THE MOTOR RACING BOOK

VOLUME 1 - CAR HANDLING

SUELLIO ALMEIDA
 CONTENTS

Foreword
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
Some Background
2. General Guidelines
Time Distribution: Learning vs Practicing
Efficiency
Good vs Bad Habits: Muscle Memory
Key Accelerators and Enemies of Technique Development
Posture
Pedals
Braking vs Seat
Steering Wheel
The Ego Barrier
Chasing Discomfort
Fitness: Mind and Body on the Limit
Small Changes: You +1%
Testing New Techniques
Module I
1. Vision
Planning Vision
Assessment Vision
2. What is the Braking Capability of the Car?
Mechanical Grip
Aerodynamic Grip
3. Braking from a Straight Line to a Full Stop
Low Downforce vs High Downforce Under Braking
4. Press Less Technique
5. Compressions, Crests, and Bumps
6. Initial Pressure to Peak Pressure and Braking References
7. Light Hands Under Braking
8. Interference Between Engine Braking and Braking
Module II
1. Importance of Initial Conditions in a Corner
2. The Stages of a Corner
 Early Entry
Late Entry
Early Exit
Late Exit
3. Entry Speed
4. Positioning and Angle
Positioning
Angle
Braking Points
Turn-in Point
Changes of Direction
5. Checkpoints
6. Sensing the Positioning and Angle with Precision
Positioning and Angle: Examples
7. Double Lefts and Double Rights
8. Deceiving Corners
9. Maximum Rotation Point (MRP)
10. Bouncing Off the Apex
11. Double Apex: High Downforce vs Low Downforce
12. Maximum Rotation Point vs Apex
Example One
Example Two
Example Three
Summary
13. Early Apex vs Late Apex
Examples of Maximum Rotation Point Placements
14. Compound Corners
Compound Corners – What to Sacrifice?
Compound Corners – Adjustment Methods
Compound Corners – Most Common Mistake
15. Elevation and Camber Changes
Compressions
Crests (Decompressions)
Camber Changes
How do I Deal with Changes in Grip?
Module III
1. On The Limit of Your Learning Time
2. Driving the Line vs Driving the Car
3. What is Overdriving the Car, Really?
Speed First, Rotation After
 Rotation First, Speed After
4. Change the Driving or Change the Setup?
5. Feeling Understeer and Oversteer
What is Oversteer and Understeer?
Feeling Oversteer
Neutral Steer
Do I Choose a Car that Oversteers or Understeers?
6. What is Trail Braking?
7. The String Theory
Ratios of String Theory
String Theory in High Downforce Cars
Advanced String Theory
8. Terminal Trail Braking Pressure
9. Three Tools for Rotation on Entry
Steering
Trail Braking
Engine Braking
Summary
10. Engine Braking in FWD Cars vs RWD Cars
11. Weight Transfer: A Tool for Rotation Management
Weight Transfer Under Braking and Turning
Weight Transfer Under Acceleration and Turning
12. Steering Angle vs Steering Force
13. Exponential Steering vs Linear Steering
Exponential Steering
Linear Steering
Camber and Elevation Changes
14. Light Hands Technique
Light Hands Technique – Countersteering
15. Light Hands Technique Part 2
16. Light Hands Technique Part 3
Inducing Understeer
17. Inducing Understeer to Correct Oversteer on Corner Entry
18. Trail Braking – Make the Car Rotate or Let the Car Rotate?
19. Inducing Understeer to Correct Oversteer on Corner Exit
20. The Problem with Brake Release for Balance Purposes
21. Fishing the Grip – Dealing with Oversteery Cars
22. Combining Handling Techniques in Racecars
23. Inducing Oversteer on Entry – Can you Spin the Race Car Deliberately?
 24. Speed of Throttle Application Towards Traction Limit (Second Level)
Speed of Throttle Application
Throttle Application in Different Horsepower Ranges
25. Throttle Application vs Steering Angle
26. Throttle Application in Front-Wheel Drive Cars
27. Platform – The Idea of Unity
28. Smooth is Fast? Input Speed vs Correction Speed
29. Hesitation
30. Perceiving Oversteer and Understeer – Car Handling’s Refresh Rate
31. Rotation Tendencies
Corner Entry
Corner Exit
32. Handling Problems and Solutions

Final Thoughts
Copyright © 2023 by Suellio Almeida
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published in Canada

First Edition, 2023

ISBN 978-1738119202

www.suellioalmeida.ca

Edited by: Julia Pama [email protected]

Proofreading by: José Luis Altet
Formatted by: José Luis Altet
www.altetpublishing.com

Pictures: courtesy of iRacing.com

Cover art by: Matheus Ferreira
This book is dedicated to everyone who believed, since the early days, that
sim racing could be a bridge to real racing.
 FOREWORD

by Tony Kanaan
Winner 2013 Indianapolis 500
2004 IndyCar Series Champion

I grew up in Brazil and loved racing with my dad. I remember that every
day we would turn on the TV and watch Formula 1 in the morning and
IndyCar in the afternoon. I started racing go-karts at the age of eight, thanks
to my dad. Unfortunately, he passed away when I was thirteen. The night
before his death, we had a really nice conversation. My dad was sick; he
had been battling cancer for a while. He asked me to do two things in life:
take care of my mom and sister if he wasn't around, and one day win the
Indy 500 for him. So I started my journey. I went through many things in
my life, even living in a race shop for four years. I had no money, but I
finally made it to IndyCar in 1998. In 2013, I won the Indy 500 and
dedicated it to him. So hopefully, he'll be proud of his son.
People ask me what's a good quote about racing, and I have to say the best
quote I have ever heard was by one of my racing heroes, Ayrton Senna. “If
you no longer go for a gap, you are not a racing driver”.
Suellio’s racing skills and driving style fascinate me, as well as how he is
always willing to help someone, not hiding any secrets. Throughout my
whole career, I have had great teammates who have had great success in
IndyCar and Formula 1. We always shared because we always felt like we
should “share the secrets and lay it out at the racetrack and see who is the
best”. I think Suellio has changed the concept, especially in sim racing, of
not sharing things —hiding things— to being honest and saying, “hey, this
is the way I do it, and if you learn and become better than me, I guess I
have to step up my game”.
His ability, actually, is one thing that people don't understand. It is one thing
to have the natural talent to drive and perform. It is an entirely different
ballgame to be able to do that and explain the technique. Being a great
racecar driver doesn’t always mean you’ll also be a great teacher. Suellio
has the great ability of making you understand driving technique to such a
high level. I have been racing for 40 years, and I learn something every
time that I watch his videos, especially in sim racing —something that I
was introduced to very late in my life.
I like the way he creates new concepts to help people because everybody's
different. Likewise, I have a different driving style, a different way of
learning, and a different technique, and he adapts to that. He looks at you
and understands what you need, and boom! He puts it there for you.
Now, Suellio has written a book. I wish I would have had a book explaining
advanced racing concepts when I started, when I was eight or nine years
old. But back in the day, we didn't have that. And I didn't think there was
even anything like it until now.
Now, while you have drivers and coaches and everything, but you have to
hire the coach. He needs to go to the track with you and spend a lot of time
with you. With a book, you can take the coach with you, read it, go back,
mark the important things, come back, and allow it to be a forever learning
tool. It is going to make you faster, and it will make you a consistent driver.
It is not just the concept of basically having a one-on-one session; you have
a book that you can go back to at any time and study. It will make you
more confident, and you will probably turn your passion into a profession.
You will see the progress and how quick it is. It is not this way in racing;
racing doesn't forgive. You are only as good as your last race. And the
quicker you learn, the faster you will be, and the quicker you will grow and
reach the top. I consider this book to be a textbook that you can revisit from
time to time. You can go to the track to apply what you learn from the book,
stop and re-read the book at the same time, and go drive again. So, as long
as you understand what the book is saying, it is going to allow you to
improve your sharpness and apply new concepts.
I think it is one of the best books, if not the best, I have ever read about how
to drive fast. If you want to become a champion, if you intend to be a good
race car driver, and if you aim to improve your technique, you need this
book.
I'm going to leave you with a phrase that I have repeated my entire life, and
it is simple. You will think I am philosophical here. Every day is a new
opportunity. Every day, you have a chance to improve. Every day will be
better or worse, but it is a new day. I say that every morning. You already
have the no. If you don't ask, you will not know if you get the yes.
 TESTIMONIALS

“My first lesson with Suellio was brilliant. Probably the most
productive and informative training session I've ever had. Suellio's
methods are really effective and the observations and corrections to
my driving really improved my ability, going down into the tiny
details needed to find the extra lap time needed. Everything was
explained in a super clear way that's easy to understand and translate
into what you feel in the car. I'll definitely be booking a few more!"
— WILL GOULBOURNE, 10 TIME CHAMPION FORMULA 1
ENGINEER FOR RED BULL RACING

“Working with Suellio has been efficient enough for me to be able

to become champion in the Logitech McLaren G Challenge in the
LATAM region. Also how to mentally approach the races. We must
not forget that a coach not only concentrates on the driving
technique, but also helps you think clearly before facing a race.
Thank you so much, Suellio!"
— GONZALO PEREZ, LOGITECH G CHALLENGE LATAM
CHAMPION

“The training is amazing. Suellio is one of the rare drivers who can
articulate what makes one go fast and helps you see things
differently. He completely changed the way I approach braking and
we found almost a whole second during one class alone. In my first
race after the session, I was already outbraking people, chasing cars
down, and making passes. If you wanna take the next step, Suellio
can get you there, no matter your skill level. 10/10”
— FERNANDO MATTOS, SIM RACER
“Suellio’s Motor Racing Checklist is excellent. He provides
detailed, well-produced, easy to understand information that walks
through every aspect of driving on a race track. The quality of the
content is really impressive. Suellio’s explanations and illustrations
are clear and concise, and full of information. He also continues to
add new content. I’m rewatching the entire course now, taking
notes, and I’m amazed at how much I missed the first time.”
— CHRIS GENGARO, SIM RACER

“I’ve been in Motorsport for 15 years now and have seen a bit of
everything, but I have to say Suellio is a talented guy. What really
called my attention was his sensibility to car handling, and in how
he is able to find what he wants through the setup. It is really
impressive, and rare to see people with this level of feeling. Most
importantly and relevant, many people know how to execute but
cannot teach. Suellio is articulated, extremely intelligent, and keen
to share what he knows, making him a person that teaches properly.”
— SÉRGIO SETTE CÂMARA, PROFESSIONAL DRIVER,
FORMER FORMULA 2 DRIVER; FORMULA E DRIVER.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have existed if it wasn’t for my fiancée, Amanda. She
has been an incredible support in my life and work. She is the one taking
me outside to write, to read, and to live, really. Thanks to her incredibly
stable, consistent, annoyingly healthy love, I kept going, for over a year, to
write this for you. We have grown together every day since the day we met,
and we will continue to do so. I would not have even started coaching if I
hadn’t met her. Her mom, Moema, was the one who gave me the idea of
starting to coach as a way to make some money to pay for my university
tuition. It happened on a regular day, during a regular chat, and I could have
never imagined that it would change my life forever. Thank you, Amanda,
and Moema; I love you both!
My parents and my siblings have always given me so much support in
whatever crazy decisions I’ve made in life. They were so supportive that
somehow, I felt it was a joke or something. But no. Antônio Carlos, Sueli,
Suelton and Suellen would say yes to all my crazy decisions, from quitting
engineering, to starting a piano career 2000km away at age 21, or to move
to a completely different country and then quit piano after building an entire
career to start racing cars. They would just say yes. They are still always
there for whatever I need. I love you!
I have spent over two thousand hours with all of you, my students and
patrons, in calls, watching you drive, taking notes. Always thinking, coming
up with better ways to make you go faster, seeing you fail, then try again
and thrive. We share this passion and have created great memories together.
I continue to spend over 20 hours a week connecting with you all over the
world. Thank you for teaching me so many different English accents! This
book is, in so many ways, made by you! I want to personally thank some
people who have become my friends and helped me become who I am
today.
James Carter is one of you guys. He’s one of those students who started
when he didn’t even know the correct racing line. He would slow down and
panic when another competitor got close to him. We’ve worked together for
many great and memorable sessions and since then we’ve become great
friends. His improvement? You would not believe it if you saw him when
we first started compared to now. James also supported me when I
transitioned to racing in real life and did not have money to buy a new set
of tires. He donated a set and helped me conquer my first podium in my
first season. I will always be grateful!
Marlon Familton is also one of you. We’ve been working together for many
months and every time we get back together for a coaching session, I
realize how far we have come. He is also a writer and helped me review this
book. Marlon, your help has been invaluable. Thank you for everything and
let’s continue to share these moments finding those tenths!
Greg Hoobler is an incredible person. Our conversations about racing
technique were always super interesting, and his application of my tips
were always on point. Greg improved a lot and we ended up only needing
the occasional session to perfect his driving, since he was already flying.
Thank you, Greg, for trusting my teaching and always being there for me!
Layton Freitas is an incredibly intelligent and disciplined driver. We did two
sessions a week for some good months and the improvement has been
insane! We quickly became friends and he is incredibly supportive of my
coaching. He is helping me to grow too. I always learn something from him
and there is still so much more! I hope that we stay in touch for a long time.
Thank you, Layton, for trusting my work and for your great advice in many
areas of my life!
A big shoutout to Brian Lockwood, Sam Kuitert and Kane Halliburton.
These guys were the most advanced and disciplined Sim Racing team, and
all of them have competed in elite championships, against the best of the
best of the best. I have learned so much with Brian through amazing
discussions on racing technique, always on the edge of the current
literature, developing new concepts (he was the one who first gave me the
idea for the Exponential Steering concept!) and spending countless hours
practicing and polishing our techniques. I’m grateful to have spent so much
time with you guys and a big part of my sim racing success is because of
you!
Evan Gobdel is one of the most intelligent guys I’ve ever met. We started
working together when he helped develop my mental performance and later
on we started working on his driving technique. We then quickly became
great friends due to so many great discussions and conversations sprouting
from the concepts and technique exercises and countless laps on the
simulator! Evan developed his technique immensely and transfered his
skills to real life as well. Thank you for everything, Evan, and hope to keep
contact for a long time!
Buzz!! Paul Busby is an awesome person. He started as an above average
driver. We started working together and he skyrocketed into winning high-
level special events against top 0.5% drivers in the world. He exploited our
sessions to become a wildly fast racing driver. He quickly became a coach
to other drivers on his team. We’ve become great friends, sharing
conversations beyond racing and helping each other become better people.
Thank you for the trust, Paul. Love you buddy!
William Goulbourne is an impressive guy. He is a 10-time champion
Formula 1 Engineer! Can you imagine being responsible for developing the
fastest cars in the pinnacle of motorsports 10 years in a row? It’s been a
huge honor to coach him in sim racing. The coaching sessions were so easy;
we could discuss advanced concepts extensively and he would just get it all
and apply it on track right away. Also, thank you so much for giving me the
opportunity to visit a Formula 1 garage! It was amazing to meet you in
person and I hope this happens again.
Abdulrahman Mahmoud started chatting with me years ago when I was
streaming my sim racing endeavors on Twitch. Then, we started doing
coaching sessions and became good friends. His support has been there
since the beginning, from moderating my Twitch channel to giving me full
support and advice in my coaching career. Sometimes I still ask him for
help with something and he stays on a call with me for hours. Abdul, I will
always be grateful for your friendship and will be here for whatever you
need!
Matti Helenius was always online. We would start the stream and it always
seemed like he knew exactly when I was going to start driving. He was also
a Twitch moderator and is a great person - always positive and supportive
with everyone around. Thank you for sharing all these moments with us,
Matti!
Cameron Das is an extraordinary person. I have learned so much from him
and have yet to learn a lot more. As a professional driver, real life
champion, incredible storyteller, and content creator, he’s always been my
benchmark for this influencer thing. We met in real life and became great
friends. It’s just incredible how much knowledge this guy has being so
much younger than me! I hope we meet more and more and do amazing
things for the community. Thanks, man!
Now, if this book looks professional, well organized, and well written, it is
because Julia Pama was there. She’s an incredible book editor! Her work
elevated my book immensely, and more than that, in record-breaking time.
We had just two weeks to edit the entire book before the book launch and
she accepted the challenge. I’m having a hard time imagining that there
would be someone else out there who would do such amazing work. Thank
you, Julia! And also thank you Tom Russell, her partner, for clarifying
racing technique terms and for being my coach when I started racing in real
life! You guys are amazing!
José Luis Altet is a treasure trove of knowledge. Not only did he format this
book, but he also gave me invaluable insights and tips about publishing, and
all the technical stuff involved. He has also given me so many tips related to
business, engineering, and so many other, diverse things that I keep asking
myself how he learned so many different things in just one lifetime! Thank
you so much for your support and work, and I hope we keep working
together!
Matheus Ferreira is one of my best friends from childhood. We grew up
together in Brazil, and we spent a lot of time gaming, making music, and
hanging out, for 15 years and counting. He is the designer of my website
and all my logos, colors, banners, YouTube thumbnails, images for
promotions, and the cover of this book! A big part of what you see in my
content is made by him. Thank you, Matheus, for growing with me. Let’s
continue to do so!
Andrew Phantavong from PhanMotion is the reason you guys enjoy my
video content so much. We started working together to make the best
YouTube videos in 2023. Ever since the first video, I knew I would need
him for a long time. Since then, we’ve been working together, writing
scripts, discussing storytelling, recording videos, editing them, analyzing
the data and then doing it all again. We spend upwards of 20 hours per week
working together. I could not have chosen a better person for this job. He is
passionate, has so much energy, and his willingness to continue improving
and learning new editing and storytelling techniques guarantee that we will
keep getting better – hopefully towards being one of the top of racing
content creators someday! Let’s keep doing it; I really enjoy working with
you and I hope we remain friends for a looong time. Love you, bro!
Matt Adams is a friend and top-level driver. We have worked and practiced
together for many years and we improved our driving together while
practicing for the Porsche Esports Sprint Challenge Canada 2021 and 2022.
Matt also helped me identify improvement points for this book and my
coaching business as a whole. Thank you, Matt! Still hoping to share the
race track with you someday!
Marc-André Séguin and the team from ApexV2R: thank you for giving me
that phone call that changed my life years ago. Trusting a sim racer and
offering me the opportunity to race in real life has shaped my career and
lifestyle to where it is now, and the snowball effect keeps getting bigger. I
consider you my motorsports father and will be forever grateful. Thank you
so much!
One of the highlights of 2023 was the opportunity to drive a Formula 4 car
thanks to the International Motorsport team. When I received a message
with the invitation, it felt weird. It was one of those “too good to be true”
moments. But it happened. Eight races later, all I can think is how crazy this
year has been for my racing career. Thank you Jonathan, Juan, Paul, Pablo,
Pato, Dana, Carlos, and everyone at the InterMS team. You have changed
my life more than you can imagine!
Jim Hoey and the team from Logitech G, thank you so much for
recognizing and supporting my story! You guys found me on TikTok when I
had only eight thousand followers and we have worked together and
supported each other since then. Jim, you have no idea how much I learn
with you. Each time we get in a call, I get out of it boiling with ideas that
I’m afraid I’ll forget, so I have to write them all down. I’ll always be
grateful for your support and advice, and I hope we still make great things
together!
Tony Kanaan is the boss. He is the one who gave me incredibly valuable
advice in difficult moments and always takes care of his team, his friends
and treats them like family. I will always be grateful for your support and it
is an honor to know such a legendary racing driver like you and to have
become your friend. Let us keep growing together and creating the most
positive impact possible on the racing and sim racing communities!
My piano teachers during my Bachelor and Master’s Degree had a huge
impact on the way I think about technique, which has transferred over to
racing technique - not only in my own development as a racing driver, but
also as a coach and communicator. Ronal Silveira was my piano teacher at
the University of Rio de Janeiro and he taught me invaluable lessons that I
have used not only in piano, but in life. I owe a lot to you, Ronal! The
massive ideas I’ve had over these years when it comes to racing technique
are in part related to the methods you used to teach me.
Paul Stewart was my piano teacher at the University of Montréal.
Unfortunately, due to the COVID pandemic, we did not meet many times,
but the few lessons we had were incredibly constructive to my piano
technique (and again, I do believe they had an impact in my racing
technique and coaching career). Thank you for your amazing insights for
piano technique and for life!
 1

