Today’s Tip – Weight Distribution and Shortening the Corner

Todays tip is an interview with the Formula One driver coach Rob Wilson.  It’s a podcast interview from the excellent Motorsport Magazine.  During the interview he talks about two of the fundamental aspects of competitive driving: management of weight distribution across the four tyres and maximising the time travelling in a straight line by shortening the corner.

Your interaction with the road and hence your ability to accelerate, brake and corner is with the tyres and the amount of grip they generate is entirely down to the weight being pressed down on them.    Moving the weight of the car around each of the tyres in the right way maximises the grip where and when you want it.  We talked recently about braking and by building the brake pressure quickly but progressively so the front tyres, that are doing the most work, increase their grip and hence the amount of brake pressure you can ultimately use.  Never ‘surprise’ the car by doing anything suddenly always progressively and smoothly move the weight to where you want it, be it cornering, braking or accelerating, to build the grip.  Remember that if you are driving a ‘downforce’ car your effective weight on each tyre increases dramatically with speed and allows you to perform your inputs faster but the same rules of physics apply, its just a more extreme window you can work in.

When thinking about shortening the corner its useful to have a bit of context: Historically, you would aim to get the car turned into a corner then pick up the gas as early as possible, feeding in the power as you gently unwound the steering, drifting the car out to the outer edge of the track on a shallowing arc, maximising your mid corner speed and giving a long graceful arc through the bend.  This worked due to the relative lack of lateral grip of the skinny cross-ply tyres of old.  Modern tyres require a more aggressive, and certainly less balletic, approach.  In short, your minimum corner speed, or apex speed, is a lot less critical now and is comparatively slower compared to the relative entry and exit speeds when compared to the traditional approach above.  With the higher lateral gip level available from modern tyres you need to maximise your corner entry speed, get the car stopped and turned at the apex then exit in a straighter, more diagonal, line to allow you to get on the gas harder and get full throttle as quickly as possible.

Today’s Tip – Lift and Coast

You often hear about ‘Lift-and-coast’ in series like F1 at the moment.  With F1 and LMP1 restricted on fuel usage the drivers are employing this technique to save fuel.  The principle is you use alot of fuel with your foot buried in the firewall but you don’t gain an awful lot of speed at the end of the straight as you car is reaching its v-max.  As such a lift and coast towards the end of the straight doesn’t loose alot of time but it does make significant fuel economy savings.

However, it does loose some time.  Drivers won’t employ this method in qualifying as it will loose precious tenths and as such you should make sure you are not inadvertently doing it as well.  I see alot of drivers who reach the end of the straight and start to think about braking and unconsciously blend out of the throttle as they prepare themselves to go for the brake pedal at the optimum time.  Make sure you keep your foot planted on the gas until the last possible moment so you don’t give up easy time on the straights.

Today’s Tip – Rate of Turn

A short but important tip today.  The rate at which you turn the steering wheel into a corner is inversely proportional to the entry speed.

This is all to do with chassis stability.  In a fast corner you want to turn the wheel relatively slowly as you add steering lock into the corner, this keeps the car as stable as possible at high speed.  Into a low speed corner you want to be faster with the steering, if anything you want to induce some instability into the slower corners to help the car rotate around a larger angle more quickly.

Today’s Tip – Set a goal

After a morning spent at the excellent Base Performance Simulators in Banbury working for a client with track familiarisation, it reminded me of setting a clear goal to your testing or even race weekend.  We’ve touched on this subject before in Today’s Tip, on the 25th May 2016.  Today I’m going to look at the goal to set when using a simulator.

Simulators are a great way to go testing, tyres are inexhaustible, damage is free and instantly repairable and the weather can be anything you want it to be.  As such it can be a great, cost effective solution to honing your technique before the season starts.  There are limitations however.  For one, it is a simulation so by its very essence, it isn’t real.  As such there is no sense of danger to driving the car: mistakes cost laptime but not money, repair time or health.  This means it can be hard to get yourself to drive in a similar way that you would in real life, its easy to be too gung-ho in the sim and whilst this might help you unlock some performance characteristics in the car it will inevitably give unrealistic expectations in the real world.

Also, even in the best motion simulators, there is not a direct correlation between what you would feel in real life through ALL your senses and what the sim can replicate.  Feedback through steering and pedals can be fantastically replicated but no sim can ever replicate sustained high G or even instant G effects felt when hitting the brakes for example.  Most high end motion sims will tend to use subtle ‘cues’ to give your brain some of the information it is expecting but it can still be a big leap for a lot of people to translate what they see on the screen and feel through their hands to the multi dimensional real world.

