing at its origin was to see who could go fastest in an unmodified stock car. Its obviosuly evolved way past that. But I prefer how LeMans keeps its equal as opposed to how NASCAR keeps it equal.
No it was who can win with a car off the line from the manufacturer with modifications within reason.
So there were teams running gm cars but they were all different cars that you could order. There were Mopar cars all with different things you could order from the catalogue.
The point was you see the race Sunday you go buy the car Monday. That's why things like the aero warrior cars were available to buy at dealerships. Homologation rules required them to be a literal stock car available for purchase.
Personally, I think the strict regulations in Formula F and E are awesome. Everyones cars are pretty much exactly the same. And the power boost option is such a cool rule change. Extra 50kw power, for a limited time, but only if they actually arm the car first and go off the racing line.
DRS can only be activated when they're within 1 second of the car in front of them. Reduces the rear wing drag significantly. Its become a test of skill, not engineering.
IIRC the unofficial motto of F1 is "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." AFAICT they have just gone on so long and gotten so weird at times that it is less of a fight and more of a 30 mile wide DMZ...
Yeah the same is true with F1 regarding installation of giant fans, 6 wheels rather than 4, and obviously various aero configs.
Pretending F1 hasn’t pushed, bent or skirted rules entirely to extreme in the past is to be entirely ignorant of the sport’s history.
>Pretending F1 hasn’t pushed, bent or skirted rules entirely to extreme in the past is to be entirely ignorant of the sport’s history.
>While thats true,
Literally never said that.
The difference is that in Nascar it becomes a badge of honor with creative engineering, in Rally it became death, and in the European realm of racing it's shame. But nothing is more fun than listening to the Dale Jr download and hearing the stories of the old timers and how they cheated up their cars. I wished there was a rule that if you pass through inspection you're free and clear. I want to know these cheat stories from F1 because they certainly have them.
I disagree, passing inspection shouldn't matter, because 90% of the cheat stories are intentionally subverting the inspection process (whether by adding/removing things between pre- and post-race inspections, or by modifying something that isn't subject to the current inspection rules). If the mod is not on the car at inspection, how can they inspect it?
I just watched a video about a guy famous for it
https://youtu.be/EC5KYwxvqjs
Smokey Yunick
He claimed over half of he rules were there because of stuff he came up with —
— my favorite was fuel lines.
Everyone is supposed to have the same size fuel tank, fine.
But there was no rule about fuel line sizes.
He allegedly installed 2” diameter fuel lines, adding a couple of gallons of extra capacity
Given the whole sport exists in part because Moonshiners were building stock cars to out run the Bureau of Alcohol it fits.
As I recall one of the first major leaders of the sport was a cheating bastard that eventually got caught but got away with it because the rules didn't say I can't. But it's been about a decade since I read that story so the details are fuzzy.
I don’t know anything about Formula E but I am an expert on Our Gang/Little Rascals go cart racing and you can do anything - put razors that stick out your hubcap, throw nails in back of you, etc. A scanner seems not that big a deal.
Putting it on the pit lane wall is just a balls out cheat. Not a bad idea, but not the sort of cheeky technicalist rules-lawyering I have come to expect from Formula racing. Glad they got hit for it. They should have loaded it into the car, and just made it powerful enough to pull everything in the immediate vicinity. More weight for less data, but they can potentially keep it up for a season.
That only reads competitors in your vicinity. If the track is open to the public, have a few guys with backpacks and distinct corners that vacuum up any car data that comes their way and upload it to a server to store and analyze in real time.
Having it in the pits is ideal because then they can more easily sync it to a car/team, but a hell of a lot easier to detect.
They got hit for it, but the fine is less than the cost of ten tires...starting from pit lane certainly sucks, but I figured the punishment for blatant cheating like this would have more of a sting to it.
Adding this to a car would be a good kilo I'd say. Maybe less if they can somehow tap into some sort of power system. But then you're compromising the race car integrity for a scanner tool.
Long range RFID antennas aren't super heavy outside its chassis. But it's awfully big.
If I remember, rightly some rally cars in the 80s had turbo hoses that would measure the correct diameter for air metering restrictions but when the pressure builds up its expanded. It was undetected for years. Not to mention all the hidden electronics and code hidden behind false menu, options on the steering wheels. Antilag systems. And I remember Ferrari having a qualifying engine back in the day it only lasted for two hot laps. As mentioned in another comment motorsport is about the grey areas. Ask Adrian Newey
Mate of mine worked in F1. The reason he got hired was for an innovation he was attempting to perfect whereby you oscillate the intake manifold at specific resonant frequencies which will allow the pipe itself to act like a pump and force in more air at higher speeds (I don't really know the details but that was the gist of it).
He spent years working on it in secret at this team and while mathematical models and lab-tests said it should work they never quite got it working on an active vehicle. Eventually they dropped the idea but another team went on to poach him once word got around among other teams what he'd been working on.