INTRODUCTION

W elcome to The Motor Racing Book! In this book, you’ll find

concepts that will help you perfect your racing technique in the
most efficient and rewarding ways. Volume I has been developed to
focus on car handling, mostly from a “technique” point of view. The
techniques from this book will be applicable both in real life road racing
motorsports and in the virtual world (sim racing). Future volumes will
explore topics such as racecraft and car setup. In the introduction, we’ll
discuss some guidelines on how to absorb the most from the book. Writing
this book in between simulator practice, coaching sessions, and even at real
life racing events has been a great learning experience. Practicing,
coaching, and driving, are the times where I reflect the most on the
importance of each little detail in the development of our skills.
In this book, you will learn how to identify opportunities to go faster,
starting from and working beyond a fundamental level. We will always start
with a basic description of each concept, but then explore them to the
highest degree possible. You will learn how to maximize deceleration in
different types of racecars, how to maximize rotation in corners, and most
importantly, how to blend them together, which is where we spend most of
the time when driving at the limit. The transition from peak braking towards
peak rotation is where the great drivers shine. You will also learn how to
find the best lines possible in complicated cornering situations, how
different cars take lines differently, and what adjustments to make
depending on the type of corner, its characteristics, and its context. The
main goal of this book is to give you tools to make sure that you will be on
the limit of traction during the entire corner, without leaving even a fraction
of a second on the table.
It’s okay to skim the entire book on your first readthrough. Let your brain
absorb the new terms and concepts just enough to become familiarized with
the content. The idea is not to go on track and apply everything at the same
time all at once. Try that and you’ll be overwhelmed and confused. Driving
involves too many skills and we’re used to doing it mindlessly, by instinct.
If you try to consciously think about all these new concepts at the same
time, your system will crash. We need to adjust our instinct layer by layer,
building one stage on top of the other.

Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

According to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, 1 memory retention is

drastically improved when we are re-exposed to new information several
times. Because of that, I have purposely repeated information and concepts
in this book with the intention of helping these new concepts sink in, as
well as applying them in different contexts.
After you do the first read through, if you want to better internalize the
content, read it again carefully, taking notes and practicing on track. Taking
notes helps you memorize the most important parts, and it will be much
easier for the brain to remember what to focus on when driving.
The key here is transforming knowledge into understanding.
We will transform a bunch of words, terms, and ideas into physical,
muscular feeling that will eventually become automatic in your driving. In
other words, once you understand the theory, then understand the feeling,
thorough practice and repetition will allow it to happen naturally.
That being said, this process is slow.
Frustration is a necessary part of learning, especially when your brain is still
digesting all the new information and trying to fit it into your previous
technique and old habits. Don’t fight frustration; embrace it and keep going.
Sleep is an important aspect of this process. Sleep allows your brain to store
and process new information into long-term memory. As an example, when
I first learned about trail braking, a concept we will explore more later, it
was overwhelming to even imagine that someone would be able to release
the brakes with such precision – up to the point of braking at 1% of the
initial pressure – consistently, lap after lap. After several days of practice
with good sleeps in between, I ended up accepting that it is possible. Some
weeks later, I was trail braking as if it was nothing special.
 The Dunning-Kruger Effect occurs when a person’s lack of
knowledge and skills in a certain area causes them to
overestimate their own competence. By contrast, this effect
also causes those who excel in a given area to think the task
is simple for everyone, underestimating their relative abilities
as well. Don’t be fooled by this. Embrace learning and you’ll
see there’s an ocean of things to improve if you want to reach
the top. Don’t be fooled by your own ego.

Compare. If you really want to see how much you are improving, make a
benchmark. Find a combo, a car and track, with fixed conditions in the
simulator. Do a stint – maybe 10~20 laps. Record the replay, take notes on
your strengths and weaknesses, what corners you struggle with, and so on.
Then, start applying all the techniques discussed in this book. After a month
or two of practicing, do the same stint with that combo again. Take notes on
the differences. Take notes, take notes, take notes! Write down your
thoughts. You’ll be surprised when you read them again after some time has
passed; you’ll be able to trace your progress much more easily.
Be patient. Expect tiny improvements, then stack them up. Find a tenth,
then half a tenth, then one more tenth, then some hundredths. Don’t expect
to find seconds in a single session, especially if you are already advanced.
The closer we get to the limit of the car, the more diminished returns we
see. Take your time and respect your brain and energy. It will come slowly
but surely.
When I started coaching and recording video tutorials, I thought I was
already a great driver. A year later, I went back and rewatched my videos,
only to quickly pinpoint so much to improve in those tutorials. I had no idea
at the time. I was almost cringing while watching my own laps from the
previous year. Did I notice the improvement during that year? Of course
not. The more advanced you are, the more subtle the improvements
become, to the point where you don’t even notice unless you compare
yourself to a long time ago. That’s how we master the art of racing. Slowly.
When trying new techniques, you should even be slower than normal until
you can blend the new inputs with everything else you were doing before.
Trying to change your entry line just a little bit will snowball into changing
your braking release, your throttle application, the balance of the car, etc.
This means you need to insist on a new style until it accommodates the rest
of your driving skills.
By reading this book, you are learning what I’ve learned and developed
over many years of sim racing, racing in real life, and coaching thousands
of drivers in the simulator – including top-tier sim racers, professional
racing drivers, F1 engineers, and coaches who teach on and off the
simulator. You may read in a few short weeks what I took years of my life
to put together. I hope you enjoy this book and open your mind to as much
information as possible to help you develop your driving technique. My
main mission as a coach is to increase the quality of the racing experience
for all my students. I want you to have more fun, to be more confident, and
to always keep improving.
Have fun driving on track!

Some Background
Before we dive deep into racing technique, I want to give you some context
about who I am and how I got here. I’m a musician; I started learning the
piano when I was 11 years old. I have always been a gamer, too. Although I
studied engineering for a few years, I decided to go all in and start a piano
career. Music has always been a passion of mine and I always searched for
ways to learn complicated pieces as fast as I could. But there’s a dark side
to my musical career. I have never been patient enough to follow my
teachers’ instructions and notice the warning signs of inefficient practices.

Arts and sports have a lot in common. Mastering complex techniques requires
many similar traits across countless domains. In this photo, I am playing the
Shostakovich Piano Concerto no.2 with an orchestra.

As a result, I ended up developing many, many bad habits along the way.
After years of carrying on with this mindset, I started plateauing. I spent so
much time in university trying to get rid of these bad habits, while my peers
were having less difficulties. By the time I realized this, it was too late. To
this day, I still carry many bad habits that I solidified over more than a
decade in piano. I solved some of them, but at what cost? Time. A lot of
time. Instead of working at higher levels, I had to re-learn techniques at a
beginner level. The time and effort I could have spent in school to further
improve my piano technique at this higher level is gone.
This realization with the piano and my bad habits happened around the time
I was starting to take sim racing as a hobby more seriously. In 2017, I
decided to join a Brazilian league in Assetto Corsa, a popular online racing
simulator, and I was afraid of developing bad habits in another domain. I
began to study racing technique early to start the right way. In 2018, I
joined iRacing, a more competitive racing simulation service. The plan was
to join another league, a higher level one, where I would compete with the
best sim racers in Brazil. I was clearly still traumatized from my bad habits
journey in piano, as before driving for the first time in the new simulator
service, I picked up a notebook. I started watching onboards and guides
about the combo I was going to practice with: the Mazda MX-5 at
Okayama. I wrote down everything I learned from each corner of the
racetrack – braking zones, gearing, lines – and, when I finally got in the car,
I treated it as a real-life session. I tried to understand the car as much as
possible and avoid going off track and crashing.
Since then, that mentality has never left me. While I was spending a lot of
my time fixing my bad habits in piano, I was building the best habits I
possibly could build in sim racing.
I wanted to learn telemetry and understand how that could help my driving.
From my coaching experience, I can say most drivers use telemetry wrong.
You shouldn’t use telemetry to only see what to do, but also to reflect on
why other drivers make certain inputs and how you can convert the data
into actual feeling on track. I use telemetry mostly for providing evidence
while coaching, or to confirm or disprove suspicions about driving habits
while practicing with teammates.
In 2019, I decided to start coaching in order to pay my tuition at the
University of Montréal, where I would start my master’s degree in piano. I
never expected that after just a few months of coaching I would gain some
recognition. I found it easy to teach others, thanks to my background in
music and experience with understanding my piano teachers’ teaching
techniques. A few years prior, I had tried to teach piano to a friend who
played the flute, and at the end of the lesson, she said: “You just gave me
way too much information; I can’t follow it.” That was the first time I had
heard that. From then on, I started reflecting on the limits of our brain and
how to optimize my own teaching skills.
In 2020, I had already made enough money through coaching to pay my
tuition and even some bills, eventually allowing me to stop receiving help
from my parents in Brazil. I was in love with how coaching allowed me to
connect with many drivers from all over the world and continue to learn.
My racing technique also improved drastically, as I was able to break down
the driving technique in a much clearer way. Doing so enabled me to teach
better and improve my own driving even further.
In 2021, I became Porsche Esports Sprint Challenge Canada Champion in
iRacing, which put me in a real Porsche for the first time. Then, a real race
team named ApexV2R (Virtual to Reality) put me in a racecar for a test day.
In 2022, I raced a real car for the first time in Super Production Challenge
in Canada. It was a tough start of the year due to the adaptation from sim
racing to real life, the g-Forces, the seating position, the feel of the pedals,
and the adrenaline of real-life racing. Shortly after, I progressed towards
getting three podiums and a win in my first year. In 2023, International
Motorsport invited me to drive a Formula 4 car for a full race weekend,
racing for the Formula Inter Championship. I finished on podium on that
first weekend. The team invited me to race several times afterwards. On my
third race weekend, I achieved my first race win in a Formula 4 series.
I continue to race more and more in real life, having also competed in a 14-
hour endurance race at Daytona with World Racing League and many other
endurance events. I quit my piano career after finishing my Master’s Degree
to focus on my racing career. I race and travel to races, I coach, I write, I
create racing content, and I create courses.
This book was in the works for over a year and a half. Every small idea I
had while coaching, practicing, racing, or talking with experienced drivers
became a chapter in this book. Here, you’ll have access to many years of
hard work, practice, research, and experience. Read this book until the end
and I guarantee you’ll be a much better driver than you could have
imagined.
The following chapters in this introduction are various ideas that will help
you set the mood and mindset for this book. These are concepts from
different disciplines that will positively affect your skills as a racing driver.
In Unit 1, we’ll dive into the detailed car handling concepts I’ve developed
over these years of coaching that will help you maximizing grip in
absolutely any racecar you drive, virtually or in real life.
1 The Forgetting Curve, created by Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows how information is lost over time
when there is no attempt to retain it, while being exposed to that information again improves memory
retention drastically.
 2

GENERAL GUIDELINES

Time Distribution: Learning vs Practicing

W e often learn things rather slowly. The power of compounding the

results of practice takes us to incredible achievements – if we make
good use of our time. With the benefits of almost unlimited track
time on the simulator, drivers can perfect techniques through repetition and
discipline. I have done close to 100,000 laps in my lifetime, and I’m far
from the top tier. Professional esports drivers spend up to 35 hours per week
practicing. The mindset of perfecting these techniques involves much more
driving than learning new things.
We should spend 5% of our time learning new things and the remaining
95% of the time internalizing them into our subconscious driving. In other
words, learn something new, then practice until you can do it without even
thinking about it. Then, forget it and move onto the next layer. In the end,
when racing with others, dealing with traffic, navigating changing track
conditions, avoiding incidents, defending, and attacking, you’ll be doing all
these little things automatically.
Practice is the moment to analyze your technique and bring small details to
the surface. You shouldn’t work on too many things at once though. Your
conscious mind is only capable of isolating one or two factors. So, work on
them and then submerge them back into the ocean of skills you collect and
develop over the course of your career. That’s why you must know which
factors should be perfected before others, what bad habits you must avoid,
and to always be aware of exactly what you are practicing. Time spent
doing blind laps is never a good idea. Winners are constantly looking for
the best use of their practice time to improve as much as possible. Join
them!

Efficiency
We’re efficient when we achieve the best outcome with the least amount of
energy spent. An efficient engine will consume less fuel and deliver more
power. An efficient driver will reach the best performance with the least
amount of tension. This tension can be muscular or mental. Brian
Lockwood, a good friend, and coach who drove at top-level world
championships in iRacing, always uses the word “efficiency” when working
with motorsports technique. I have adopted the term into my own practices
of driving and coaching. When looking through the lens of efficiency, we
start finding many opportunities to shave off energy spent and simplify
driving on the limit.
Driving can be interpreted in an incredibly complex way: with telemetry
engineers describing a long list of technical data, slip angle, braking
pressures, steering input, etc. But through the eyes of efficiency, the driver
is not thinking about all these things at all, especially when in the flow
state. Instead, the efficient driver will sense cues and feel the car in a way
that allows them to expend the least amount of energy while still reaching
near perfection in all ways possible. In other words, just a few efficient cues
and ways to drive might naturally trigger a chain of events that follow the
path of least resistance and happen simultaneously. Although the engineer
might be able to list a series of specific issues, the driver is only thinking
about one or two, and the other things happen to be connected.
My point is: you don’t have to think about everything, because you won’t
be able to anyways. No one can. Instead, think about specific inputs or
behaviors that might be the root cause of other inputs and states. The fast
driver will eventually find the most relaxed state, where thinking only about
some things will be enough for them to find the limit.
One would think that a prodigy driver has better innate abilities – that they
are “born better.” I have a different approach to describing this
phenomenon. The prodigy driver is the one who was lucky enough (or was
well instructed) to find the most efficient ways to drive since the beginning
of their technique development. Some ways to think are just more efficient
than others. There are drivers who are capable of driving incredibly well yet
cannot describe what they are doing in precise terms. This is because they
have found a way to drive that is so internalized and efficient, they didn’t
even have the time to put words to it. Through the eyes of efficiency,
they’re doing it “by feel.” However, they still probably have some cues to
understand the behavior of the car and take it from there, without going
through a long and complex thought process.
Being able to describe the things you do is not a bad thing. But if you are
over-thinking states (and as a late learner and driving coach, I include
myself in this group), you may end up going down a longer path to find the
outcome that the natural driver found much earlier. If you are not able to
shrink down and simplify these thought processes, you may end up being
overwhelmed and failing to find the true efficiency in motorsports: going
from point A to point B as fast as possible.
Work smarter, not harder. Mindless effort may not only waste your energy,
but also bring you further away from your goal.

Good vs Bad Habits: Muscle Memory

As Ross Bentley said in Ultimate Speed Secrets:

It is much like the pathway flowing water makes in dirt. The first
time the water begins to flow, it seeks out a pathway. The more it
flows, the deeper and stronger the pathway becomes. The same is
true of the neural pathways in your brain. The more you practice
anything, the stronger and deeper the programming becomes.