As such, simulators are great at a couple of main areas:

Firstly, circuit familiarisation.  Quite simply, which corner comes next, when do I need to turn over this blind brow etc.;

Secondly, Engineering Setup.  If the model of the car is a close representation of your own you can try setup changes and see roughly what result it will have on your car in the real world.  This obviously depends of the quality of the car model in the sim and the complexity of the simulation computations the system runs and it will not be 1:1 for your real experience but it helps you get into the ballpark before your test day begins.

Thirdly, driving technique.  If the vehicle in the simulation has similar driving characteristics to your real car the sim can help you try different techniques and quickly work out if your car prefers, for example, a faster entry, or a slightly different turn in point

In summary, don’t go into a sim session expecting it to be like a wet and windy day at Snetterton, go in with a clear goal of what you want to achieve based on what the sim is able to give you and maximise your time behind the wheel.

Today’s Tip – Wait…

Patience is very important when looking for a good lap time.  Mid corner it can be very beneficial to wait, just for a beat, to let the car rotate that last little bit before getting on the power.  It can be the difference between having to gently squeeze the throttle and fight the ever-decreasing track width to the exit or being able to achieve full throttle much earlier and fire the car out of the corner with more moment.

Mid corner speed is critical to the overall lap time but not at the expense of exit speed.

Today’s Tip – Rotation

Mastering the rotation of the car into the corner will give you access to some of those last few tenths of laptime you are chasing.

The goal of rotating the car is to change the direction of the vehicle as you approach the apex of the bend to make the car point more towards the next straight rather than towards the outside of the corner.  This allows you to get on the gas harder and earlier.  The key is in the brake release and how you manage the weight transfer in the last phase of the deceleration into the bend.  Each car will react differently in this crucial phase of the corner and mastering the technique is definitely easier for some cars than it is for others but keep practising it as it is a skill worth having.

As you brake toward the corner you will start to turn into the bend, rolling out of the brake as you wind on the steering as we discussed in the Tip ‘Grip Usage’ in May last year.  The last phase of this brake release is where you set up the car for the corner exit.  As you release the last little bit of brake, keep the brake pressure a moment longer and using the weight over the nose of the car let the rear of the car drift out slightly.  We are not looking for armfuls of opposite lock and big, smokey skids, just a little change in attitude of the car.  Once it has given you those few extra degrees of rotation you will have a clearer line of sight to the exit of the corner allowing a harder acceleration.

A good video to demonstrate this is below, from one of the friends of Learn To Race: Javier Morcillo back in 2009 at the old Snetterton circuit.  In particular the entry to turn 2, what used to be called Sear, you can see how Javier uses the end of the braking phase to rotate the car into the corner allowing him to get on the power early for the long back straight.

Stay Sharp in the Off Season

The winter is a quiet time in the racing world, generally there are less events and less track driving opportunities to keep yourself sharp so what should you do?

Seat time is all important, it keeps our reflexes sharp and it keeps our brains and bodies used to the sensations and tasks of driving quickly.  Seat time costs money, especially at this time of year when it often involves taking you and your car to a warmer country so what other options are there that won’t break the bank?

Simulators are a great way of keeping your eye in.  Commercial simulators are excellent at reproducing alot of the realism of real-life track driving and even home computing is powerful enough to provide excellent simulations in the comfort of your own home.  The level of detail you can go to in a home setup is entirely down to your own taste/budget with everything from a playsatation and a £100 wheel to a full 3d motion simulation rig costing tens of thousands.

If you want to experience tried and tested setups then there are a number of commercial venues that can cater to your tastes from the small but bespoke Motorsport Tuition through to the larger venues such as the excellent Race Hut or the long established setups like Base Performance there is something to suit your budget and requirements.

If looking at pixels isn’t your thing then get to your local kart track, indoor or outdoor.  They will all have free practice sessions where you can arrive and drive and this helps with your driving technique but also helps the fitness levels as karts can be notoriously tough to drive.

Lastly, keep reviewing your previous year’s sessions.  Go over the data to look for improvements, re-watch incar videos with a critical eye and watch other drivers videos on youtube to see if you can pick up any hints or tips.

Have a good winter and I look forward to seeing you on track in 2017