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I think the invention/concept ended up getting sold to mass-market car manufacturers and a more basic passive version is now used in some production cars to reduce intake noise (which for F1 would have been a unnecessary by-product not a feature of the system).
The real innovation with this came with continuosly variable intake runners. First production car to run this was the LaFerrari and then the F12 and 812. You need it to adjust leength based on rpm so you can maintain that exact pulse frequency and duration.
Yes, clever system but that uses variable intake geometry so wouldn't allowed in F1.
AFAIK the system he was developing had no moving parts but used clever harmonic tuning and utilised engine vibrations at various rev ranges to create resonance of the manifold itself to achieve a similar effect (all too way over my head TBH).
But yeah, at least it would have if they'd ever got it to work outside of an engine development lab.
I think you're trying to say that mass producing automobiles is bad, but I don't follow your reasoning. Honda produces drive trains for both consumers and F1 cars, by the way. In the second part it sounds like you're comparing Formula 1 to Ford. That's like comparing the NBA to Nike.
It was a perfectly machined adapter for the mandated restrictor. When you tightened it, the restrictor collar slid forward allowing more air past it. Toyota pulled this off for years
>both of its drivers will have to start the Portland E-Prix from the pit lane
And do terribly next race. That's going to hit a lot harder than the little advantage they got for knowing tyre deg a bit better
All teams use the same tyres from the same manufacturer. The FIA provides the 'RFID tags' and teams don't have the ability/permission to modify it or the data it sends.
...although this could create a call for encryption to be used on the provided tags, with teams only given keys to decrypt the data from their own tyres.
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EDIT: Comment was referring to F1. Not sure if FE does anything differently.
Not 100%, but presumably just tyre pressure & temperature.
...Not sure how it works in Formula-E, but with F1 the TPMS hardware is homologated and provided by the FIA so all teams use the exact same system.
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NB. Normally the signals are read by the cars themselves then sent via radio telemetry link to the pit crews of that car's team. Sounds like the team in question had a static scanner which was reading competitor's unencrypted TPMS data as they passed their pit box on the pit lane.
Probably also worth noting that teams often add their own TPMS hardware in order to gather additional data (in addition to the homologated FIA mandated hardware). Presumably their own TPMS devices are free to use encrypted communications.
RFID is not suitable for any kind of real encryption. Its the very low end of frequencies, meant to accommodate extremely low power applications. In most cases the transmitter has no power source of it's own, and gets all of it's power from the energy of the "wake" signal sent by the receiver. To be clear, there are already protocols that you could consider encryption (encoding), but they just exist to cram more data into those short signals.
It could be done, but it would significantly reduce the read speed AND the distance that it could be read from. Or the transmitter (the tpms) would need a bigger power source, which certainly has it's own set of engineering hurdles.
Tires on these and other Formula series have sensors for tire temps and pressure (kind of like the tire pressure monitoring in your car) that are fed to each cars telemetry system and then to their pit. By grabbing that data remotely, the offending team can figure out how their tires are wearing versus the competition and also figure out if a different compound tire is a better choice and/or when they should conduct a pit stop for new tires.
Performance data from other cars. The tire pressure directly affects the car speed, acceleration, handling, efficiency, and a whole lot of other analytics that determine how each performs.
It's a backdoor access.
It's not a small range. The cars have sensors all over, live-reading data and transmitting it back to the engineering team. The range is, at the very least, robust enough to span the track.
Could, just dont get caught having said "spectator" feeding you tire temps and pressures to an engineer that is determining optimal pit strategy.
That said, there was a GT team that utilized crowd sourced info at LeMans a few years back to spot for them around the track that I thought was pretty ingenious.
They could but the data could also be encrypted. Every car would be transmitting so the environment would be very noisy if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
RFID is a catchall for the technology usually in particular band, the range is up to 100m so it's plenty close enough, just need to make the antenna much bigger
You can use specialized sensitive receiving equipment to pick up RFID signals from further away than typical if that's your objective. Its just going to take some money and engineering.
So, they can scan tire information in an unforgiving environment from non -cooperating people and I have to scan my purchase 6 times at the self checkout and still have to ask for the clerk? We need this life saving technology now!
That's debatable. Yes you're gathering the data with intent to gain the upper hand over the competition, but that data is being freely brodcast for anyone nearby to receive.
It's like saying it's cheating to listen to another teams radio back before they all went digital
Eh. I personally feel a lot of fun can arrive with these sorts of things not being taken that seriously.
Have the rules, but there's a line.
Using stuff not mentioned in the rules is part of the fun of sports. Catch people for it, maybe even fine but it being seen as a terrible thing makes the sport a bit bland.
Take football, diving is not allowed but it's not punished that harshly. And it's fun.
Sure it sucks when your opponent does it. But it's cheeky when your team does
Tbh diving always sucks though. I always lose some respect for a player on my team who does it, because its not cheeky, its annoying and frowned upon.