This quote describes the way our brain works. We can consciously move
our arm up and down if we want, but we can’t consciously control a
complex set of movements like driving a racecar at speed. You just can’t
actively think about throttle, braking, shifting, steering, traffic, breathing,
blinking, and everything else that is involved in racing. Most of these things
will happen at a subconscious level. They happen immediately and
automatically. We just need to program them correctly. Muscle memory is
not really stored in your muscles (I’m saying that because I thought it was
when I was a kid!), it is simply a given movement that has been repeated
enough times that your brain has created a strong pathway associated with
it.
Muscle memory is the result of conscious repetition. It becomes an
automatic reflex that requires less conscious effort to be executed. Muscle
memory is important in absolutely everything we do in life. In many ways,
you have muscle memory in places you never even thought about. Think
about language. You can produce sounds that people from other linguistic
backgrounds may not easily reproduce because you have spent your entire
life practicing that sound naturally. If you try to speak a new language,
you’ll find yourself struggling to produce some sounds that you never had
to produce before. It can be difficult to learn them because you have no
muscle memory! Your tongue never had to roll in that specific way or touch
the back of your teeth like that, so it will be a new and uncomfortable thing
to do. After a while though, you get used to it – possibly to the point you
don’t even think about it anymore, just like your native language. This is
the way our brain works for a lot of things: language, sports, walking, social
skills, emotions. We get used to things and develop more proficiency the
more frequently we are exposed to them.
There are two important characteristics of muscle memory of which we
need to be aware. The first is that it takes time to build. The second is that it
also takes time to deconstruct or change what our muscles are conditioned
to do. Muscle memory doesn’t only happen in the ways we want to
condition ourselves. It happens for everything. A person who learns
something the wrong way (through the lens of efficiency) will develop a
muscle memory that “protects” itself from being fixed. If a racing driver has
a bad habit of pressing the brake pedal with their heel for years and
someone tells them to instead brake with the ball of their foot, that person
will find the new way extremely uncomfortable. It will feel wrong. The
driver will have to spend a lot of time consciously thinking about pressing
the brakes in the new way. They would then be unable to drive at the very
limit, since a lot of their attention is focused on that specific change in
muscle memory for many days or sessions of practice.
Think about how much effort is required to make a simple change in such a
simple thing. Think about the time needed to make this correction – time
that could have been used in other more specific ways, like finding better
lines or understanding the car’s balance. This time would be spared if the
driver had started their driving career with proper instruction and learned
how to position their foot correctly from the beginning. Time is the most
important resource available to us. And it will always run the same, for you
or for your competitors, so using it efficiently is always a good idea.
Driving is an incredibly complex sport. Try to think about how many bad
habits can be developed. Infinite! If you don’t look for the most efficient
ways of doing things in your technique, you open the door and let all the
bad habit demons get in. You might only know what you are doing wrong
and reinforcing when someone else points it out, or when you do a strong
self-analysis. While figuring it out yourself is possible, we’re talking about
time efficiency, so it’s always better to look for instruction.
Changing habits is always going to be outside of your comfort zone. It feels
weird to try to change something you’ve been doing a certain way for years,
and most likely there will be a built-in defense against change. You may
defend your driving as your “style” and “just how it is,” but even if you do
open your mind and try different things, it will take some time. It’s
important to be aware of how difficult it is to learn new things, so
remember to save some mental energy for them when practicing. But try
them. Muscle memory is dumb. It will always want to stick to what it
knows. The conscious mind can give orders to that muscle memory to
slowly change it.
Let’s imagine two ways of driving. Method A is efficient, allows you to
drive without too much effort, and you can become a great racing driver.
Method B is only slightly different, but it prevents you from trail braking
correctly (maybe the habit of releasing the brakes too quickly mid-corner),
causing the car to understeer. Both examples are reinforced through years of
practice and racing. A driver using method B might have learned skills on
top of their habit to compensate the understeer and find some lap time.
Driver B also changed the setup of the car to compensate for the understeer
and now feels like they are on the limit. A driver using method A, however,
can get in cars that naturally oversteer or understeer and adapt with no
problem, since they are capable of trail braking and can change the speed of
brake release to determine the balance of the car. Driver A does not worry
too much about setup for balance, focusing instead on setup for pure lap
time and other subtleties.
Note that I said Driver B built a pile of habits on top of their bad habit to
compensate its effects. You can build a series of habits, layering them one
on top of the other, but if one of them is wrong, the others will be affected.
Then, you amass a collection of skills that are all contaminated by
something you built early in your career that was not ideal through the eyes
of efficiency. To correct that, you would have to change a little bit of every
single habit that was built on top of the bad habit. Again, that is time lost.
Of course, there are some factors we can’t control, like what we have been
taught before we were aware of bad habits. Promise me that after reading
this chapter, you’ll think about it and be careful about what you learn next,
who teaches you, and how you can identify your current bad habits. Then,
get rid of them so you can make better use of your time from now on.

Key Accelerators and Enemies of Technique Development

It’s possible to put in an hour of practice and get better. It’s also possible to
put in the same amount of time, but by making a few adjustments to your
practice methods, to double the amount of improvement. In this chapter,
we’ll highlight a few important tips so we can know exactly what to aim for
during practice.
Key Accelerator #1 Awareness
If you know what you are trying, you can adjust it. If you know what
caused a problem, you can adjust it. Control is directly related to knowing
exactly what is happening. The worst thing during practice is to lose control
of the car and not know why.
One of the most effective ways to develop driving technique that I use with
most of my students, from beginners to professional competitors, is to make
them induce the mistake they’re trying to avoid.
 If you can cause it on purpose, you know how to prevent it.

Are you afraid of oversteering? Okay, then spend a few laps oversteering on
purpose. This way, we become aware of how to use our driving inputs to
cause the oversteer. Although we will still spin sometimes, we’ll eventually
learn how to manage the oversteer and stay on the limit for longer.
If you are unaware of what you are doing, you’ll be afraid of making
mistakes, but they’ll happen anyway and make you feel terrible. That will
make you develop a Hesitant Technique.

Technique Enemy #1 Hesitation

Hesitation and fear walk together. When this mental state takes over,
learning is drastically impaired.

Fear inhibits learning

Hesitation shows up when we’re afraid something unpredictable will
happen. Unpredictability comes from being unaware of all the dynamics in
racecar driving. One of the great benefits of sim racing is that we can spin
and crash as much as we want, so it’s an awesome tool for us to try absurd
driving styles and test the limits of the car. Using simulators, we can fight
back against hesitation by deliberately causing what we’re afraid of. This
works like magic. Within just one coaching session, some of my students
were able to go from being afraid of oversteer to fully controlling it and
maintaining nice slides just to show off!

Key Accelerator #2 Getting the Right Information In

Although this is listed second, it doesn’t mean it’s less important than
awareness. Generations of drivers have tried different methods and driving
styles, documenting it all for us. All you need to do is get the right
information and work on it on track. In this book you’ll find my
contribution to racing technique’s literature, with many new concepts to
help drivers find the limits in a much more efficient way. Your job is to
make sure no information goes unnoticed or ignored so you can build the
best technical vocabulary possible. The more you know about racing
technique, the more you can work on being aware of all these things while
driving. You’ll eventually get to a point where you apply all of it without
even thinking about it.

Technique Enemy #2 Passive Driving

There should be no waiting if you are driving on the limit. Passive driving
happens when you are waiting for the car to rotate on its own during the
corner. There’s a full chapter on passive versus active driving later in this
book, explained in a more technical way, but I will cover it briefly here.
Passive driving is generally related to understeer. When you find yourself
waiting for things to happen to you mid-corner, you are not on the limit. An
active driver is constantly adjusting their driving – from initial braking all
the way to the exit of the corner, with the car floating on the verge of
sliding. Some drivers are afraid of oversteer. They end up being under the
limit or preferring understeer instead, which are driving styles associated
with passive driving.

Posture
It sucks not being comfortable while driving. Being uncomfortable sucks up
all your energy and concentration. Comfortability is a prerequisite to getting
in the flow state and driving fast. A good posture through the lens of
efficiency allows the driver to spend the least effort possible to steer, brake,
and withstand the g-forces of a car. It will also prevent injuries in the long
term.
A perfect posture is one that is not even noticeable to the driver. It will
allow you to drive for hours with no unnecessary soreness or pain. It is also
imperative in seamless communication with the car.
One of the most sensitive parts of driving is feeling input from the steering
wheel. The Light Hands Technique, which will be discussed in Unit 3,
requires total relaxation of the body to be fully realized. Let’s use sound as
an analogy.
Imagine the feedback from the steering wheel at the most subtle and
advanced levels. Think of it as a friend who doesn’t speak loudly. It is
someone who whispers when talking to you, no matter how much you ask
them to speak louder. Imagine that you are at a heavy metal concert with
this friend. How many of their words will you be able to understand? Don’t
even try! But if you go to a nice quiet library instead, you’ll be able to have
the conversation.
For this analogy, your body tension and comfort are the ambient noise. An
uncomfortable posture with lots of tension and distractions is the metal
concert. You just won’t have enough headroom for the details. A perfect
posture is one that, again, is not even noticeable. You are relaxed, nothing
hurts, and you can focus on the small stuff. This is the library.
Another way to see this is reflecting on the idea of becoming One with the
car. This is the dream of any racing driver. The technique reaches its peak
when the boundaries between the driver and the racecar cease to exist. The
driver and the car are the same thing, as if you could feel the tires, the
steering wheel, the brakes, and the engine, as extensions of your body. This
is only achievable through great communication – and relaxation and
comfort are key in developing the physical ease to have a conversation with
the car.

Pedals
When setting the pedal distance, make sure your leg is almost straight when
the brake pedal is fully depressed. You still want your knee to be a little
bent, though. This is especially important if the car has brakes that require a
lot of force. Pressing the pedal too hard with the leg too bent will hurt your
knee in the long term, while pressing the pedal with an overextended knee
can similarly injure it. It’s also important to make sure the leg is in line with
the pedal. I remember having set up the brake pedal on my simulator just a
little too far to the right and feeling a lot of pain in my knee until I finally
noticed the issue. After aligning the brake pedal properly with my left leg,
the pain was gone.
I use 85kg of brake resistance. For reference, F1 drivers brake with up to
more than 100kg. Production-based cars with unmodified brakes will be
much lighter, with ABS kicking in around 30kg, on average. The heavier
the brake pedal, the more important setting your pedal alignment will be. If
you are braking with a soft pedal where you can easily reach max braking
pressures, it’s okay to bend your knee more. This applies especially to
drivers who use a gaming chair and desktop as a racing simulation rig and
can’t decrease the angle further.

Braking vs Seat
If your seat wasn’t attached to your simulator or car, braking would
immediately move it backwards. That is because the same force applied to
the brakes is applied backwards to your seat. Meaning 50kg applied to the
brake pedal is 50kg of pressure against your seat. It is possible to feel that
pressure in your back. You can improve your hard braking precision by
paying attention to how much your back is pressed against the seat. Make
sure that the pressure is mostly concentrated in your lower back. Your
contact point to the brakes should be the ball of your foot. That is where the
pressure will be applied. When braking, the energy should be concentrated
on these two areas only!
Tip: In simulators, the pressure that the pedal reads will depend on how far
from the pivot of the pedal you are pressing, as the leverage is different
over the surface of the pedal. If the pedal is not inverted, pressing on the
lower end of the pedal will actually make it more difficult to reach full
pressure. By moving the ball of your foot up and pressing closer to the
upper edge of the pedal, you’ll most likely hit the maximum pressure with
around 10-20% less force. Here are a few other related tips:

1. Make sure you are always pressing the same area of your brake
pedal for better precision.
2. Be careful not to tense your toe up too much.
 3. Your heel should be free to move up a little bit when pressure is
being applied. If it’s stuck to the floor, energy is being lost and you
are losing precision and efficiency. If you have a tendency of
keeping your heel glued to the floor while braking hard, you are
probably not feeling the energy reaching your back and the seat
properly.
4. Your lower back always needs to be touching the seat. That’s
where your core stability comes from, both for turning and
braking.
5. For the throttle pedal, since there’s generally much less resistance,
your heel will most likely remain rested on the floor when
accelerating. The energy should flow freely from the ball of your
foot to your back, passing through the heel and the knee without
being stuck there. This is incredibly important!
6. Precision comes from efficiency in brake force application. The
Press Less Technique allows you to release the pressure seamlessly
and smoothly. This requires good braking posture.

Steering Wheel
When holding the steering wheel, you should always use the 9-3 position.
This is the most stable position as you’ll spend energy more efficiently
when moving the steering wheel around. Never do 10-2. Your hands must
be as far away as possible from one another. This gives you the best
stability for fast-moving actions like countersteering. When you turn the
steering wheel, one hand will be pulling down while the other will be
pushing up. Still, try to even out the energy spent by both hands. If you are
driving karts, you can push much more with the outside hand (the right
hand if you are turning left, or the left hand if you are turning right),
because of the wheel construction. Pulling the wheel down with your thumb
in karts causes pain and soreness very quickly. In fact, pulling the wheel
down with your thumb can cause a lot of pain in your hands in any car.
Make sure you are not gripping the wheel too hard with your thumbs. Use
just enough energy to hold it and move its angle – no more than that.
Every little detail counts. Add them up and your better form will allow you
to drive for longer sessions without getting hurt or becoming too tired. This
will ultimately make you faster. If you can practice for longer or be more
comfortable during your sessions, you’ll let more information sink in,
you’ll be freer to try new things in your technique, and you’ll improve
faster.
Tension and bad posture are some of the most underrated problems that will
prevent you from being a winning racing driver. Most people won’t give the
importance to them that they deserve. It is by shaping and treating your
biological machine well that you’ll be able to master the racing machine.

The Ego Barrier

To think you are good is useless for your improvement. Mentally, you want
to think you always have the potential to improve. Be open for further
improvement! You want to try to go faster, to perfect your lines a little bit
more each lap, to feel increasingly connected with the car, to be always
looking forward. When you think you are good, that is a static mindset. It
stops your improvement right there. Of course, you can think both: “I’m
good, and I want to be even better.”
We often conflate good drivers with high egos, but ego has no practical use
in high performance driving. This is because thinking about oneself takes
up brain real estate. As discussed before, our conscious mind does not
contain a lot of working space, so anything that is happening in our mind
that is not about feeling and driving the car is taking away space that should
have been purely focused on those two aspects.
The flow state does not contain any notion of self. As per its nomenclature,
it flows with the technique as if the driving is happening by itself, not
caused by the driver. The car drives the driver. The driver is just witnessing
the event, as their subconscious, well-programmed mind takes care of the
inputs.
Have you ever been in a situation where everything is going well – you are
leading a race on the last lap – and then suddenly you start thinking about
yourself, the reaction of the team, your interviews, and all the glory that
comes with a victory, and end up losing concentration and making
mistakes? This is the ego taking control and shutting down the flow state.
As you try to consciously take control of your driving, it becomes sloppy.
One of the biggest challenges for athletes is to let themselves go and
become the sport, without fighting against their ego.
How can we get rid of our ego? I have some tips for you to act as a starting
point, but don’t just trust me. Do your own research or consult a sports
psychologist to see what will work best for you.

Don’t try to block thoughts.

Try to distract yourself with the right ones.

If I tell you to not think about a chicken crossing the road, you will
obviously think about it. Whenever something is mentioned, you’ll think
about it; you’ll imagine it.
Imagine a canvas painted white. Nothing else, just white. Now imagine
someone painting it pink. Now blue. Now let’s add some difficulty. Do not
think of it as red. Let’s say red is bad. Have you already thought of it as red,
even if just for a fraction of a second? Most likely. To not think of red, it’s
easier to go back to thinking of the other colors. Think about blue. Now
green. Close your eyes for a bit and keep your green canvas in mind. Think
about your breathing while you calmly imagine the green canvas in front of
you. Do this before you keep reading.
Difficult, right? It seems like the thoughts start fighting with each other and
the more we try to take control, the worse it gets. Some people will be able
to concentrate on the green more easily, but others will struggle with the red
canvas coming back all the time. This is a simple analogy that gives us an
idea of how difficult it is to not think about something. Since our ego is a
very strong part of our mind, it is a real challenge to get rid of it. But just
like thinking of the other colors, the secret to dismissing your ego is to
distract yourself with the right things. This could even be the experience of
driving.
When a child plays with toys or starts a sport at an early age, they don’t
really think about themselves too much. They’re easily distracted and
entertained. This distraction and entertainment, or experience, is one way to
keep your mind focused on the right things. Don’t try to block thoughts.
Instead, try to distract yourself with other ones. When the egotistical
thoughts come back, don’t fight them either. Let them be there,
acknowledge them, and move on. If you think “Oh no, I’m being distracted
by my own ego, I’m losing focus!” and panic, these thoughts will stay for
longer. Let them flow. In and out. Don’t give them any importance. Then,
they’ll slowly fade away.
I’m really talking about the conscious egotistical thoughts. This does not
mean you won’t get nervous, or that you won’t get the rush of adrenaline
and focus when necessary. Those will always happen in motorsport, but
their presence is good. Adrenaline will enhance your reflexes and you’ll
drive even better. Welcome these sensations. They overclock your body so
that it uses more energy when it’s necessary, like during the race. You’ll get
tired more quickly, of course, but this is how cool our body is. We naturally
activate a “boost mode” and improve our performance when needed. Then
we calm down and start saving up for the next one.
When you meditate, you try to either focus on a single thought (convergent
meditation) or you open your mind to any thought (divergent meditation).
In both modes you are calmly focusing on something, never blocking other
things. The mere attempt to block other thoughts is already thinking about
them, so it won’t really work.

The real fun in life is in the process of doing things, not in the
final results.

