You've heard it over and over again.

Maybe you believe it.

Maybe you've repeated it.

It is troo...Sometimes!

<Zoolander On> "You.must.only.make.one.change.at.a.time". <Zoo.land.er.off>

In the past I've likened the chassis tuning problem to a multi-dimensional topography, with multiple local maxima and, somewhere, theoretically, one absolute maximum.

Simplified, finding the best setup is like a game of Battleship. If you're too young to know what the hell I'm talking about, google it or ask Casey.

Anyway, I'm not really kidding, I think it's alot like that.

The Zoolander method is fine of course if you think you're near the absolute maximum, or a local maximum so close it doesn't matter.

How you would know if either is the case is pretty much beyond me though. I don't doubt however that an interesting theory I recently heard about how our political system comprised of highly imperfect individual voters manages to collectively make pretty good decisions in general, also applies to problems like this. In other words the common wisdom is frequently quite satisfactory.

So somewhere between so close it doesn't matter and quite satisfactory is where most of us play this game. And again, I don't think we have much choice. The road to "the answer" is long, and may never actually end.

So how much different is this than a game of Battleship?

Lot's really. We can have an actual theory. We can start by applying relevant data validated in similar applications.

In Battleship you're firing blind till you hit something. Of course once you've hit something - then you go into the Zooland...er, Scientific method.

But, in a way, after we've hatched our theory, we're just taking our shot and waiting to hear if we've hit (gotten a promising laptime out of it).

Scott, who played it somewhere between method and game today, except for that I didn't take any laptimes....but I sure enjoyed the driving...