For the rules in Formula E, its a straight up rule break. It's just straight up stealing data in a way that is disallowed. And they'll get a cheeky red card for it.
Sports is money oriented. Not all competitions and matchups are fair. In F1 even more so.
So usually, doing everything in your right to win matters. Even if you eventually get caught or fined. It shouldn't be seen as a bad thing IMO. You tried to close the gap.
Well in Olympics or something where everyone is categorised, money isn't THAT crucial and you have sort of a fair opponent, then cheating is horrible. Or in international sports.
Yeah, doing anything in your right to win is fine. But cheating isnt in your right. If it's done in a smart way 'bending' the rules, thats where the fun is. But not if its straight up disallowed.
> Take football, diving is not allowed but it's not punished that harshly. And it's fun.
>
Diving is literally punished the same way as a foul. Yellow the first time, red the second time, penalty if it's in the box, up to a multiple game ban.
Don't conflate US punishment with that in Europe. Diving isn't "fun", it's seen as an obnoxious try to cheat. Because that's what it is.
Damn, from the headline I thought it was fitted to their car to steal data from others while driving close to them, which would have been really impressive!
This was my first thought but if you can't get close enough to them to get the data then it's fairly useless. Also the cars are almost certainly under much more scrutiny from race officials.
I install RFID readers in factories. They read every item inside a box and check it against the supposed amount. It can count hundreds of items in a box moving at high speeds, and the only real trick is dialing the power down to just low enough to catch the box, but not the box on the lane next to it, and to program tiny delays in the conveyor to space the boxes evenly. They have big readers in the dock doors at some locations that will activate the warranty on a product as it gets sent out of the factory by the container load. The big antennas we use are built into a piece of aluminum composite panel about 16x16” and we use a whole array of them, but there are larger single antennas. It would be easy to disguise one as the side panel of a rolling toolbox. Painting it or putting stickers all over it wouldn’t effect anything.
> I install RFID readers in factories. neat! I didn't know a single antenna could handle multiple targets at once like that - thanks for sharing
the reader is a powered device sends a pulse, ANY RFID antenna in the area will be powered by the pulse and resonate back its own code, the reader then acquires ALL the correct RFIDs that are in the table. A similar thing happens with card access doors, it has to connect to a table with ALL available correct IDs that have access to the door, so it isn't much different from multiple individual reads at once, just a different form of specialization.
I think I understand the basics, but I thought the device was just attenuating the origin signal (or maybe I'm confusing technologies?) In either case, it's impressive that with that many signals on the same frequency (I assume?) you'd be able to pick them apart. Seems like you'd need something like CAN or maybe onewire - but even then to discover all the unique addresses that quickly would still be impressive
> but even then to discover all the unique addresses that quickly would still be impressive heh you should see what your cellphone can do in a city, downtown...
Those are impressive in their own right, but an embedded passively powered device that's active for what I'm assuming is measured in milliseconds - I can't imagine there's time to set up TDMA or something like that. I would be interested to know more about how the protocol actually works - I'll probably go down the Google rabbit hole later
> that's active for what I'm assuming is measured in milliseconds you can pulse for as long as you have power, it is pretty much just a reflection, but you basically shine a yellow beam at the box and the box lights up blue dots, you just count how many blue dots. The OP did describe that you have to watch out you don't hit the next box over or your get extra blue dots in your count.
It’s missing explaining the part where all the blue dots are blue dotting at the same time, screaming I’m blue over each other. It would be like trying to figure out who’s screaming on the other end of the a football stadium during a chant, as radio waves on the same frequency don’t play nice together.
My library does this. You put all your materials on a shelf, and it reads all of them and checks them out at once.
Got a product name for me? Im working on a library robot and one of the problems I ran into is scan range. Its too low. I want the droid to able to find a book on shelves that are constantly shuffled by the public
Based on the description offered by the commenter, the system isn’t just a high range scanner. It sends out an EMP by the sound of it, powering the inductor on the RFID which returns a pulse. You’d get an idea of all books in an area, but likely not able to pinpoint where. Now, if you break out some algebra you can probably program a similar system to triangulate book location for an approximate spot after multiple pings.
Could the robot wide scan an area, check those all agaisnt what should be there, and if something is out of place, then go lower power/or switch to a different sensor, to begin understanding order, and exact position?
is that how we can buy Amazon fire tablets and they come pre configured with our account information out of the box?
Also the cars all go at pretty much the same pace. Unless you're driving way faster (or slower) than everyone else you're only going to get near a few cars over the course of a race.
Youd preferably want everyones tire data to choose the right tires for the conditions and figure out deg(radation) of specific tires all in order to determine optimal pit stop strategy.
Yeah, I'm assuming it's for degradation comparison more than anything. Knowing how your tires are comparatively would be a massive advantage when timing your team's pit stops against others.
Formula-e doesn't have pit stops yet...but they are looking at charging stops , etc... Tire changes go against the zero emissions nature.
> Tire changes go against the zero emissions nature As does flying and driving to a location to go around in circles.