It may be funny to think about, but the losers of a race are often thinking
more about winning than the actual winners. This is because the winners are
busy with other things. They’re thinking about driving, they’re thinking
about improving, and most of them are enjoying the moment. Of course, it’s
not always like that, but the general lesson from this is that if you enjoy the
process of improving, pursuing the limit, and driving, your performance
tends to improve. When you enjoy the process of learning, that becomes
part of your routine, and you don’t want it to end. If you win a race and get
too comfortable, you’ll end up improving less quickly afterwards.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should not celebrate victories or
take your time to relax and recharge. But as soon as you get back to
preparing for the next race, go back to being 100% focused on improving
even further. Don’t let past victories make you comfortable; try to make
them motivate you even more. The victory is in the preparation. And the
preparation must be lived in totality. Be present and focused during practice
just as much as you would be in a race for the title of a championship. That
race will be a result of how well you prepared throughout the year.

Chasing Discomfort
When working out or practicing hard, athletes often need to deal with
discomfort, physical or mental. It’s just the way it is. Chasing discomfort
requires a high amount of energy and motivation that is not always going to
be there.
Waking up early and taking a cold shower is famously effective as a small
reminder that we actually feel better after discomfort, yet we fight back
against doing it again the next morning. The physical discomfort of the cold
water generates some energy and wakes us up, but it doesn’t end there. It
also serves as a reference for our mental discomfort and prepares us to deal
with other forms of stress.
You must enjoy stress. Enjoy working out, enjoy running against your
limits, and enjoy being outside of your comfort zone. Enjoy being moved
into action and moving others. Being a racecar driver may require less
physical preparation than some other sports, but you still need to be at your
best form to perform better. Physical and mental performance are always
tied together.
To wrap up the ego chapter, I just want to emphasize that this is a very
superficial introduction to the domain. There are full books with hundreds
of pages about general peak performance that go much more in depth that
you should read. I strongly recommend The Art of The Impossible by
Steven Kotler. The author spent his entire life following high-performance
athletes from many domains, studying the psychology and neurology
behind peak performance in detail. By reading his book, you’ll learn what
he spent at least 15 years developing and researching.
Fitness: Mind and Body on the Limit
A healthy mind needs a healthy body. Michael Schumacher, former German
Formula 1 driver, was one of the first drivers to exploit this concept to the
extreme. To him, “fitness equals lap time.” By becoming an incredibly fit
driver, he found he could maintain his focus for longer while also keeping
his energy up during long races.
There are no downsides to exercising. Working out is one of the few things
in life you’ll never regret doing. Among its numerous benefits, racing
drivers should note an improvement in focus quality and duration.
By realizing that there is this intense connection between mind and body, a
determined racing driver will make an effort to keep both sharp. To harvest
the best mental benefits from working out, focus on high-intensity sports
that will increase your heart rate. Cardio exercises like running, swimming,
or cycling are going to give you more benefits in racing than weightlifting,
for example. Enduring through tiredness is what will give you the edge.
Keeping up with a healthy exercise routine will spill over to your other
habits, like what you eat or how you sleep. You’ll see that you need to sleep
better and eat better to keep up with the energy and motivation to exercise,
and the exercise will help keep you motivated to sleep better and eat better.
It’s the best vicious circle in life.

Small Changes: You +1%

Driving technique improves incrementally. As beginners, we improve by
gaining big chunks of lap time. Since we’re still learning the basics, we end
up gaining full seconds in single sessions. As we progress, we start seeing
diminished returns, and the gains in terms of lap time are progressively
smaller, down to just a few tenths in a whole day. Still, we can make huge
gains over time if we are patient and focused on the progress, the learning,
and the discomfort, as a routine.
As beginners, our lap times can improve drastically since we’re still far
from the limit. The closer to perfection we get, the more diminished returns
we’ll see. Although true perfection is unreachable, the best racing driver is
the one who is closest to it.
The racing driver’s worst nightmare is the plateau. This happens when we
reach a point in technique where we fail to improve further, whether that is
because we try the same thing expecting different results, because we don’t
know what else to try, or because we have developed bad habits.

No matter the cause, plateauing means you have stopped improving. The
only way out is to learn something new, look for new information, and/or
ask for someone to watch your driving so you can find ways to improve
your lap times again.
Consider a track with 10 corners. If you manage to find 0.05s in each
corner, that adds up to half a second per lap, which in some series might be
the difference between P1 and P20.
Even for beginners, understanding a technique and feeling it just right, in a
way that gives you a slight advantage in lap times, is a victory. Don’t expect
to improve magically. The best gains are a combination of thousands of
micro-gains over the course of hours and hours of practice. Be patient.

Testing New Techniques

When learning a new technique, allow yourself to exaggerate its application
in a way that lets you clearly feel the reaction of the car and what you are
doing different. This approach will make you slower initially, as you will be
focusing on the big difference in car behavior, which will put everything
else out of place.
Racecar driving always involves many different techniques and inputs in
combination, simultaneously. When you experiment with something
different while trail braking, for example, other inputs might need to be
adjusted to accommodate the new technique. Because of this, the first
moments of learning something new might even feel wrong – as if it’s not
the right move. But after some time and polishing, everything comes back
into place and the real results start showing up, whether good or bad. To
make sure you are really testing a new technique properly, you need to
make sure that:

You are feeling the difference in your own inputs and feeling a
different reaction from the car.

This is where exaggerating the inputs at first helps. If it’s too subtle, the
difference is not clear enough. After a bit, you can start backing off to a
more subtle change, always paying attention to the reaction of the car.
 You are testing it long enough to allow your other inputs to adjust
to the change.

Most changes will feel wrong at first. Some will stay wrong, which means
they didn’t work, but some will start making sense, allowing you to extract
better results. Take your time.
 MODULE I

BEFORE THE CORNER

 1

VISION

V ision is the most underrated skill you’ll work on, but the one that will
make absolutely everything else more doable. It’s the most important
chunk of information you’ll give to your brain to process before
making decisions.
With bad vision, you will:

Lose braking precision,

Get completely lost when battling for position, especially if you are
on the inside towards the next corner, off the racing line,
Have too much variance in your turn-in points, generally turning in
too late, and upon noticing that it’s too late, turning in too quickly
and unsettling the car, and
Spend a lot of energy inefficiently, increasing anxiety and stress,
and getting tired very early.

With good vision, you will:

 Make decisions in advance, generally half a second to one second
before the actual inputs,
Open up your effective field of view, absorbing a lot more
information like bumps, curbs, dirt, elevation changes, trackside
objects like trees, and everything else that can add to your
complete mastery of the track,
Make better decisions when battling for position, especially when
off line, since you’ll have enough time to make alternate plans
based on the opponent’s moves,
Be incredibly more consistent, and
Be more confident, have more fun, experience less stress, and
enjoy your life.

I’m not kidding. Vision is incredibly useful, and you need to train your eyes
to be efficient in gathering information that you’ll use while driving.

Vision can be divided into two types:

Planning Vision
Planning vision is the popular “look ahead” technique that you will
probably hear often. The advice generally stops there: look forward and
you’ll have more information for your brain to digest and everything will
naturally become easier.
There’s more to it, though. You don’t want to look too far ahead. You
should look no more than one second ahead of the car. It’s useless to be
looking at the end of a hill way up ahead on the track if you are still setting
up the line far before that. So, look further, but not too far. The visual
information coming in must be useful.
Planning vision is not enough, though. Things don’t always go as planned
and we have to make adjustments all the time based on where the car is at
that moment, which leads to the second type of vision.
Assessment Vision
Assessment vision is a quick look to check where your car is located – a
quick glimpse right in front of your bumper to see where the car is. Are you
on top of the curb like you wanted? Is the inside tire on the white line where
there’s a little bit more camber that gives you more rotation?
This doesn’t take too much time. All you need is a tenth of a second to
check, then return to planning vision.
You want to plan, then check, then plan, then check. I do this several times
in a single sector, with my eyes going back and forth between planning and
assessing, to make sure I’m keeping the car on the right line. This is
incredibly important in compound corners, where a little change on the exit
of one corner will mean a big change on the entry of the next one!
What about blind corners? Well, it’s useless to look forward and plan what
you can’t see. In those cases, you’ll look as far as you can see; in some
instances, you’ll have to look at the entry curb until the last moment and use
assessment vision a lot more before turning into the corner. You’ll use the
positioning and angle of the car in relation to the curb you are on and use it
to time your turn-in. When checking whether it worked, you’ll make further
adjustments on the next lap. Just don’t try to look further when there’s
nothing to look at.
Train your eyes. Think about these two concepts while driving. It’s going to
be uncomfortable at first, but then your subconscious will learn the pattern
and do it for you. Although it looks easy, as soon as you go back to
autopilot mode and start trying to go fast, your bad habit of looking too
closely ahead of the car will come back right away. That’s why you need to
actively think about vision (and nothing else!) for a few laps or sessions to
be able to improve your technique to a point where you don’t have to think
about it anymore.
 2

WHAT IS THE BRAKING CAPABILITY OF THE

CAR?

T o safely find the limit around the racetrack, we need to know not only
how much the car can rotate at different speeds, but also how quickly
the car can decelerate to those speeds. In this chapter, we'll discuss the
braking capability of the car in a straight line, removing turning from the
equation to analyze the braking dynamics of a racecar more closely.
It is very common to excessively focus on corners and not optimize the
braking phase, leaving a lot of grip on the table. The reason is the method
we use to find speed. The most common method for racing drivers is to try
braking later first, and then trying to deal with that situation by adding more
brakes and trying to keep the car on track. This can be dangerous, since
they may end up over the limit, and as soon as they start locking the brakes
or using ABS and finding the limit, the chances of going off the track or
crashing increase drastically. Then, after having some scary moments, they
again become afraid of braking later, and their braking efficiency is harmed.
But we don't need to take extremely high risks to reach maximum braking
efficiency. We don't need to brake late first and then try our luck to keep the
car on track.
Instead, what we can do is brake at the same safe reference, but harder. This
way, we won’t be panicking about whether the car will stop, leaving us with
more mental energy to analyze and feel the braking performance. Fear
blocks learning. After feeling that the car can stop more and getting close
to the longitudinal limit of the grip, we can start braking later. This is
especially important in real life, for obvious reasons, but in the simulator,
you'll find the limit of the car much more quickly, decreasing the time it
takes to get up to pace. Crashing on the simulator doesn't harm you
physically, but going back to the pits and re-starting all the time totally kills
the flow of the practice. In other words, we want to find the limit of braking
first, in a safe environment/situation (braking quite early), and then we can
start moving the braking references further.
Racecars rely on the contact patch between the tires and the track to move
around. The higher the force between the tires and the track, the more grip
is available to alter the state of the car. If an identical copy of a racetrack
was on the moon, the same car with the same tires would have a lot less
grip, since the weaker gravity wouldn't be able to pull the car as much,
decreasing cornering, braking, and accelerating capabilities. We'll divide the
available grip into two types.

Mechanical Grip
Mechanical grip is purely the weight of the car being thrown around the
track. On a flat surface, it remains pretty consistent. On tracks with
elevation changes or alterations in camber, the mechanical grip is going to
be dramatically affected.

Aerodynamic Grip
When at high speeds, air collides with the car, interacting with the body in
many ways, depending on its characteristics. It can create lift (like an
airplane), drag (slowing down the car), or downforce (sucking the car onto
the track). A lot of downforce is created on a high-performance racecar,
pushing it down and strengthening its interaction with the track. What's
amazing about downforce is that the car has a lot more contact with the
track, as if it was more massive, but without the inertia that would come
with actual extra weight, maintaining its agility. A 1000kg car with 1000kg
of downforce produces the equivalent compression at the tire contact patch
as 2000kg. When turning, braking, or accelerating, the inertia only applies
to the actual mass of the car, 1000kg. If you get a car that has more
downforce than its own weight, it would theoretically be able to drive
upside down in a tunnel without falling. Don’t try this at home, of course.
 3

BRAKING FROM A STRAIGHT LINE TO A FULL

STOP

O n public roads, we brake smoothly and progressively. The reason is

safety and convenience. By squeezing the brakes very slowly, your
car doesn't suddenly stop, and you maintain predictability around
other cars. Also, you don't want to launch your stuff forward and spill your
coffee everywhere.
In high-performance driving, we need to completely invert this approach,
and focus solely on stopping the car as quickly as possible, going
immediately to the limit of the grip. If we were to do an exercise trying to
go from top speed to a complete stop, this is how the telemetry graph of
pressure versus speed would look in a racecar compared to regular urban
driving.
In the example above, you can see that the peak (or highest) pressure is also
the terminal pressure (final braking pressure where the car comes to a full
stop without locking). This means we could maintain that same braking
force until the car comes to a full stop, without locking the tires. This would
be the graph of a low downforce racecar, where the influence of the air
colliding with it is low, and where we rely on a consistent mechanical grip.
These examples are on a flat track with no elevation changes.

Low Downforce vs High Downforce Under Braking

In cars that benefit heavily from downforce, like a winged open wheel car,
the amount of braking capability increases with speed. At higher speeds,
you can brake harder without locking, but your speed will quickly drop, and
you will need to decrease your braking force accordingly to prevent locking
later in the braking zone. The higher the downforce, the greater the
difference between the peak pressure and the terminal pressure.
Some cars with extreme downforce can have dramatically different peak to
terminal pressures – all the way to double the braking pressure at top speeds
in comparison to when coming close to a full stop.

In high downforce cars, it is more difficult to find that perfect braking

efficiency on a straight line since it is a moving target. Also, releasing the
brakes slowly requires more muscular precision, which takes time to
develop (but not that much if worked on correctly). We will discuss the
Press Less Technique in the following chapter. Because of this extra
challenge, it is very common to release the brakes too much after the initial
pressure, bringing the terminal pressure under the limit of grip. Even during
a top speed to full stop exercise, the majority of my students release their
brakes more than necessary in their first attempts (which is normal for
beginners and students!)

Another common mistake includes initially braking under the limit, but then
not releasing that pressure enough as speeds decrease, locking up the tires
towards the final braking part.

Note that high downforce adds grip to braking. Because we’re looking at
graphs, we may have the impression that we brake less at lower speeds in a
high downforce car. The truth is that we brake more than low downforce
cars at high speeds, and then we come closer to low downforce pressures at
low speeds.
 4

PRESS LESS TECHNIQUE

O ne of the trickiest techniques to develop in motorsports is proper

brake release. Initially, with less muscular precision and sensitivity,
we tend to brake hard and then quickly release the pressure as we
turn into the corner. Even when we try to release more slowly, we don’t
have enough control in our feet.
There are two big reasons we don’t have this control right away. First, we
haven’t yet developed that muscular sensitivity. It’s a matter of practice and
getting used to feeling it. The second reason is that most drivers actively
think about releasing the brakes, trying to “lift” their foot. We have two
groups of muscles in our legs and feet. The first group works together to
press the foot against the pedal. Let’s call them the “down” group. The
second group of muscles lift the foot. Let’s call those the “up” group.
Now you might think: “Okay, so what I need to do is control the up group
so the brakes can be released more slowly!” This is wrong. The solution is
to never use the up group in the first place! The brake pedal has its own
resistance against being pressed. If you stop pressing it, it will return to its
original position on its own. This means we can do 100% of the braking
technique using only the down muscles. We press the brake pedal hard, it
goes to 100% braking, and then we press less. But we’re still pressing. It
will go down to 90%. Press even less, it will go down to 80%.
The Press Less Technique gives you more precise control of brake release –
if practiced correctly and consciously. On the simulator, try the Press Less
Technique by braking to 100%, and then by using the same muscles, release
it to 99, 98, 97, 96, etc., and feel those muscles relaxing ever so slightly.
When you get used to releasing the brakes at a ridiculously slow rate, start
releasing them a little more quickly. If you can release the brakes smoothly
using this technique, increasing the release speed afterwards is easy. The
most difficult part is training your muscles to gain the precision of slow
release.
This technique allows you to have full control of brake release. You will
then have to worry about deciding what to do with the braking, instead of
wondering if you are able to do it.
If you make too many adjustments under braking, you’ll never really know
whether your braking reference is good. It’s better to over slow the car by
under braking to clearly feel that your reference is too early, allowing you
to make more efficient adjustments and find the limit faster.
 5

COMPRESSIONS, CRESTS, AND BUMPS

A ll of the braking examples in the previous chapters are valid for flat
surfaces. Changes in elevation will increase or decrease the amount
of traction available for braking, and consequently affect the optimal
pressures. During a compression, the car gains grip, and the threshold
braking pressure is higher.

Over a crest, the track starts "falling" away from the car, and the tires have
much less contact to it, decreasing the threshold braking limit.
The same braking zone may have both forms of elevation change, making
the brake telemetry trace look less common, with ups and downs that you
will not find in flat braking zones. Along with Turn 1 at Circuit of the
Americas, the braking zone into Corkscrew at Laguna Seca is a great
example, as you brake uphill, then immediately run over a crest, and finally
go downhill but at a fixed angle.
The braking zone to the Corkscrew is a blind right-hander kink. This tricky
corner invites you to lock up the right tires, since it forces you to turn
slightly to the right at the same time as it offers little mechanical grip.

Right after the small right kink, the crest ends, and now we find ourselves
going downhill but on a rather flat surface, which offers more grip than the
previous crest. This allows us to increase our braking pressure slightly
before turning downhill left-right. The resulting brake trace follows:
The same effect would happen on a high downforce car, but with slightly
more pressure in braking at higher speeds due to extra braking grip at those
higher speeds.

Braking track of a high downforce car (red) versus low

downforce car (purple).

