Chuck Frank wrote:
Chuck, I hope he does better at paid gigs than the program he put on at nationals a couple years ago. I was glad I didn't pay to sit thu it. The info he put out was just parroted (often inaccurately) from his "sources", much of which has been disproven/cast aside, and he was unable/unwilling to field any technical questions. IMHO most people out in the field gathering the knowlege/experience for a living seldom take the time to write books, and the authors who write books for a living seldom have enough background to really understand or be an authority on the subject they write about.
I see this in my own field, most of the text books I own have the same grossly inaccurate information that has been passed from one author to another until it is accepted as fact because "it's in all the texts".

Wow, that's some good input! I was envisioning a seminar where he goes over in detail the three modes of tire "traction" and also covers the whole subject of the contact patch (i.e. distribution of load/slip over the patch as a function slip angle, tire width, load, pressure, sidewall spring rate, tread temperature, etc.)...stuff like that. He covers some of this in his book and does an acceptable job of starting to cover these topics. However, I've got a great thirst for more detail as always, especially transient behavior which he doesn't cover at all. Perhaps I've made a poor assumption that he knows more than he published in his book.

I guess it makes a lot of sense to talk with the UNCC professor about what, if anything, they got out of the seminar. Oh well, it sounded like a good idea anyway.
Re authors...I agree 100%. In my field of the past 15+ years (financial trading), there exists, by far, the largest bunch of crap published of any other field. Where money is directly concerned, the masses will fall for just about anything.

Unreal. Heck, even vaunted Nobel Laureate's at Long Term Capital Management created the most stupid trading system imaginable (one that ignored outliers and actually increased leverage more and more in an outlier situation!) and lost many billions of dollars back in 1998 (all the money they had in their fund and a lot more) and forced the Federal Reserve to step in to stabilize things in the world's markets -- from darling of Wall Street to almost imploding the world's bond markets in less than 6 months. Pretty good accomplishment after winning a Nobel prize.
Chuck