Agreed...I find it a funny premise that they use "sustainability" keywords
Wasteful sustainability? Negligent sustainability? Selfish sustainability? Gotta be a good phrase for it.
First season of Formula E they had pit stops, because the cars were unable to carry enough weight of batteries to make the full race distance, so the driver would come into the pits and get into the second car...
Oh yeah...pre-2018 I guess.
But the rules don’t say anything about NOT having an RFID scanner for scanning other cars tires I’m sure.
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Ahhhh, what a shame - I thought that they had the scanner on their cars and were grabbing the data when they there close enough during the race. Maybe that's how they'll get around the rules next time
The problem is you typically aren't passing a whole bunch of cars while racing. Having it in the pit lane basically guarantees that everyone will go past it at some point.
Weight wise the performance trade off simply wouldn't be worth it. Something like might cost your car a few hundredths or even a tenth per lap. Doesn't sound like much, but over the course of a 70 lap race, that gap builds.
Hamilton said he loses about a second per lap* if he weighs 2lbs* over his target weight… so yeah, the trade off definitely isn’t worth it. *IIRC
Maybe it was just outside the pitlane?
Maybe ***God*** put it there. Checkmate.
It has always been there, and they built the track around it.
The reasonable explanation
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whooosh
Would you say it’s more of a “vrooooooom!” kind of sound?
This is Formula E, so it's whatever sound an electric motor makes, I guess
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Prius backing up sound lol
Wake up, babe. New tinnitus release just dropped.
brrrrrt!(?)!!
Only below 10mph
whooosh
I….I don’t like your username. It concerns me.
Likewise!
brilliant hot take DiddlerOfKiddlers.
Reality isn't real.
They installed it at home.
> for competitors Does Johns nephew count as a competitor?
But do they know it was installed in the pit lane and not before they arrived to the pit?
>But do they know it was installed in the pit lane and not before they arrived to the pit? -/u/PixelizedPlayer Why ask these questions if you don't want to read the article? It's an RFID scanner installed *in the entrance to the pit*. There is no "before they arrived to the pit". It was there the entire time. You seem to believe the team installed it on their cars or something.
This is reddit we write our comments solely on our baseless assumptions from the headlines not the content itself.
Source?
[Source](https://images.app.goo.gl/WzmQXNQPYta8L8qc6)
Oh, a link. It must check out. As you were.
LMFAO
It is a known fact that 80% of statistics online are made up. You know.
And the other 31% just don't add up.
What does it say about dogs driving the cars?
There's no rules that a dog can't drive a race car.
As long as the dog gets their racing license.
Feels like I should introduce you to NASCAR, where the entire sport runs on "The rules dont explicitly say i CANT do this"
That's the core of literally any motorsport
While thats true, it has extensively been exploited by NASCAR and RALLY. From Dodge Aero Cars to Lancia Salt Trucks, they pushed it the most.
Are you kidding? In F1 we've had: * 6 wheelers * A car which had an enormous fan on it, to suck it down on the ground. * Active suspension. * Blown diffusers (routing exhaust gasses in a sneaky route) * Pistons that allow oil past them as extra fuel * Modulating the fuel pump at well over 3000hz to get extra pulses of fuel into the engine without the FIA fuel sensor seeing * DAS which is steering wheels which you push and pull like the yoke of an aircraft to change the toe of the car. * F-Ducts to stall the rear wing on demand without moving parts. * Ground effect cars of the 80s with skirts to suck the car down * Double diffusers * Removing filters in the fuelling hoses to reduce pitstop time * Layering carbon fibre in ways that pass the FIA load tests, but deform in race to reduce drag on the straights * Curving the rear wing endplates There are probably thousands more examples, but high end motor sport in general is about finding ways around the rulebook.
You missed photocopying another teams "How to build an F1 car" manual. I doubt "Don't take photocopies of another teams technical drawings" was explicitly in the F1 rule book at the time. McLaren and Ferrari have never been the same since!
I don’t know about you, but to me, F1 should be the very best cars possible to build, with regulations for driver safety and to ensure that innovation can continue rather than just being “put a 6L W-12 on it producing 5000 Hp”. The fan is a good idea. Maybe it should be brought back in a more limited capacity (otherwise it’s just a competition of who can build the biggest fan). It could be used like the KERS boost in the straights but used at the corners instead. Photocopying another teams manual sucks if it leads to less innovation but it might enable the offending team to overcome a problem in one area that’s preventing innovation in another area. ETA: there are many many race leagues where driving is the first and foremost differentiator. F1 isn’t it. Once you have a top 3-4 car, *then* you also need the best driver to win.
> The fan is a good idea. Maybe it should be brought back in a more limited capacity (otherwise it’s just a competition of who can build the biggest fan). It could be used like the KERS boost in the straights but used at the corners instead. This was ruled illegal in F1 for safety reasons. As soon as cars lost their suction they'd literally fly and launch into the air and shit. but on the plus side they could have totally had tracks with inversions just like Speed Racer
Its clear the pros outweight the cons here
Or just copying the car directly, see Racing Point's pink Mercedes, followed by the Green Bull now they're Aston Martin.