Be aware of changes in track surface or patches, visible through cracks or

different colors on the asphalt. These changes are generally bumps that
could make you immediately lock up the tires if you are braking too hard
right on top of them. Braking should be an active input, and you should be
constantly adjusting the input based on track conditions to stay on the right
limit: not under, not over.
 6

INITIAL PRESSURE TO PEAK PRESSURE AND

BRAKING REFERENCES

U nlike urban driving, in motorsports we want to reach peak braking

pressure as quickly as possible. But we don’t want to overdo it. We
don’t want to “kick” the brakes from a distance with our feet. We
want to squeeze the brakes by slightly touching the brake pedal’s surface
before applying pressure. This gives us much more control over the peak
pressure. A good braking technique should allow us to brake at extremely
similar pressures lap after lap. If you need to brake at 85% in a corner, you
better brake at exactly 85% every lap! This is much more difficult to
achieve by kicking the brakes.
At super high speeds, the distance between the very beginning of the brake
application and the peak pressure is always much further than you think. By
watching replays and reviewing telemetry, you can see how the car moves
tens of meters in between initial application and peak pressure. If you are
applying the brakes too slowly, this value can go up to 50m or so. There are
two problems with this.
Let’s say you are braking at the 150m mark. What are you using that
reference for? If you are using it for initial brake application and you are
braking too slowly, then you might be only reaching peak pressure around
the 100m mark. If you are using it for the peak pressure, then your braking
might actually start at the 200m mark. When you take too long between
initial brake application and peak pressure, your braking references become
less reliable and less precise. This makes it difficult to carry the exact same
speed into the corner lap after lap, which will hinder your confidence.
The second problem is that if you are not conscious about how slowly you
are braking, that distance (initial to peak pressure) will never be the exact
same. Sometimes you will do it over 50m, sometimes over 40m, or
sometimes over 30m. This makes the car decelerate at a different rate every
lap, which kills your consistency.

In practice, try to make sure you are using visual references for the peak
pressure or for the initial braking. You can do both at the same track, in
different corners. Sometimes a braking reference is great for initial
application, but others will be better for peak pressure, depending on where
they’re placed.
High downforce, light, and stiff cars will accept a faster brake application.
You should still squeeze the brakes (touching the pedal before application),
but you can apply the brakes quickly, as long as you can still reach
consistent peak pressures.
Low downforce, heavy, and soft suspension cars might benefit from a
slightly slower brake application. By slower I don’t mean 50m between
initial application and peak pressure. Blinking takes around 150
milliseconds. Think about it as one blink of an eye for formula cars until
you reach peak pressure and two blinks for low downforce and soft cars.
Even though it’s double the time, it should still be quite fast and determined
in any car.
 7

LIGHT HANDS UNDER BRAKING

P eak braking performance is achieved in a straight line. If you are

turning into a corner, you can’t keep braking at maximum pressure,
since that would lock up the tires, activate ABS, and make the car
unstable and unresponsive. But are you really in a straight line under
braking?
The self-centering nature of the steering wheel helps keep the car straight
when there is no force acting on the wheel from the driver. If the driver is
“death gripping” the steering wheel under braking, the steering might be a
few degrees to the right or left, which may considerably decrease the
braking performance.
Optimal braking performance happens when the car is laterally balanced:
50% of the weight is on the right side, and 50% is on the left side. In bumpy
braking zones, the car might want to adapt to the slight irregularities.
Relaxing your hands under heavy braking will allow the steering to adapt to
these irregularities almost automatically. If you grip the wheel too hard and
try to artificially hold it straight, the car won’t adapt to the bumps and might
not be balanced laterally anymore. Even being balanced 49% to the left and
51% to the right means you can no longer brake at maximum performance.
From the very beginning of hard braking until the beginning of turn-in, your
hands should be relaxed. When starting to turn-in, they should not start
acting quickly either. You want to add steering angle slowly and
progressively, adding more and more force to the steering towards mid-
corner. We’ll talk about the difference between some steering concepts like
steering grip, steering force, and steering angle later in this book.
Practice relaxing your hands every time you start braking hard. Create this
association in your brain: brake hard, light hands. They should happen at
the exact same time. If you were already in a straight line, your hands
should already be relaxed. If you were coming from a corner into some
braking, this technique will help even more. If you keep turning the same
amount and start braking, you’ll immediately lock up the tires or lose the
balance of the car. Remember that you have a limited amount of traction
available for turning and braking, so 100% braking means 0% turning, 50%
braking means only 50% turning, and so on.
 8

INTERFERENCE BETWEEN ENGINE BRAKING

AND BRAKING

W hen applying brakes in a straight line, the tires receive a percentage

of the braking force, divided between the fronts and the rears. This
can be altered by the brake bias adjustment, when available in the
car.
The brake bias can determine, for example, that 55% of the braking
pressure will go to the front tires and 45% to the rears, or 56/44, 60/40, etc.
If the brake bias is 100%, braking very hard over the limit would make the
front tires lock completely and the rear tires still roll freely. If the brake bias
is 0%, braking very hard over the limit would make the rear tires lock
immediately and the car spin right away.
In a hypothetical situation where we’re braking from high speeds in neutral
gear (no effect from engine braking in the rear tires), brake bias remains
constant throughout the entire braking zone.
However, engine braking will always factor in, as we won’t clutch in when
braking or put the gear into neutral every time we brake into a corner. We
then need to understand the behavior of engine braking to understand the
braking performance of a car. This will affect the braking both under
braking and while turning. Learn to control the engine braking of the car by
timing the downshifts to gain extra balance control at all stages of the
corner.
Engine braking works like light braking on the driven tires only. If the car is
front-wheel drive, then engine braking will affect the front tires. If the car is
rear-wheel drive, engine braking will affect the rear tires. All-wheel drive
cars will have a neutral effect since the engine braking will be applied to all
four wheels. The majority of racecars are rear-wheel drive, so in this
chapter we’ll talk about this type of engine braking. When you release the
throttle, the engine starts sucking energy from the tires instead of giving
energy to them. The higher the RPM (revolutions per minute), the higher
the engine braking effect. This “light rear braking” will add to the actual
braking of the car, affecting its final brake bias.
If the car has 50/50 brake bias, the extra engine braking might make the
final braking bias (braking + engine braking) somewhere around 47% at the
fronts and 53% at the rears, for example. If you downshift less aggressively,
meaning you downshift later into the braking zone, allowing the RPM to
decrease a little bit more, there will be less engine braking, and the final
braking bias might be somewhere around 48% at the fronts and 52% at the
rears. In the end, what you have is a dynamic final braking bias that you
can adjust from corner to corner by adjusting the timing of your downshifts.

Some cars will benefit from downshifting very aggressively (be careful not
to blow up your engine if you downshift too fast and bring your RPM too
high!), as you can make the car rotate slightly more if the car tends to
understeer, for example. But if the car already oversteers, it might be better
to be more patient and downshift later to prevent excessive engine braking
and even more oversteer.
In front-wheel drive cars, the engine braking happens on the front tires,
adding extra stress to them. That means the effects of engine braking are
inverted in FWD cars, so downshifting more quickly will make the car less
prone to oversteer, while downshifting more slowly will make the car rotate
more.
The biggest mistake regarding downshifts is not being aware of their timing
and rhythm. A slight difference in how quickly you downshift in the same
corner on different laps might make the car behave differently, which will
cause inconsistency and unpredictability. Consciously analyzing the speed
and rhythm of downshifting will allow you to fine-tune the balance of the
car at every single corner.
MODULE II

INTO THE CORNER

 1

IMPORTANCE OF INITIAL CONDITIONS IN A

CORNER

T he key to mastering motorsports is in being able to manage entry and

braking. Whenever there is a small change to the entry positioning of
the car, the rest of the corner will be affected. Even when there is no
braking involved at all, the turn-in point of fast corners still pretty much
determines the outcome of the corner.

Entry is cause, exit is consequence.

Let’s say we’re about to do a tight 90-degree corner on a street circuit

surrounded by concrete walls. The amount of control a driver has on entry
right before braking is 100% (if there is a straight before that corner). The
driver can choose where to position the car right before decelerating, and
how late to brake. They can safely position the car as close to the walls as
possible without too much risk.
As soon as the driver starts braking, the amount of control decreases
drastically. Now the car is on the limit, and positioning the car laterally is
not possible anymore (unless you decide to not be on the limit under
braking), except to turn into the corner and commit to a line. The driver
might be able to increase rotation and decrease the radius of the line or
decrease rotation and open up the line if they turn in too early or are
oversteering, but that’s it. As soon as you commit to a line and braking
reference, the amount of control is limited. At this point, being as close as
possible to the apex wall is a little trickier, as you have a lot less room for
error and a much smaller range of possible lines. This stage depends
entirely on the initial braking point and line.
As soon as the driver starts accelerating out of the corner, the number of
corrections possible while committing to throttle are also very limited. I call
corner exits a “consequence” since you are pretty much along for the ride
through the exit based on how you dealt with the corner in the earlier
phases. If you get back on power too late and the car is slow, you might
rotate the car more than necessary and you will not use the whole track on
exit. If you get back on power too soon or with the car pointing too much to
the outside, you won’t be able to stay on track without lifting the throttle,
which will also slow you down. This means that for a good exit, you have
to thread the needle on entry and mid-corner to position the car perfectly,
and then harvest that line. This stage is the one where we have the least
amount of control, and it is where most drivers will hit the wall on exit.
This brings us back to the initial conditions of a corner. The initial
conditions is the most important phase in pretty much all corners. Changing
the car’s positioning or angle (discussed in more detail in a subsequent
chapter) even a little will affect the entirety of the corner. If the driver is
unaware of these small differences, the car might behave differently every
lap, causing inconsistency and unpredictability. If the line on entry is not on
the limit, for example, the driver will rotate the car less before the apex,
meaning the exit line will see the car pointed a few degrees to the wall on
the exit, which drastically impairs the exit speed since the driver will have
to make a small correction on the throttle to not hit the wall. If the driver
turns in a little too late, they’ll instinctively look for more rotation so as not
to miss the apex, which could cause oversteer. That instinct is so subtle that
the driver won’t understand why the car lost the rear on this lap but might
not have on the previous one. Having a different line on entry each lap but
expecting the car to be in the exact same place at the apex is a big source of
frustration among drivers, since the balance of the car will vary depending
on the initial conditions of the corner.
 2

THE STAGES OF A CORNER

I f you have researched or studied the stages of a corner on the internet,

you might have found a few explanations that describe numerous or
complicated steps for a single corner. I’ve found some advice that
divides a corner into as many as six or seven steps. I believe that these
approaches are next to impossible to apply while driving. There’s no way
you’ll be able to think about seven different things in just a few seconds.
With an understanding that the human brain can only consider so much
before becoming confused, I have come up with a much simpler division
that encompasses the most important car handling concepts we’ll work on
in this book.
The cornering stages can be divided into four, distinguishing that the hard
braking zones are a separate step. Hard braking zones in a straight line
happen before early entry. That means the first stage described in the image
below already involves some degree of turning. Remember that this
division is applicable for corners where braking is involved. Cornering
while only lifting or keeping the throttle flat should have a different
approach and will be discussed later.
Let’s discuss each stage.

Early Entry
Early entry is where the initial transition from peak braking should start.
This is where the first degrees of steering angle show up and the weight
transfer starts shifting backwards (due to brake release) and outwards (due
to steering).
One of the most common mistakes at this stage is initially turning the
steering wheel too much or too quickly. We want to slowly transition the
brake release to the steering input. If we do it too quickly, the buildup of
rotation towards the apex will be unstable and peak lateral grip won’t be
reached. In simpler words, trying to reach too much rotation that early in
the corner will cause the car to either understeer or oversteer, and you’ll
spend the rest of the corner trying to fix the problem instead of going fast.
The totality of the corner should encompass one big motion – one big
buildup of rotation that will peak at the apex before we launch the car out of
the corner.
It should be noted that one of the key characteristics of this phase is the
tendency for the car to oversteer due to heavy weight on the front tires from
the initial trail braking phase, as well as higher RPM and heavy engine
braking effects (if the car is rear-wheel drive).

Late Entry
The second quarter of the corner is the final build up to peak rotation 1
before we launch the car out to the exit. Here, we should be committed to
getting as much rotation as possible and testing the grip limits when
learning a new car/track combo. The speeds, RPM, and the braking
pressures are lower, so the car tends to oversteer a lot less than in the
previous phase. Each degree of rotation that happens here is one less that
will need to happen on exit. The safety of a corner’s exit is directly
correlated to the amount of rotation we achieve at this stage. The more we
rotate on late entry, the better and safer our two final phases will be. This
stage is all about getting as much lateral grip for rotation as possible.
The most dangerous and common mistake in this phase is to hesitate when
it comes to turning and rotating the car. Failing to rotate the car in this
phase is the main cause of exit spins and crashes, both in the simulator and
in real life.
The late entry is the final build up to what I call the Maximum Rotation
Point (MRP), a key concept we will discuss in depth throughout this unit.
Reaching peak rotation in the late entry phase depends largely on the
previous phases, like braking and early entry. If your line is correct, you
should be able to commit to rotating the car as much as possible without
hitting the inside limits of the track too early.

Early Exit
Early exit starts at peak rotation (or the Maximum Rotation Point). This is
when we start accelerating. Ideally, at least 50% of the rotation should
already be done and the rotation should start decreasing as the car gains
speed out of the corner. This is a very important thing to remember. No
rotation should be gained at this point. Rotation and speed are always
inversely proportional, and trying to gain rotation after accelerating will
cause the car to go over the limit and oversteer or understeer. If this doesn’t
happen when you gain both speed and rotation at the same time, that means
you were under the limit between late entry and early exit.
The most common mistake at the early exit phase is to unwind the steering
wheel too much, likely due to fear of losing the rear on power or hesitating
when it comes to getting as much rotation as possible. This causes you to
rotate below the limit at a lower speed. Then, when you realize you need
some extra rotation at the late exit phase, the car is now too fast to handle it.
Hesitation on early exit is also one of the most common causes of spins and
crashes on the late exit phase.

Late Exit
Late exit is the stage where we have the least amount of control of the
racecar. Everything that we’ve done in the earlier phases (braking, early
entry, late entry, early exit) will determine where we’ll find ourselves in this
phase.
Exits are consequences. They rely on what happened on entry. The speeds
are higher, the rotation should be decreasing, and we should reach peak
acceleration, allowing the car to drift wide to the edge of the track on the
limit.
These stages will be referred to throughout the book when describing
various concepts.

1 By rotation, I mean yaw rate, or degrees of turning per second.

 3

ENTRY SPEED

T he speed on turn-in is one of the most important factors for

consistency and predictability in racing. Carrying different speeds
into the corner is one of the biggest sources of inconsistency in
racing, and the biggest enemy of your confidence. If you can’t carry the
exact same speed into a corner, the car will behave differently each lap,
making you scared of driving on the limit.
Having a precise braking reference is the most common tool for consistent
speeds on entry. But that alone is not enough. If you brake in the same exact
place, but with varied pressure, you’ll still carry inconsistent speeds lap
after lap.
The second most common tool is to choose a specific gear to decelerate the
car to more specific speeds for each corner. This helps a lot, especially if
you are still learning the track.
When you want even more consistency, my advice is to not only choose a
gear, but to also note how high the RPM are in that gear. For example, third
gear might be great for two corners, but if one is slightly faster than the
other, you can listen carefully to the engine and try to carry higher RPM
into the faster one. This works because you can use the engine sound as a
reference for how much speed you are carrying with more precision.
Remember that this will always operate in conjunction with your other
inputs. Braking references and braking pressure must still be very precise
and consistent so you can reach your gear and RPM goals. These tools
combined will allow you to expect similar behaviors lap after lap. When
downshifting in a similar way every time, you’ll also have similar engine
braking behavior, which affects the rotation of the car a lot more than we
expect. We’ll discuss the Three Tools for Rotation later in this book.
 4

POSITIONING AND ANGLE

C onsidering the positioning and angle of the car might seem simple
and obvious, but the problem with racing is we try to do too many
simple and obvious things at the same time. We will feel that we
already know something – that it seems so easy, but I want you to stop and
ask yourself one thing: are you really extracting absolutely every factor to
the extreme?
Positioning and angle are concepts I developed when coaching beginners,
but after a while I noticed it made sense to explain these concept to
advanced drivers as well so they could bring these “simple and obvious”
things into their consciousness.
After some experimenting in coaching, I found it incredibly useful to
analyze lines in the initial conditions of a corner, sometimes helping drivers
find up to a tenth of a second in just one corner. As with every technique we
learn, we’ll approach these ideas in an exaggerated way and then reduce
them to their specifics.

Positioning
Positioning is where the car is placed laterally on the track. You can be on
the left of the track, in the middle, or on the right (and everywhere in
between). In this case, the outside of the track is preferred for entry
positioning, but there are exceptions. If you can do a corner with ease, for
example, you don’t need to go all the way to the outside on entry, since that
would make you drive a longer distance and lose time.
Think about positioning at the beginning of any arc. It’s useful to think
about your position not only right before braking, but also at any change of
direction in compound corners since they’ll determine the proceeding arc.

Angle
Angle is where the car is pointed. You can be pointing outwards (1),
inwards (3), or parallel to the track (2). If you are already positioned on the
outside white line, for example, you must be parallel to the track as soon as
you start braking to maximize track usage (if it’s a hard braking zone).
The angle is mostly going to be important in corners that are close to others.
Belle Isle at Detroit offers a good example.

Detroit, Belle Isle, Turns 5 and 6

The most common mistake in this corner is to “relax” in between the left
hander and the right hander (blue line). This affects your entry positioning
and angle for the second corner, hurting the lap times. When corners are
close to one another, make sure you are optimizing them as quickly as
possible to not leave lap time on the table!
In any 90-degree corner (image below), for example, if the car is
completely parallel to the entry, the car will only need to turn 90 degrees.