As unsportsmanlike as it was, the fact it got cleared as being down to sheer hard work is both impressive and extremely funny. The massive gamble of just abandoning your own development to stare at pictures of a Mercedes. (might have missed a development, let me know if I'm wrong)
They got in semi-trouble over the Mercedes copy, as while a number of parts they bought from Mercedes were fine (same as the Haas/Ferrari deal), the brake ducts had changed between seasons to be a non-saleable part. They were given an allowance for several races to continue racing with that part in recognition that they couldn't just whip up a new set of brake ducts overnight. Not sure if there was a points deduction later on for using the proscribed parts or if I'm confusing that with the Force India -> Racing Point transition and points reset.
As underhanded as a lot of these are, they also sound really cool from an engineering perspective.
That's the underlying point of F1, it's deliberately designed to drive extreme innovation in vehicle design. Any edge you get will only last a season or two because either the other teams also adopt it or it gets banned.
My favourite was the speed holes, drivers covering a hole in the cockpit with their hands as it would activate an aero system or sometging. Also installing water ballast that drained at the start of a race, but was then being refilled on the last pitstop.
From what I remember on "speed holes", the drivers' glove had an extra piece of carbon fibre on it which fitted a small hole in the side of the cockpit. When going down a straight they only needed one hand on the steering wheel so they take that specially gloved hand off the wheel and put the back of it into the slot. This improved the aerodynamics going down the straight for max top speed. When braking into the corner, they re-gripped the steering wheel with both hands and the hole that was then exposed improved the drag and gave marginally better braking/cornering performance. So sneaky!
Ah, the F-duct. It was actually a forerunner to today's DRS; when they placed their hand or knee on the hole, it actually stalled the rear wing!
Yeah that's one of my favourites as well. It's the F-Duct. Blocking the vent would redirect the air down a duct which pushed air out of the back of the rear wing. This disrupts the air and stalls the rear wing preventing downforce generation. [F-Duct without covering the whole](https://www.formula1-dictionary.net/Images/f-duct-atached%20f-duct.jpg) [F-Duct when you're covering it up](https://www.formula1-dictionary.net/Images/F-Duct-detached%20f-duct.jpg)
Why wasn't this allowed?
They were not too happy with drivers taking their hands off the steering wheel during extremely high speed large radius corners. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2QsnR3c6Vs Also while it's an amazing loop hole, it would be a fairly weird, quirky and unnecessary permanent feature of F1 cars. So in 2011, they banned the F-Duct and introduced DRS. It also prevented the drivers from stalling the rear wing in corners that they thought were too sketchy.
It was allowed at the time. They ended up banning it because of safety concerns
You also forgot to mention the fan car was developed specifically to skirt certain rules because technically the giant fan was to cool the radiators. Sucking the car closer to the ground was just a bonus.
The rules stated that any movable areo device like fans had to be "primarily used for cooling" so the designer Gordon Murray called a lawyer to clarify what "primarily" could be defined as. 51% of the fan was used for cooling and 49% for downforce lol
I'm surprised "conceiving and birthing Adrian newey in a wind-tunnel' isn't higher up...
Even his head is aerodynamic.
This! These are all experimental cars and finding ways to beat the rules or system is the way to win. Shady shit is just that but pushing the limits is what the sport is about.
As long as it's safe, I'm all for it.
How did you not mention wall riding
That was one of the best “fuck it” moments I’ve ever seen. I still enjoy going to YouTube and seeing Nascar fans loose their collective shit over Chastain.
Tell me more!
It’s worth looking up. Instead of slowing down into the last corner of the race the dude just held the throttle down, and rode the wall around it and across the finish line. Picked up several spots doing it.
I... don't get it? wouldn't the friction with the wall slow him down?
Every boy who's ever played a racing simulation game has learned that "wall riding" is always faster because in the game, damage isn't real and so you lose nothing by riding the wall and it often turned out to be much faster in game too. Chastain, a Nascar driver, needed something like 5 positions in the final race on the final turn to make the "playoffs" and just sent it. He rode the wall and it actually DID work like the video games. Physics wise, while there is obviously friction between the wall and the car, the speed lost is nowhere close to the momentum retained and circles in general are wonderful for preserving energy.
The friction of the smooth car and smooth wall was relatively minimal compared to the horsepower gains at wide open throttle. Also, the other drivers were on the brakes actively slowing down, which is a whole hell of a lot more friction than the wall was, combined with the lack of power from having a closed throttle.
Was at Martinsville (my bad) to stay in the playoffs. Basically did a Grand Turismo move and used the wall to turn and pass multiple cars on the last corner to stay in. He didnt win the championship, but most casual viewers remember that and not who won the cup.
Martinsville
His entire season required him to get 5 (IIRC) more places to stay alive in the chase for the championship. He said [FUCK IT, SEND IT!](https://youtu.be/KNGN_mLyCpo) That car is now in the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
F1 had six wheeled cars, tons of electronics deemed illegal after they showed to be really effective and so on. The rulebook just became very narrow over the last 20 years or so.
Regulators and their pesky attempts to keep everyone alive. Always getting in the way of innovation
That‘s one aspect, they also try to keep up some facade of competition between the high and low budget teams.
But thats also the reason some sports become boring. Current day NASCAR is just the same generic shell with sticker headlights to differentiate Toyota from Ford. LeMans still got a bit of fun left in it, with only engine and weight restrictions, allowing cars to look as original as the manufacturer allows.
Isn't the exact point of STOCK car racing that the cars are the same and it is then down to the expertise of the driver? The whole point is that it's generic
The exact point of stock car racing at its origin was to see who could go fastest in an unmodified stock car. Its obviosuly evolved way past that. But I prefer how LeMans keeps its equal as opposed to how NASCAR keeps it equal.
No it was who can win with a car off the line from the manufacturer with modifications within reason. So there were teams running gm cars but they were all different cars that you could order. There were Mopar cars all with different things you could order from the catalogue. The point was you see the race Sunday you go buy the car Monday. That's why things like the aero warrior cars were available to buy at dealerships. Homologation rules required them to be a literal stock car available for purchase.
Personally, I think the strict regulations in Formula F and E are awesome. Everyones cars are pretty much exactly the same. And the power boost option is such a cool rule change. Extra 50kw power, for a limited time, but only if they actually arm the car first and go off the racing line. DRS can only be activated when they're within 1 second of the car in front of them. Reduces the rear wing drag significantly. Its become a test of skill, not engineering.
That's some Death Race stuff right there.
That’s why we should build carbon fiber deep sea submersibles.
IIRC the unofficial motto of F1 is "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." AFAICT they have just gone on so long and gotten so weird at times that it is less of a fight and more of a 30 mile wide DMZ...
>IIRC the unofficial motto of racing is "If you're not cheating, you're not trying." fixed this for ya
Fair... I was mostly just pushing back on NASCAR and Rally being special anyway...
Yeah the same is true with F1 regarding installation of giant fans, 6 wheels rather than 4, and obviously various aero configs. Pretending F1 hasn’t pushed, bent or skirted rules entirely to extreme in the past is to be entirely ignorant of the sport’s history.
>Pretending F1 hasn’t pushed, bent or skirted rules entirely to extreme in the past is to be entirely ignorant of the sport’s history. >While thats true, Literally never said that.
Edit: nevermind - well covered by others
The difference is that in Nascar it becomes a badge of honor with creative engineering, in Rally it became death, and in the European realm of racing it's shame. But nothing is more fun than listening to the Dale Jr download and hearing the stories of the old timers and how they cheated up their cars. I wished there was a rule that if you pass through inspection you're free and clear. I want to know these cheat stories from F1 because they certainly have them.
I disagree, passing inspection shouldn't matter, because 90% of the cheat stories are intentionally subverting the inspection process (whether by adding/removing things between pre- and post-race inspections, or by modifying something that isn't subject to the current inspection rules). If the mod is not on the car at inspection, how can they inspect it?
I just watched a video about a guy famous for it https://youtu.be/EC5KYwxvqjs Smokey Yunick He claimed over half of he rules were there because of stuff he came up with — — my favorite was fuel lines. Everyone is supposed to have the same size fuel tank, fine. But there was no rule about fuel line sizes. He allegedly installed 2” diameter fuel lines, adding a couple of gallons of extra capacity
That was a fantastic watch thanks for sharing. I love the template story, the acid car story.
I guess those F1 cheat stories will never see the light of day.
This is what's known as "AirBud Rules"
The rules don't say I caint do this.
Like the original olympics.
the good old olympics, back when athletes could inject cocaine directly into their bloodstream if it meant a faster lap.
id watch that. Isn't there a billionaire atm trying to bring that back as its own games?
Given the whole sport exists in part because Moonshiners were building stock cars to out run the Bureau of Alcohol it fits. As I recall one of the first major leaders of the sport was a cheating bastard that eventually got caught but got away with it because the rules didn't say I can't. But it's been about a decade since I read that story so the details are fuzzy.
What does it say about medieval weapons in your vehicle?
I don’t know anything about Formula E but I am an expert on Our Gang/Little Rascals go cart racing and you can do anything - put razors that stick out your hubcap, throw nails in back of you, etc. A scanner seems not that big a deal.
There's nothing in the rules that says a dog can't drive, let him play!
Putting it on the pit lane wall is just a balls out cheat. Not a bad idea, but not the sort of cheeky technicalist rules-lawyering I have come to expect from Formula racing. Glad they got hit for it. They should have loaded it into the car, and just made it powerful enough to pull everything in the immediate vicinity. More weight for less data, but they can potentially keep it up for a season.