If the car is pointing to the outside, even by three degrees, the entire corner
is now 90 + 3 = 93 degrees (orange line below). This means the positioning
and angle the driver chooses at the beginning of a corner might make the
corner more difficult and longer than it needs to be.
Bringing these concepts to the surface allows you to test more deliberately
and make more subtle adjustments that will bring consistency to your
driving. Of course, this is just a baseline concept, and there are some
exceptions. In some corners, it might be better to start braking with the car
pointing slightly outwards.
Think about Les Combes, at Spa. Depending on the simulator, car, track
surface, conditions, etc., it might be better to use the curb on the left to open
up (improve your positioning by making it even wider) for the corner.
However, that curb starts pretty late in the braking zone, so we can’t use it
if we’re starting to brake parallel to the white line. This is, of course, in case
it is worth adding an extra few degrees to the corner for the sake of gaining
more track usage (better positioning, but worse angle), and in case the curb
provides good grip. You can know if these adjustments are worth it mostly
by trial and error, especially when the differences are subtle.

Spa-Francorchamps, Les Combes corners.

In this case, we start braking with the car a bit further from the white line,
but pointing diagonally outwards to eventually use the whole curb when it
starts. In this example, we benefit from better positioning (car is using more
of the track on entry) but we sacrifice the angle a little bit (car is pointing a
few degrees to the outside at the beginning of braking). For some cars, that
sacrifice will be worth it; for other cars, it won’t.
You can measure and think about position and angle anywhere, but the three
most important points are the breaking point, the turn-in point, and any
changes of direction.

Braking Points
If you are braking on the limit for a big deceleration, the best line is a
straight one. If you turn even a little while braking, you’ll shift the balance
laterally away from the ideal 50/50, and you’ll lose braking performance.
Having light hands under braking can help make sure that your car is
perfectly straight and adapts to small imperfections on the road. Braking on
the limit will lock you in a straight line, making you unable to change your
direction too much. Turning just a few degrees under heavy braking
decreases the ideal pressure by a considerable amount and will cause
locking or ABS. It’s best to think about the positioning and angle at the very
moment you start braking. In places where it’s impossible to brake in a
straight line, measure how much you need to steer to be able to turn and not
hurt the braking performance too much.

Turn-in Point
If you are braking hard in a straight line, your positioning and angle at the
braking point will also determine where your car will be by the time you
start turning in. When there is turning involved before the turn-in, either
because there is no braking before the corner or because there is some
braking with turning combined, pay attention and measure precisely where
you are placing your car at the turn-in point. A slight change in turn-in
positioning and angle will carry through the entirety of the corner! This
means that if you have three compound corners one after the other, one
small change in the initial positioning and angle will also affect the next
two corners. Most of the time this will cause a snowball effect, where the
difference in car placement will be even bigger for the second and third
corners. Remember, the initial setup of a corner is the most important stage
and will drastically affect the rest of the corner.

Changes of Direction
When driving through chicanes or compound corners with changes of
direction, the moment you make the change will give you two things to
consider, both of which have aspects that will be discussed further in
subsequent chapters.
First, your turns will depend heavily on your turn-in positioning and angle.
If you want to consistently change direction at the same place with the same
angle, you’ll have to turn the car in at the exact same reference you set for
the entry every lap. Also, remember that the speed you carry into the corner
will affect the radius of the arc you’ll be able to build.
Second, the positioning and angle of the change of direction will affect the
next corner and the car needs to be placed consciously so you always get
the same exit.
Suzuka Esses
 5

CHECKPOINTS

A s we progress in our racing technique development, positioning and

angle can become natural very quickly, especially in single corners
coming from a straight. But compound corners or corners that are
very close to one another can steal your attention and trick you into driving
the wrong line when your timing matters most.

Virginia International Raceway, Turns 2 and 3

Blue is the line that many drivers take by trying to apex the first corner, and
then realizing they are too close to the inside, try to correct the line (purple)
before the next left hander.
Checkpoints are places where the positioning and angle will determine the
outcome of the next corner. Think of connecting points between corners
that you need to hit if you want to maximize your racing line (we’ll talk
about deceiving corners later). In the example above, the beginning of the
braking towards Turn 3 is the most important moment of this sector, so
that’s our checkpoint here.
I use the checkpoints concept only when drivers are missing important
techniques due to tricky corner sequences. They’re a way for you to re-
analyze your approach and remind yourself what you should be aiming for
in your racing line.
Checkpoints are most common in two places: corner entry and changes of
direction. This is because as soon as you find yourself in the right
positioning and angle at the beginning of a corner, or when connecting
compound corners, the remainder of the corner becomes much easier to get
right (it’s impossible to get any corner perfect if the initial conditions are
wrong).
Hitting checkpoints right in every lap will make you much more consistent
over a stint and will allow you to feel more subtle changes mid-corner. It’s
impossible to know how a small change in speed might affect the rotation
of the car mid-corner if the car had a different positioning and/or angle on
corner entry.
Make sure you are consistently positioning and angling your car and be
aware of your lines when the grip matters the most, avoiding traps in
deceiving corners that make you drive the wrong lines and lose consistency.
 6

SENSING THE POSITIONING AND ANGLE WITH

PRECISION

T o improve your consistency when hitting marks and to always

position and angle your car in the same way, try to align something on
track to some reference in the car. For example, you can align the
white line on the track with something inside the car (like the pillar, the left
side of the hood, etc.) to make sure you are using the entire track. Most of
the time the driver is not using the whole track because they think they
already are, but they never created a visual reference to know when the tires
are actually hitting the grass. It might look like your tires are on the verge of
hitting the grass, but when you look at the replay there is a whole tire width
still available. Check your replays!
You can also use curb in changes of direction to make sure you are
positioning your car in the exact same place. You can analyze both the
positioning of the car (“How far am I from that curb?” or “How late am I
hitting that curb on the inside of a chicane?”) and the angle (“Am I parallel
to that curb by the time I’m hitting it, or am I hitting it on an angle?”).
These small details are the answer to questions like why the car always
behaves differently on the exit of ess turns.
Every millimeter makes a difference. The most important step for
consistency is creating visual references that will help you place the car in
the exact same place every single time in a stint.

Positioning and Angle: Examples

Most corners will have an easy and obvious approach. A hairpin preceded
by a straight line with parallel track limits invites us to drive parallel to the
white line under braking. That’s our positioning and angle.

There are, however, situations where it’s not as simple as having the turn-in
point be parallel to the track limits that precede the corner. There are
situations where the track limits are not a straight line. These places require
a lot more experimenting and thinking before we find the optimal line.
Let’s see some examples of corners that don’t have an obvious entry
positioning and angle:
The final chicane at Suzuka can be a trap when it comes to braking
performance and car balance. Braking at maximum capacity requires a
perfectly straight line, but the curvy braking zone of this corner prompts the
driver to follow the white line and then turn slightly to the right (orange
line). This unloads the right side of the car, causing tire locking (either
front, rear, or both, depending on car setup). In this case, a possible solution
is to start braking while pointed away from the white line so you can brake
on a totally straight line before meeting the white line again (red line). In
this case, the checkpoint in mind is the one at the very turn-in phase of the
corner, where you should be as close as possible to the white line.
 Suzuka Chicane

Detroit (Belle Isle), Turn 7

Turn 7 at Detroit is a deceiving corner. It invites you to stay on the left

(red), sending you into a small left kink before the actual braking zone. This
catches many unaware drivers, hurting their cornering performance
drastically for the actual right-hander.
 7

DOUBLE LEFTS AND DOUBLE RIGHTS

A s I have mentioned before, when you have two consecutive corners

with little space in between them, the entry to the second corner will
be affected by the exit of the first one. Let’s see some examples:

Interlagos: Ferradura, Laranjinha and Pinheirinho corners

The connection between Ferradura, Laranjinha and Pinheirinho at

Interlagos is a perfect example of a double-right corner. Positioning the car
imperfectly on the exit of the first turn causes a problem for the next two
turns. Not using the entire track on exit (blue line) also hurts your
positioning and angle for the next corner (purple line). This is a very
common mistake in this sector.
The biggest challenge in this situation is being able to drive the car all the
way to the exit of the first turn by having the right timing for acceleration.
Addressing this with the Maximum Rotation Point and its adjustments in
compound corners will be discussed soon.
Spoon at Suzuka is another famously tricky double corner that punishes you
for not using the whole track in between corners. For this example, let’s
reverse engineer the optimal line, building the exit corner before the entry
corner. Reverse engineering a corner will ensure that we get as much exit
speed as possible by planning the lines that start the sector. It should look
like this:

Suzuka: Spoon

Now that we know the ideal entry point for the second corner, let’s connect
the exit of the first one to it:
Seems easy, right? But what happens most often is this (yellow to red):

The fact that the two corners are so close to one another can cause
confusion, and many drivers will lose their laser focus of positioning and
angle in between them. Remember: missing the positioning and angle
between close corners will double the lap time performance hit.
 8

DECEIVING CORNERS

A deceiving corner is one that throws you away from the fastest racing
line. Let’s analyze some deceiving sections:

Sebring, Turns 14 and 15

The small, apparently harmless left kink before Turn 15 at Sebring traps
many drivers into not using the whole track where it really matters: the
braking zone into the right hander. If you try to keep the car close to the left
side of the track before the kink, you won’t have the grip to place the car on
the white line right before braking (blue line). To solve this problem, stay a
little wide just before the kink, so you can “late apex 1” it and stay on the
left (green line).

Turn 2, also at Sebring, is a very similar kink to corner complex. Avoid driving
the blue line!
 Sebring: Turns 3, 4 and 5. Avoid driving the blue line!

Turns 3, 4, and 5, still at Sebring, also deceive you into driving the wrong
line right before the most important corner of the sector, since it leads into a
straight. As you can already imagine, being aware of these deceiving
corners might give you a huge advantage on this racetrack!
 Virginia International Raceway, Turns 2 and 3

The example above at Virginia International Speedway is a variation of a

deceiving corner, this time with both the kink and the corner going the same
direction. In this case, falling into the trap means trying to apex the kink,
which destroys your line into the actual corner that requires braking. If you
drive the blue line, by the time you realize you have to open up to do the
actual corner, it’s too late. If you try to open up anyways (purple line),
you’ll start braking with the angle completely wrong, pointing many
degrees to the outside, and drastically decreasing braking and cornering
performance. The solution is to “miss” the apex of the small kink to ensure
you have the right line for the second left hander (red and green).

1 Late apex means hitting the inside of the corner at a later stage, which in the case of the example
above allows for a wider entry for the next left hander.
 9

MAXIMUM ROTATION POINT (MRP)

A t this point I have mentioned the “Maximum Rotation Point” several

times. In this chapter, I will explain what I am referring to.
If we drive a car at a fixed speed while rotating as much as the car can
handle without understeering too much or oversteering into a spin, right on
the limit, the car will produce a fixed-radius circle:

As you can see in the image below, if we increase the speed and then
maintain it, the car will start doing a bigger circle. The higher speed means
it won’t be able to maintain the same rotation from before, creating an
increasing radius while accelerating (green), and a new fixed but bigger
radius when maintaining the new higher speed (second layer of blue):
If we decrease the speed and then maintain it, the car will start doing a
smaller circle, since it will have more capacity to rotate.

If we decrease the speed at a consistent rate, the car will progressively turn
more, creating a closing spiral.
If we increase the speed at a consistent rate, the car will progressively turn
less, creating an opening spiral.

In corners where deceleration is required, the rotation should then reach its
peak at the minimum speed. This creates something like an ellipse. In this
next example, the vertex of the ellipse matches the inside of the corner, or
apex.
Racecars are much more efficient in deceleration than in acceleration. This
means we spend less time braking and more time accelerating. To maximize
exit speeds and compensate for this behavior, we should start accelerating a
little earlier than the geometric ideal line. Then, our ideal racing line looks
like this:

Knowing this, we have two very important points to discuss. I first one is
the apex. The apex is the inside limit of a corner. While I describe the
concept of the apex in this way, others might describe it as the place where
you start accelerating. I find this confusing. That’s why I created a
distinction between the apex and the Maximum Rotation Point. This is one
of the most important concepts I’ve developed in my coaching career.
The Maximum Rotation Point is the place where you reach peak yaw rate.
Yaw rate is the amount of rotation per second that the car generates,
normally measured in degrees per second (deg/s). In simpler words, the
MRP is the point where the car is turning the most. It should also be the
minimum speed point. The car rotates the most when slowest. While it
might seem obvious to some, based on my experience coaching so many
drivers, including some high-level competitors, it’s not. It becomes less
obvious in practice. The reason it is not obvious is because of the confusion
between the MRP and the apex.
The Maximum Rotation Point is not the apex. Again, the apex is the
physical inside limits of the corner.

Here is an example of a late apex approach. In a late apex approach, you

accelerate earlier, which means the distance between the MRP and apex is
bigger (and the MRP is before the apex).
Why should we have a well-defined Maximum Rotation Point in a corner?
It allows you to brake later, and accelerate earlier, both at the same time.
Without a clear MRP, there is a big chance we’ll end up reaching a fixed
amount of rotation and speed, staying there for a while, not knowing what
to do mid-corner, maybe accelerating a bit (half-throttle), and scrubbing the
fronts waiting until we feel confident to accelerate. This mistake is what I
call a Maximum Rotation Line (MRL), where the driver is confused and
just waits for the feeling that they can accelerate while keeping the yaw rate
fixed. Drivers who make MRLs are most likely losing time on early entry
and late exit. Just remember: if the car is decelerating, you must get more
rotation out of it. Always.

Blue: Not very well-defined Maximum Rotation Point (an MRL). Green: Well-
defined Maximum Rotation Point.

The Maximum Rotation Point helps to identify the differences more clearly
between a V-shaped approach versus a U-shaped approach.
A V-shaped approach (imagine a more pronounced ellipse) makes the car
turn in much more progressively. The transition from braking to turning is
slower in this approach and the rotation is much higher at the slower
speeds.
A U-shaped approach, however, is suited for high-downforce cars. Here, the
rotation does not start as much progressively as it does linearly, since the
extra downforce adds some extra cornering capability at the higher speeds
to compensate for the natural V-shape tendencies that inertia causes.
 Note how the difference in speeds between the yellow and blue line is biggest
at high speeds (1), but smaller at the low speeds (3). This is due to downforce
being more effective at high speeds.

The biggest benefit from the MRP is being able to simplify the approach to
and learning process of new corners, as well as perfecting the ones you
already know. When learning a new track, you can simplify everything into
only two points: the braking point and the Maximum Rotation Point.
Knowing you’ll build up your rotation to a peak at the defined MRP, you’ll
naturally find your turn-in point, and the exit of the corner will just be a
consequence. By treating the exit as a consequence, you can judge how
well-placed your MRP was, and then make adjustments to it.
Before we go into more detail on the Maximum Rotation Point, here are
some extra tips:

The Maximum Rotation Point should be the Minimum Speed

Point.
Because of this, the MRP is also the Throttle Application Point.
Generally, the Maximum Rotation Point is placed at the End of
Braking Point (EOB) (where you stop braking and start
accelerating). The exception is when you are driving a car that
 oversteers on entry and you can’t trail brake all the way until the
throttle application, which means you are coasting for a while.
The Maximum Rotation Point is the peak yaw rate of the corner.
Look for the MRP as early as possible when learning a new
car/track combo. Start with the lower speed corners, then move up
to finding MRPs at higher speed ones. Feel the limit of grip when
finding rotation at the minimum speed. This will give you valuable
information that will allow you to find the ideal line and speed in
that corner much quicker.

Remember that the Maximum Rotation Point is just the climax. Although it
is a point, the build up to it starts as soon as you turn into the corner. Don’t
relax between turn-in and the MRP!
 10

BOUNCING OFF THE APEX

B eing aware of the Maximum Rotation Point idea inherently makes

you try to rotate the car more. Its very name persuades us to reach
that peak rotation, which means we’re looking for the lateral grip
limit mid-corner.
If you turn in at the right moment, at the right speed, with the right trail
braking, you’ll spend 100% of the corner rotating the car as much as you
can. This means you’ll remain on the best racing line, and touch the inside
track limits perfectly, all while forcing the car to turn more and more.
If you turn in a little too late, no matter how much you force the car, you’ll
miss the apex, either through understeer or oversteer and corrections. You’ll
end up trying to force the car through the whole corner, even though it
won’t be the fastest way through it.
If you turn in too early or too slowly, something interesting happens. So
many drivers I coach have this problem. It’s common because it’s a
comfortable mistake that makes you feel good.
In an easy corner like in the image below, you know the racing line. You
know you should brake in a straight line and then turn into the corner while
trail braking, accelerating slightly before the apex.
Imagine that you are just a little under the optimal speed to take the corner.
What do you do? Two courses of action are likely.
The first is doing nothing different, really. You continue to drive the racing
line, but you are under the limit. This is what a driver that Drives the Line
will do.

If you are doing the perfect racing line but carrying a lower
speed (darker blue), you can lose a lot of time without
noticing. Remember the mentality of hustling the car and
always trying to extract rotation from it!
The second is that you’ll turn in, asking for rotation, but you realize the car
turns a little more than necessary so you relax the steering a bit to ensure
the car is still on the ideal line. This is what the driver that Drives the Car
will do. This is ultimately more useful than the first option, if done
properly.

A driver that consistently forces the rotational capability of the

car (orange line), when slower than ideal, will extract more
rotation than necessary, correcting the direction deeper into
the corner so to not hit the inside.