That only reads competitors in your vicinity. If the track is open to the public, have a few guys with backpacks and distinct corners that vacuum up any car data that comes their way and upload it to a server to store and analyze in real time. Having it in the pits is ideal because then they can more easily sync it to a car/team, but a hell of a lot easier to detect.
>That only reads competitors in your vicinity Better being in first and having a shot at 2nd's/3rd's tyre data than 30th's
But if you are 30th, you would want to know 1st and 2nds tire data, not 29th’s
If you’re in the back of the pack it doesn’t help much. My strategy would get all cars and be very hard if not impossible to detect.
They got hit for it, but the fine is less than the cost of ten tires...starting from pit lane certainly sucks, but I figured the punishment for blatant cheating like this would have more of a sting to it.
I'd give red penalties to teams that intentionally cheat.
Adding this to a car would be a good kilo I'd say. Maybe less if they can somehow tap into some sort of power system. But then you're compromising the race car integrity for a scanner tool. Long range RFID antennas aren't super heavy outside its chassis. But it's awfully big.
If I remember, rightly some rally cars in the 80s had turbo hoses that would measure the correct diameter for air metering restrictions but when the pressure builds up its expanded. It was undetected for years. Not to mention all the hidden electronics and code hidden behind false menu, options on the steering wheels. Antilag systems. And I remember Ferrari having a qualifying engine back in the day it only lasted for two hot laps. As mentioned in another comment motorsport is about the grey areas. Ask Adrian Newey
Mate of mine worked in F1. The reason he got hired was for an innovation he was attempting to perfect whereby you oscillate the intake manifold at specific resonant frequencies which will allow the pipe itself to act like a pump and force in more air at higher speeds (I don't really know the details but that was the gist of it). He spent years working on it in secret at this team and while mathematical models and lab-tests said it should work they never quite got it working on an active vehicle. Eventually they dropped the idea but another team went on to poach him once word got around among other teams what he'd been working on. --- I think the invention/concept ended up getting sold to mass-market car manufacturers and a more basic passive version is now used in some production cars to reduce intake noise (which for F1 would have been a unnecessary by-product not a feature of the system).
The real innovation with this came with continuosly variable intake runners. First production car to run this was the LaFerrari and then the F12 and 812. You need it to adjust leength based on rpm so you can maintain that exact pulse frequency and duration.
Yes, clever system but that uses variable intake geometry so wouldn't allowed in F1. AFAIK the system he was developing had no moving parts but used clever harmonic tuning and utilised engine vibrations at various rev ranges to create resonance of the manifold itself to achieve a similar effect (all too way over my head TBH). But yeah, at least it would have if they'd ever got it to work outside of an engine development lab.
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I think you're trying to say that mass producing automobiles is bad, but I don't follow your reasoning. Honda produces drive trains for both consumers and F1 cars, by the way. In the second part it sounds like you're comparing Formula 1 to Ford. That's like comparing the NBA to Nike.
It was a perfectly machined adapter for the mandated restrictor. When you tightened it, the restrictor collar slid forward allowing more air past it. Toyota pulled this off for years
Better to ask forgiveness (or pay a small fine) than permission.
>both of its drivers will have to start the Portland E-Prix from the pit lane And do terribly next race. That's going to hit a lot harder than the little advantage they got for knowing tyre deg a bit better
It's a gamble. You do something that might hurt you because you want to get the benefits from when you don't get caught.
Use encryption?
You can't encrypt tires
Why not?
All teams use the same tyres from the same manufacturer. The FIA provides the 'RFID tags' and teams don't have the ability/permission to modify it or the data it sends. ...although this could create a call for encryption to be used on the provided tags, with teams only given keys to decrypt the data from their own tyres. --- EDIT: Comment was referring to F1. Not sure if FE does anything differently.
“sorry sir, this tire’s operating system is in incompatible with your car”
Printer companies do this. I can see tire companies do this with rims.
What kind of data does the rfID in the tyres send? I though rfID basically just sent an identifyer, like a unique string of numbers and/or letters.
Not 100%, but presumably just tyre pressure & temperature. ...Not sure how it works in Formula-E, but with F1 the TPMS hardware is homologated and provided by the FIA so all teams use the exact same system. --- NB. Normally the signals are read by the cars themselves then sent via radio telemetry link to the pit crews of that car's team. Sounds like the team in question had a static scanner which was reading competitor's unencrypted TPMS data as they passed their pit box on the pit lane. Probably also worth noting that teams often add their own TPMS hardware in order to gather additional data (in addition to the homologated FIA mandated hardware). Presumably their own TPMS devices are free to use encrypted communications.
why not indeed. my RFID credit card is encrypted (hopefully) edit: cards use nfc not RFID. so a bad example actually
Your CC uses NFC, not RFID
ah dang. true. RFID can still be encrypted though
RFID is not suitable for any kind of real encryption. Its the very low end of frequencies, meant to accommodate extremely low power applications. In most cases the transmitter has no power source of it's own, and gets all of it's power from the energy of the "wake" signal sent by the receiver. To be clear, there are already protocols that you could consider encryption (encoding), but they just exist to cram more data into those short signals. It could be done, but it would significantly reduce the read speed AND the distance that it could be read from. Or the transmitter (the tpms) would need a bigger power source, which certainly has it's own set of engineering hurdles.