Both options will be slower. In both, you are carrying less speed into the
corner! The second option, though, will be more useful for us in this
chapter, since it is the best way to identify the problem.
The problem with carrying less speed is that it makes the corner much
easier. You have some extra room for keeping the car on the ideal racing
line. This feels comfortable. Driving the car a little slower guarantees that
you are not going off track or getting off the racing line. If you don’t want
to do that, and if you want to go as fast as possible, how can you quickly
identify this problem and solve it?
Here’s where the “bouncing off the apex” idea comes into play. Always
rotating as much as possible, at all stages of a corner, is the key to ensuring
you are using all four tires to their limit. But, if you are a little slower, the
car will give you more rotation than you need for that corner, as per the
second course of action.
As soon as you notice you are rotating too much and going towards the
inside, make a correction with the steering. Straighten it out to go back to
the ideal path. Then turn again.
There’s nothing further you can do in that corner. You carried less speed
into it. You may compensate to get a slightly better exit and lose less time,
but that corner is not ideal anymore. What you can do is remember what the
car did at that speed. Remember how it felt and how the rotation was too
easy. Then, try to carry slightly more speed into the corner on the next lap.
Bouncing off the apex refers to turning in too early or too slowly, putting
you on a path where you’ll hit the inside of a corner and get stuck there.
This completely kills your peak rotation.

“Bouncing off the apex” (red) happens when the driver slowed down the car too
much and the car can rotate more than necessary. The ideal line is in blue.

A perfect Maximum Rotation Point is built from the very beginning of a

corner, adding rotation until you reach the acceleration point. If you lose
that rotation and try to generate it again on the second half of corner entry,
you won’t recover the lost rotation and the time from that correction.
Although we say the MRP is a specific place, it is truly the peak of
something that builds up since the turn-in.
My advice is to try to bounce off the apex! Turn more and test how much
rotation is available, even if that means going where you don’t want to. This
will clearly show you if the car is too slow. You’ll learn the speed threshold
for that corner and make corrections more quickly.
Over slowing and driving the perfect racing line is likely to be slower than
carrying too much speed and missing the apex a little but driving on the
limit during the entire corner.
 11

DOUBLE APEX: HIGH DOWNFORCE VS LOW

DOWNFORCE

A double-apex corner is one where the ideal racing line touches the
inside limit of the track twice. There are two types of double apex
corners. The first type is two separate corners, like a double-right or
double-left, that are close enough that you don’t have time to accelerate in
between them. Here, you merge the ideal racing lines into one single
deceleration, one single MRP, and one single exit.

Laguna Seca – Andretti hairpin

This type is easy to spot, especially when the corners are kind of square.
The natural line already sends you into a double-apex approach, where you
hit the inside limits twice.
The second type is more difficult to spot. These are long corners that appear
to have a fixed radius or a single apex.

Bruxelles corner at Spa-Francorchamps

Of all types of corners, this type is most likely to encourage you to take the
wrong approach. This is a corner where most drivers bounce off the apex
for a long time, losing a lot of lap time on entry and on exit.
I will break this down. In a short 180-degree corner, or a hairpin, you would
brake in a straight line to slow down the car, and then have lots of rotation
in a short amount of time.
 Circuit Gilles Villeneuve – Hairpin

In a long 180-degree corner, like Bruxelles, you’ll spend a lot more time in
the corner, which means your braking duration will be higher. If you are
braking for longer, you can carry more speed into the corner by braking less
while making the turn. Because of the V-shape nature that emerges from
trail braking, the ideal line will end up touching the inside of the track in
two different spots.
In this chapter, we’ll specifically analyze how early to turn, how to figure
out the distance between the apexes in such a corner, and what determines
the line in a double-apex like Bruxelles at Spa-Francorchamps.
If the car has low downforce, cornering will be very limited at turn-in,
increasing progressively towards lower speeds, causing a V-shape line.
If the car has high downforce, cornering will be more effective on entry
compared to the low downforce car, allowing the rotation to increase at a
more linear rate, causing a U-shape line.
In the example below, you can see that the Maximum Rotation Point is at
the same stage of the corner for both a low downforce car and a high
downforce car. The difference lies in how far the MRP sits from the inside
of the track.

The distance between the apexes is consequently affected by the downforce

levels. The higher the downforce, the smaller the distance between the
apexes.
Fun fact: if the car has enough downforce, it can convert what would be a
double apex in a lower downforce car into a single apex if both ideal apexes
meet at a single point. Such phenomenon is rare and happens when the
corner is already a very subtle double-apex for lower downforce cars.
If the car has enough downforce, it can single-apex a corner that would be a
double-apex for lower downforce cars.
To summarize:
 Low downforce (red) versus high downforce (purple)

In low downforce cars, a double apex will have:

Earlier turn-in,
A more elliptical line,
More progressive/exponential steering input,
More trail braking into the corner, and
Bigger distance between the apexes.

In high downforce cars, a double apex will have:

Later turn-in,
A more circular line,
More linear steering input,
Less trail braking into the corner, and
Lower distance between the apexes.
 12

MAXIMUM ROTATION POINT VS APEX

E arlier we discussed the distinction between Maximum Rotation Point

and apex. Let’s go into more detail. We will discuss the distance
between the apex and the Maximum Rotation Point in single apex
corners, which has been alluded to before.
Let’s analyze the single apex corner in this image and the possible
approaches to it. The ideal approach will depend on many conditions, like
car, setup, and even racing situations.

Example One
In this first example, the apex and MRP are practically at the same point.

This represents the ideal geometric line, but since racecars decelerate more
quickly than they accelerate, we want to start accelerating a little before the
apex to generate more speed at the exit.

Example Two
In the second example, there is a small distance between the MRP and apex.
This is the most common approach, where the difference between braking
efficiency and acceleration efficiency are compensated, allowing for better
exit speed.

Example Three
In the third example, we have an aggressive approach, focusing on the best
exit possible, but at the cost of losing time on entry.

A very common mistake among beginners is to turn in and accelerate right

away, trying to do the entire corner while accelerating. Be careful! This
induces a lot of understeer. Try to rotate at least 50%, as a baseline, of the
corner while on the brakes!
The approach in the third example could be an ideal way to do the last
corner before starting a qualifying lap, for example, since the time of the
current lap does not matter, and the next lap will start with a slightly higher
speed at the start/finish line.

Summary
A late apex should mean early throttle application. There is often confusion
even among high level drivers and coaches when describing the relationship
between the apex and the throttle application point. I’ve heard people say
that the apex is where you accelerate. In the case where you are hitting a
late apex to get a better exit though, you accelerate earlier.
You should never accelerate after the apex. The Maximum Rotation Point
(which, as mentioned before, is also where you will start accelerating)
should always be before the apex. Sometimes it might be at the same spot,
but never past.
 13

EARLY APEX VS LATE APEX

I n this chapter we will explore when a driver should take a late versus an
early apex. Let’s go back to the geometric racing line for reference.

In this example, the Maximum Rotation Point and apex are at the same
point.
Since deceleration happens more quickly than acceleration, we should
accelerate slightly earlier than the apex in almost all corners. When drivers
first hear about this, many end up accelerating way too early.
If a driver accelerates too early, they are likely to drive off track after the
corner.
Ideally, you want to accelerate when the car has rotated at least 50% of the
angle of the corner. For example, in this 180-degree corner, you want to
have rotated at least 90 degrees before you accelerate. If the car is pointing
away from the direction of the corner exit, the throttle will create
conflicting forces, making the car push wide through understeer or
oversteer. The same would apply for braking. If you are still trail braking
after the 50% mark, you are creating forces against the direction of the
corner and losing a lot of time.
If the apex is later in the corner, our MRP will move backwards. If the apex
is 51% of the way through the corner, for example, the MRP would then be
at 49% of the way through the corner. This means we’ll reach peak rotation
and start accelerating slightly before the apex, which will give us a better
corner exit speed. Such a subtle change would still be considered early
apexing.
High speed corners are mostly faster when early apexing. Consider the
MRP at 49% of the corner and apex at 51% of the corner as references for
early apexing.
Medium speed corners are mostly faster when doing a slightly later apex.
Consider the MRP at 47% of the corner and apex at 53% of the corner as
references for a slightly later apex.
Low speed corners are mostly faster when doing a more aggressive late
apex. Consider the MRP at 45% of the corner and apex at 55% of the corner
as references for a late apex.
These examples are great for corners that are isolated from others (that have
a straight before and after). In reality, you will always be surrounded by
other corners, which will be another factor in deciding how to approach
each corner. If you have a long straight after the corner, for example, you
might benefit more from a late apex, even if it’s a medium-speed corner. It
might be better to early apex a low-speed corner if there is another corner
right away and you wouldn’t really benefit from the exit speed. You’ll have
to weigh your decision factors (speed of the corner + what comes after it)
and practice through trial and error. The delta lap time information is your
friend in these moments!

Examples of Maximum Rotation Point Placements

Most corners will have a similar MRP placement: close to the apex, or the
inside limit of the corner:

The reason the MRP is placed very close to the apex in these corners is
because the car is decelerating, so the rotation keeps increasing until
acceleration.
If a similar corner comes right after the first one, the car is already quite
slow, meaning no deceleration is needed. Where should the MRP be here?
In this case, the MRP is at the early entry phase, which is not very common.
It is also already the turn-in point. This happens because our minimum
speed is already at the corner entry since we’re just accelerating while
doing the second corner. It’s common to see drivers turning further toward
the apex even though they’re already accelerating during turn-in.
Some corners have weird or unexpected MRP placement. These corners are
a common cause of inconsistency and loss of lap time among intermediate
and even some advanced drivers.
At the Senna S turn at Interlagos, the MRP is placed as expected in the first
apex of this sector: close to the inside limits of the corner on the left. The
reason is because that is where the minimum speed is. The second apex,
however, is where a lot of drivers get the turn wrong. Since there is a long
straight after this sector, it’s very important to carry as much speed as
possible through the right hander. Because of that, we’ll bring the car
further to the left and change direction on throttle, not braking again for the
second apex.
 Interlagos: Senna S

Since we are already accelerating, the MRP for the second corner is at the
change in direction. We should turn right and reach our peak rotation
immediately because we’re not braking again. As we gain speed, our
rotation should decrease, which means the peak rotation is way before the
actual inside limit, or apex, on the right. The MRP placement in this
example is an open secret; only really advanced drivers nail it consistently.
The most common mistake in this sector is increasing the steering angle
towards the second apex after changing direction, even though we are
accelerating there. This would only wear the front tires excessively or cause
oversteer and a spin.
Most drivers tend to increase the steering after changing direction, even
though they are accelerating. Since the speed is increasing, similarly
increasing the steering in that situation is inefficient.
Visit www.suellioalmeida.ca/mrp to watch two sample lessons on MRP
placement from my online course, The Motor Racing Checklist.
 14

COMPOUND CORNERS

Suzuka Esses

A set of corners is considered compound when the fastest lines of

sequential corners conflict with one another and some sacrifices must
be made to find the fastest combination possible. Compound corners
require you to sacrifice the first exit to have better positioning for the next
corner. Where you place your MRP in the first corner will determine the
next line, so make sure you plan exactly where you want to accelerate
before the first corner to keep the car on a consistent line when practicing
compound corners.

How corners would have been taken in isolation (red) versus how corners
blend together as a compound corner (blue).

One of the most important rules for compound corners is to never go

straight in between them. You should always be turning as much as
possible, on the limit of grip, to prepare the next corner.
The exception to this rule is under heavy braking. In cases where slowing
the car down as much as possible is faster than preparing the entry of the
next corner, braking fully in a straight line is a better option.

Summit Point – Hairpin

Compound Corners – What to Sacrifice?
Each compound corner has its own context and needs to be analyzed as its
own entity. Factors include the corners themselves and what comes after
them.
If there is a long straight after a compound corner, it might be worth
sacrificing the first corner a little and benefiting from a better exit out of the
last one to keep gaining time for longer on the straight. In general, tight
corners should not be sacrificed too much in compound corner situations
since they impact the lap time a lot more than longer ones.
If there is a long corner that leads to a shorter corner, it’s generally better to
sacrifice the exit of the long one to minimize the amount of deceleration
needed for the short one.

Detroit (Belle Isle) – Turns 10 and 11. Note how the second
corner is tighter, so the ideal line keeps tight, sacrificing the
exit of the longer corner to benefit from the shorter one.

If there is a short corner that leads to a longer corner, it’s generally better to
not sacrifice the short one too much, since we’ll have enough time to
decelerate, and maybe double apex, in the longer second corner.
 Interlagos, Pinheirinho. Note how the second corner is longer,
so we try to benefit as much as possible from the first shorter
corner, without losing too much time on the longer left hander
afterwards.

Compound Corners – Adjustment Methods

In a regular corner, we have:

1. Positioning and Angle

2. Braking Reference
3. Turn-in Point
4. Maximum Rotation Point
5. Exit Line (Consequence)

The exit line is the part of the corner where we have the least amount of
control, which is why I call it a “consequence.” In compound corners, that
consequence debuts in the initial conditions of the very first corner, which
shows how important it is to nail the four first points on the first corner.
More specifically, the MRP in the first corner will lead to specific
positioning and angle of the second corner, which repeats the cycle. If there
is a long straight line between two corners, we can reset the cycle and freely
readjust the positioning and angle. This would mean the corners are not
compound and won’t affect one another (except for the entry speed, which
can be slightly different). If there’s no straight and you don’t have the time
to make a free adjustment, the corners are entangled and it’s crucial to get
the MRP of the first corner perfect if you want to have a consistent
approach in the one(s) that follows.
In compound corners, the most effective and precise way to adjust the
positioning and angle of the second or third corners is to reposition the
MRP of the previous one. You can do this by waiting before re-accelerating
or changing direction (which changes the MRP positioning – how early or
late it is), or by turning in a little later into the first corner (which changes
the MRP angle – how much to the inside of the first exit the MRP is
pointed).

The point of acceleration greatly impacts the exit line. If on the limit,
accelerating means opening up the line. In this case, the time of acceleration
will also heavily impact the entry line of the second corner.
Remember that the turn-in point will affect the angle of the line. Think of
the MRP as the place where you start accelerating, but don’t forget its angle
–where it’s pointed. The MRP itself has a positioning and angle.
Always have the car pointed to the same place when getting back on power
for better consistency. Tip: Align your car with the inside limits, like the
white line or the curb, as a reference for your positioning and angle at the
apex.

Compound Corners – Most Common Mistake

One of the most common mistakes in between compound corners is to force
the car to open up more than it’s capable of.

Line of Consequence (blue) versus attempted line

The Line of Consequence is what the car is capable of doing according to
what you did on entry. When the car carries too much speed in the exit of
the first corner and drifts wide into a bad line for the second corner, trying
to force the car to open up too much for the next corner could make it even
worse, and most importantly, is dangerous.
Forcing the car over its limit in between compound corners is one of the
most tempting mistakes in motorsport. The solution is simple: remember
that the second corner depends on what you did in the first one. Doing the
same line in corner 1 and expecting the car to behave differently, or
somehow gain more grip in the second one, is a waste of your time.
Adjusting the MRP on corner 1 is the most efficient solution, but that can
only be done on the next lap. In long sections with several compound
corners, there is a snowball effect. Corner 1 will affect corner 2, which will
then affect corner 3, etc. If you are on the limit, missing the first techniques
in a sector like that will have a much bigger effect than missing just the last
corner. Think of these long sectors as one big entity and be ultra-focused on
understanding how connected these corners are.
 15

ELEVATION AND CAMBER CHANGES

E levation and camber changes directly alter the amount of mechanical

grip available. They are commonly ignored and some of the trickiest
corners can be solved when we start paying attention to them. Let’s
start with their definitions and what to do when we encounter them on
track.

Compressions

Compressions are elevation changes that increase the amount of available

grip. They happen when we start going upwards from a flat track, or when
we start to go flat coming from a downhill. The car will feel heavier on
these types of transitions since we’re essentially crashing downwards
against the track, increasing tire contact and traction.
While compressed, we can ask for more from the car: to turn more,
accelerate more, and brake more. Compressions generally happen over a
very small amount of time, often much less than a second, so the grip
available will change quickly. We already explored compressions under
braking in the book, but this chapter will discuss the effects of compression
on cornering situations as well.

A famous example of compression is the braking zone into the first turn at
Circuit of the Americas. There, we have a huge compression where we can
brake as much as 20% harder without locking the tires. Another example is
the braking zone into the chicane at Road Atlanta. Right before the corner
we’re going downhill, but at the braking zone the track flattens, creating a
compression that allows us to brake much harder.
 Road Atlanta, braking zone before Turns 10A and 10B

Road Atlanta also has a compression at the first corner, where the track
goes upwards towards the apex, creating a compression that increases the
amount the car is able to rotate due to the extra grip.

Road Atlanta, Turn 1

Crests (Decompressions)
Crests (or decompressions) are the opposite of compressions. This happens
when the track starts going downhill and falling away from the car, making
it feel lighter and decreasing contact between the tires and the track. On a
crest there is less mechanical grip available, and we should be more patient.
We will need to turn less, accelerate less, and brake less.

A famous example is the exit of turn one at Red Bull Ring, where the track
falls at the exit, drastically decreasing the amount of available grip and
causing exit oversteer. Note how the exit isn’t immediately visible since the
track falls away. This is a big reason drivers lose control of their cars at the
exit.

Red Bull Ring, Turn 1

Another example is the braking zone into the corkscrew at Laguna Seca. In
this zone the track starts falling after we start braking, causing loss of
braking performance and forcing us to release the brakes on top of the crest,
coming back on the pressure after the track flattens right before the turn.
A cornering example that contains both compressions and decompressions
in the same corner is La Source at Spa-Francorchamps. The corner has a
small and quick dip at the apex which ends and flattens right after towards
the exit. This causes a tricky effect that we’ll call compression to snap
decompression.