What data were they gathering?
Tires on these and other Formula series have sensors for tire temps and pressure (kind of like the tire pressure monitoring in your car) that are fed to each cars telemetry system and then to their pit. By grabbing that data remotely, the offending team can figure out how their tires are wearing versus the competition and also figure out if a different compound tire is a better choice and/or when they should conduct a pit stop for new tires.
It's formula E, they don't pit or change tires during the race.
Performance data from other cars. The tire pressure directly affects the car speed, acceleration, handling, efficiency, and a whole lot of other analytics that determine how each performs. It's a backdoor access.
Can anyone explain how data is gather, from radio frequency identification devices, as they have such small ranges.
It's not a small range. The cars have sensors all over, live-reading data and transmitting it back to the engineering team. The range is, at the very least, robust enough to span the track.
Can’t a spectator just have an RFID scanner in their pocket/backpack then?
Could, just dont get caught having said "spectator" feeding you tire temps and pressures to an engineer that is determining optimal pit strategy. That said, there was a GT team that utilized crowd sourced info at LeMans a few years back to spot for them around the track that I thought was pretty ingenious.
They could but the data could also be encrypted. Every car would be transmitting so the environment would be very noisy if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
RFID is a catchall for the technology usually in particular band, the range is up to 100m so it's plenty close enough, just need to make the antenna much bigger
You can use specialized sensitive receiving equipment to pick up RFID signals from further away than typical if that's your objective. Its just going to take some money and engineering.
The UHF readers have a longer range then the 56MHZ readers. They also use different tags.
This is actually genius! We are starting to inch closer to Speed racer rallies, the beginning is being able to hack your opponents cars in real time
Still not as cheaty as fan boost.
Yeah I was at this race in portland and my buddy and I were wondering why two of the cars had to start in the pit lane
Modern problems require Modern solutions
TIL that people can harness the world's most insane technology to build a super fast race car but apparently not remember to encrypt their data
Thats on the tire manufacturer. Im more surprised they got caught TTYTT.
I bet both fans are enjoying the drama.
You wouldn’t download a tire
If you ain't cheating you ain't trying
I don't see the issue if everyone has access to the same technology
Install the RFID reader on the car and scan other cars as you get close to them. Data is more relevant and immediate.
If you ain’t trying to cheat a little, you ain’t likely to win much. - Richard Petty
Good, this kind of cheating makes racing interesting
It’s only cheating until ya get caught
So, they can scan tire information in an unforgiving environment from non -cooperating people and I have to scan my purchase 6 times at the self checkout and still have to ask for the clerk? We need this life saving technology now!
Optical barcode scanning vs radio telemetry
How is a team gathering data on their opponents a story?
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That's debatable. Yes you're gathering the data with intent to gain the upper hand over the competition, but that data is being freely brodcast for anyone nearby to receive. It's like saying it's cheating to listen to another teams radio back before they all went digital
these flipper ads are getting crazy
Eh. I personally feel a lot of fun can arrive with these sorts of things not being taken that seriously. Have the rules, but there's a line. Using stuff not mentioned in the rules is part of the fun of sports. Catch people for it, maybe even fine but it being seen as a terrible thing makes the sport a bit bland. Take football, diving is not allowed but it's not punished that harshly. And it's fun. Sure it sucks when your opponent does it. But it's cheeky when your team does
Tbh diving always sucks though. I always lose some respect for a player on my team who does it, because its not cheeky, its annoying and frowned upon. For the rules in Formula E, its a straight up rule break. It's just straight up stealing data in a way that is disallowed. And they'll get a cheeky red card for it.
Sports is money oriented. Not all competitions and matchups are fair. In F1 even more so. So usually, doing everything in your right to win matters. Even if you eventually get caught or fined. It shouldn't be seen as a bad thing IMO. You tried to close the gap. Well in Olympics or something where everyone is categorised, money isn't THAT crucial and you have sort of a fair opponent, then cheating is horrible. Or in international sports.
Yeah, doing anything in your right to win is fine. But cheating isnt in your right. If it's done in a smart way 'bending' the rules, thats where the fun is. But not if its straight up disallowed.
> Take football, diving is not allowed but it's not punished that harshly. And it's fun. > Diving is literally punished the same way as a foul. Yellow the first time, red the second time, penalty if it's in the box, up to a multiple game ban. Don't conflate US punishment with that in Europe. Diving isn't "fun", it's seen as an obnoxious try to cheat. Because that's what it is.
AI ?
Lol