Spa-Francorchamps, La Source corner. Red shows areas with less grip due to
crests, while green shows compressions, where the car glues more to the track
and has better rotation. The orange shows neutral or flat zones.
In this drawing, we have what initially seems to be a compression. If you
look closely at the beginning and end of the dip, though, you’ll realize that
there will be less grip in both of those places since the track falls away from
the car for a fraction of a second before the compression, as well as at the
very end (compression to snap decompression).
In other words, after some types of compression, the end of the
compression becomes a flat track again, which ends up causing the same
effect as going over a crest, causing less grip.
We must generate more rotation in compressions and less rotation on crests.
Trying to generate the same amount of rotation in these two scenarios
causes unpredictability and frustration.
 Oulton Park, last corner. Here, we can see the turn well until
after the apex, then the track starts falling towards the exit

Oulton Park, last corner. This angle clearly shows how the
track falls away after the apex. Many drivers lose the car at
this spot and have no idea why
 Oulton Park, last corner. In this top-down view, green lines
represent a compression (more grip) followed by a crest (less
grip).

In the example at Oulton Park’s last corner, there is a compression towards

the apex, but towards late exit the track falls on a big crest and the grip
disappears. This corner often catches drivers unawares. The correct
approach to this corner is to generate as much rotation as possible at late
entry and point the car in a straighter line at exit. Even when you think
you’ve rotated too much and your exit will be too straight, you feel the car
wanting to lose the rear on you. Understanding the compression to crest
dynamic in this corner is crucial if you want to identify subtler examples in
the future.

Camber Changes
Camber changes work in a similar way to crests and compressions: on-
camber means the track is tilted in the direction we’re turning, increasing
cornering grip, and off-camber means the track is tilted outwards, making
the car fall towards the outside of the corner, drastically decreasing
cornering grip.

Oulton Park, Shell Oils corner. The banking (on-camber)

increases mechanical grip.
 Mount Panorama (Bathurst), Turn 3. Green represents more
cornering grip; red represents less cornering grip.

In the example above at Bathurst, the road has a crown shape for better rain
drainage. Because of that, in a right-hander, driving on the inside will give
you much more cornering grip due to the camber. Conversely, driving on
the outside will give you terrible cornering grip due to the off-camber.
Regardless, you still need to drive the racing line. Knowing when you’ll
cross from the outside to the inside will be crucial to nail this corner, since
the grip suddenly changes when crossing the center of the road, which is the
top of the crown.

How do I Deal with Changes in Grip?

The most common mistake regarding elevation and camber changes is to
just ignore them. The amount the grip changes isn’t something you can
ignore in these situations. Expecting the car to behave how it would on a
flat straight is what causes most of the spins in crests.
Here are some tips that may appear obvious, but that are very useful:
1. If you can’t see a lot of the track ahead, you are going over a crest
and you’ll have much less grip on top of it.

Road Atlanta, Turn 1. Note how when sitting close to the

track, you can’t see much past corner entry. That is a clear
sign that the track falls away and there will be less
mechanical grip.

1. If you can see far on the track, it’s most likely a compression and
there will be more grip available.
 Road Atlanta, Turn 1. After the crest we identified on corner
entry, we can see the track going up when it gets closer to
mid-corner. That is a clear sign of a compression and that
there will be more mechanical grip available. The grip
available on corner entry is drastically lower compared to mid-
corner.

When driving, the secret to nailing these elevation changes is to concentrate

grip and rotation on compressions and banked (on-camber) corners, since
we’ll have the extra grip there, and to plan to drive straighter or brake less
on crests and off-camber corners, since there is less grip, and the car
wouldn’t be able to rotate the same way. One of the most frustrating
experiences in driving is being unaware of these places, always losing the
car while driving through them and having no clue why. This kind of
unpredictability destroys your confidence as a racing driver since you are
over-driving the car while thinking you are under-driving it.
In a corner where there’s a crest on exit, for example, the fastest approach is
to rotate more on entry (increase the density of rotation on entry) so that the
car finds itself with most of the rotation already complete before the crest,
then going straighter on the crest with the car already pointing correctly to
the exit. Trying to force too much rotation on top of the crest is frustrating
and will never work efficiently.
In the end, when getting used to these elevation changes, you’ll be
constantly adjusting how to extract the most from the car. Start with the
obvious ones. This will help you to slowly start noticing more subtle
examples in corners and tracks where you had never thought about
elevation changes before. If you think of Silverstone, for example, it really
looks like there’s not a lot to worry about in terms of elevation changes, but
when you develop an eye for them, you’ll see that some corners have a
touch of off-camber, and others have a touch of a crest. Then, the grip
change will be noticeable.
If you can feel subtle changes in elevation, you will easily gain many tenths
per lap, as well as manage your tires more easily and make less over-driving
mistakes.
MODULE III

CAR HANDLING
 1

ON THE LIMIT OF YOUR LEARNING TIME

T he essence of racecar driving lies in reaching the limit of traction,

mostly laterally. A good racing driver carries more speed while
cornering. It’s definitely not about pressing the throttle harder on a
straight line.
Think about driving a car in the city. The skills needed to be a good driver
are in a different category: you need awareness of the pedestrians, to know
the traffic rules, to adjust to other vehicles and bicycles, and to find the best
routes without traffic. Losing control — hearing your tires screech — is a
very rare situation in the city. In other words, in terms of traction usage, you
are almost always under the limit. This means that if you never leave the
city, it’s possible that you spend your entire life driving around without
having to know what understeer and oversteer are, unless you often drive in
snowy places or off-road.
Just as driving your entire life in the city does not mean you’ll go fast on
the racetrack right away, being a racecar driver does not mean you’ll
magically understand the traffic rules of different cities in the world. The
skills and preparation needed are different.
Now let’s move on to the racetrack. On the very first day of practice, you
might already experience traction limit. You start carrying more and more
speed until you start sliding. This is where you get into a totally different
skillset than city driving. Now you need to master getting to that limit in a
controlled way, and stay there, while doing the fastest lines on the track.
As a racecar driver, a great number of necessary skills lie on the limit of
traction. Time spent on the limit of at least one end of the car (either
understeer or oversteer) is already productive in terms of learning. Of
course, you want to learn both, so only understeering all the time will
eventually stop being productive. Time spent understeering will make you
understand one set of skills; time spent oversteering will make you learn a
different set. You should balance your time driving different cars, some
“understeery,” others “oversteery,” to develop a diverse array of abilities.
On the racetrack, if you push the car to the point of reaching the limit more
often, you end up spending more time in that realm of learning. Of course,
this is an extreme simplification, but I’ve seen it work. Making more
mistakes means learning more. In my experience with coaching and racing,
young drivers who are aggressive develop a better racecraft over the years.
These drivers tend to use their time more efficiently, always being outside
their comfort zone and polishing their skills. Simply put, if you don’t push
the limits of the car, you won’t push the limits of your skills and they won’t
expand. Time spent understeering or oversteering is learning time. Time
spent being too careful is wasted. Of course, in real life motorsports the
approach must be much more gradual, as you look to feather the limits
progressively to not crash, but you still need to be on that limit for as long
as possible.
This is the reason you might hear that racing drivers from snowy countries
are generally very talented. In winter, drivers must learn understeer and
oversteer and spend much more time with the car sliding around, even at
low speeds. This makes them naturally develop car handling skills over the
limit of lateral traction. There are likely many non-racing drivers from
snowy countries that understand car handling much better than racing
drivers who are always under the limit.
In real life, the biggest reason for driving under the limit is fear. I’ve been
there. Fear prevents learning. To build up confidence and learn safely, focus
on the lower speed corners. These are the best and safest opportunities to
throw the car around and feel its dynamics when on the limit. As you gain
confidence and understand the car’s behavior, move on to being more
aggressive on medium-speed corners, before finally tackling the high-speed
ones.
We can then push this concept to the highest level, starting to divide the
corner into smaller pieces: entry and exit, then early entry, late entry, early
exit, and late exit. You can then ask yourself if you are on the traction limit
in all the stages. Not being on the limit and not noticing it is useless for
technique development. You must be either understeering or oversteering
(or a little bit of both; think of a go-kart with a high slip angle going slightly
sideways with all four tires sliding equally) at all stages of the corner.
Imagine that you are doing a low-speed corner, and you turn in at the ideal
line, without sliding, and when you get back on power at the apex, you start
oversteering a little bit on exit. In this situation (being slightly slower than
ideal and doing the line perfectly) it is easy to miss that we’re under the
limit, especially on entry. In this example, the corner probably felt okay, but
we missed learning time on entry. The most efficient practice sessions will
be the ones where you spend more time on the limit of your tires. Think
about this limit mostly as rotation. You can judge how much the car is
rotating versus how much it can rotate at that speed. If it can rotate more
than you expected, you were under the limit and you can carry more speed
on the next lap.
The simplest way to group handling adjustments and judge the traction limit
is rotation x speed. If you are not on the limit of rotation, carry more speed.
If the car refuses to rotate and either understeers or oversteers and slides
out, carry less speed.
 2

DRIVING THE LINE VS DRIVING THE CAR

I magine two different drivers. One focuses on keeping the car on the
ideal line as much as possible. They use every inch of the track, on
entry, apex, and exit. The second driver focuses on feeling the grip limit
of the tires, rotating the car as much as possible, even if that means not
using the whole track on exit, for example.
These are two extremes. Most drivers have a little bit of both mentalities
when driving a racecar. We just need to find the right balance between
them.
Driving the Line is the most comfortable driving approach. You can be
slightly under the limit and do the perfect line all day. This can be a safe
mentality if you are taking care of the tires in an endurance race, for
example. Here’s the problem with it: it invites you to stay in your comfort
zone. It might even trick you into thinking that you are on the limit and that
you are carrying the right amount of speed into a corner.
Driving the Car is trying to always reach the cornering grip limit. It’s
reaching out to that point where you know the car is on the verge of sliding
too much. It’s asking for as much as the car can offer. This approach will
make the car rotate a specific amount depending on the speed, until it
understeers or oversteers. If the car is too slow for that corner, it will do a
tighter line than necessary, and two things will happen.
First, if you are on corner entry, the car will just point more than necessary
towards the apex, and you’ll need to adjust the steering. When this happens,
you’ll quickly realize that the car has more grip to offer, and you can carry a
little more speed on the next lap. When you correct the steering to come
back to the line after being too far on the inside, you won’t use the grip on
the front tires, which clearly shows you are under the limit. (Bouncing off
the apex, remember?)
Second, if you are on corner exit, you’ll turn more than necessary on exit
and not use the whole track. This is the most effective way to feel that you
can carry more speed through a corner.

IMPORTANT: Artificially using the whole track on exit by

unwinding the steering can easily hide the fact that you are not using
all the grip that is available. You might think that you are on the
limit because you are driving the right line, but if all four tires are
not on the limit the whole time, and you can’t do a tighter line, you
are not carrying enough speed on exit. The right exit speed gives
you only one choice: use the whole track on exit.

On the simulator, “driving the car” is the most effective approach as you
can overshoot the corner a lot, and even spin or crash, without any
consequences. In real life, you have to balance the two approaches. Try to
stay close to the racing line (driving the line) while making some micro-
tests for grip (driving the car), without making big changes in entry speed.
Remember that adjustments in speed on corner entry should be based solely
on braking. If you want to carry more speed into a corner, brake less.
Braking hard and then accelerating earlier while still on corner entry will
upset the car on exit and is not the most efficient way to do the corner.
Adjustments in speed on corner exit will depend on your line and speed on
entry, but you can always try to accelerate a little earlier and test the
placement of your Maximum Rotation Point.
If you can increase the overall speed of the car without affecting line and
rotation, you are gaining time. It’s as simple as that. But if you can increase
rotation without affecting speed, this means you can carry more speed on
the next lap. This approach is the most efficient when learning a new
car/track combo.
 3

WHAT IS OVERDRIVING THE CAR, REALLY?

T raditionally, to overdrive the car is to try to do a corner at a higher

speed than the car is capable of and getting too much understeer or
oversteer, missing the line of the corner, and having to back off or
wait too much before getting back on power.
Overdriving is a common, even necessary, part of looking for better lap
times. But there’s more than one way of doing it.

Speed First, Rotation After

Braking too late is the most common way to overdrive. Here, you find
speed by braking later and later, and then trying to deal with the extra speed
mid-corner. This approach shifts our focus towards the braking reference:
you brake at 100m, then you try to do the corner. Then you brake at 90m
and try again. Then 80m, 70m, etc. until you can’t make the apex anymore
or you can’t rotate the car, meaning you have to wait and get back on power
after the apex, which is slow. After you miss the apex, you back off to 80m
to try again on the next lap.
Again, this process shifts our focus towards the braking reference, which
means we’re not focusing as much on the following phases, especially if
we’re desperately trying to stay on track.
Let’s call this the speed to rotation approach. This means we prioritize the
entry speed more than anything, and then we just “deal with it” mid-corner.
The speed to rotation approach is not enough. Only doing this can mean
that you develop your car handling skills in an extremely subconscious
manner, which can be bad if you are also developing bad habits.

Rotation First, Speed After

There’s a smarter way to test the grip limits of a racecar. That does not
mean it is the only way and that you should ignore everything else. It’s just
one more tool for you to use in your technique development.
You’ll note that the remainder of the book will be hyper focused on
rotation. How to feel it, how to control it, how to cause mistakes on purpose
so you can prevent them – it’s all about lateral grip. While I say that 90% of
motorsports is braking, a big part of braking is pointing the car into the
corner, too. The way you carry the brakes into the corner can impact how
much the car oversteers or understeers. Ignorant of this, you’ll still blame
the setup.
Aim to reach the rotation limits on corner entry before you build up the
braking references. You’ll do this by starting at a slightly lower speed.
Why? Because you’ll have the mental space to pay attention to the lateral
grip, to the rotation, and to your inputs into the corner. Test the rotation of
the car by deliberately inducing a little bit of understeer, and then minimize
that and test pointing the car more aggressively, feeling a little bit of
oversteer. The information you get from this is more important than
anything else. With it, you can have a much more precise idea of how much
extra speed you can carry through that corner. After all that, you can adjust
the braking reference accordingly.
Let’s call this the rotation to speed approach. This means we prioritize the
rotational capability and control of the car more than anything, and then we
adjust the entry speed afterwards.
The rotation to speed approach is the one I use in real life to maximize my
testing efficiency and my track time. I can safely test the rotational limit of
the car and oversteer a little while being at a safe speed. This gives me
enough information to set my braking references quickly.
 4

CHANGE THE DRIVING OR CHANGE THE

SETUP?

L et me tell you a story. A driver approached me looking for high level

coaching with a focus on setup changes. We started the session
driving the Porsche 911 Cup car at Brands Hatch in iRacing. To warm
up, we both went on track and did some laps. After around 10 minutes of
lapping, I did a 1.24.9 and he did a 1.26.1, with the same baseline setup. At
this point, I already felt that the session couldn’t focus only on setup –
especially because you can’t just talk about setup if you are obsessed with
driving technique like I am. Also, I knew there was a good point to be made
about the relation between driving changes and setup changes.
I then asked him how he felt about the car. He said it wouldn’t turn, that it
was understeery. I agreed with him; it was indeed. But the car was still
drivable and with the right driving style we could get a nice neutral steer
towards oversteer on exit (where all four tires were working, and the car
was sliding just right). So, the car understeered on entry and oversteered on
exit.
Before making any changes to the setup, I figured it would be a lot more
productive to try to minimize the time differences between his lap time and
my lap time.
Here’s the catch: instead of making a setup change to make the car rotate
more, I instructed him to induce more rotation using driving technique.
After looking at the replays and telemetry, we identified that he was turning
in too fast, something he would do naturally because of his experience with
karts in real life and Formula 3 cars in iRacing. Light and high downforce
cars accept (and sometimes even require) this quicker initial turn-in to reach
maximum usage of the four tires right away, but heavy and low downforce
cars are not forgiven by inertia and the front tires need some time to start
moving all that weight around. We’ll talk about exponential steering versus
linear steering later in this book.
After finding more grip in the front tires through a driving style that was
better suited to that car, he found 8 tenths of a second in his lap time,
decreasing his time from a 26.1 to a 25.3. No setup change was done. Then,
it was time to change the setup and give the car the front grip we felt we
needed at the beginning of the coaching session.
We decreased the anti-roll bar stiffness on the front of the car, and we went
back on track. The car immediately turned much more easily on corner
entry. His reaction was positive, feeling that the car was so much more
responsive on entry. Using the technique we worked on before, he was able
to make the car turn as much as he wanted on entry, even oversteer, which
is quite rare in this car under braking because of its nature. However, his lap
times did not improve.
The problem was that this extra rotation on entry was overheating the rear
tires and then the car had less traction overall at the very end of the corner,
which made it slower. He did not improve his 25.3 with the setup that “felt
better.” Because the understeery setup was still drivable, he went back to
the original setup and was doing a great job inducing more rotation. The car
was planted and rotated nicely on exit with aggressive throttle application
while keeping good traction.
This is where the most important lesson of our session emerged. Only make
changes to the setup that will make the car faster. A setup that feels better
won’t necessarily do faster lap times, because the overall balance of the car
(in terms of rotation) does not guarantee that you’ll carry more speed
through the corner. It is incredibly important to look at data and have a lap
time delta when trying new setup changes to make sure that it not only feels
better, but actually gains you time.
Keep in mind that we are focusing on hot lapping and finding lap time in
this example. In other situations, like preparing the car for a long endurance
event, it might make sense to change the setup to make it feel better, be
more predictable, and be less prone to mistakes, like if you are going to be
on track for long hours.
The second important point of the lesson was that you don’t necessarily
have to make setup changes to change how much the car rotates. Driving
adjustments might have an even bigger impact on the way the car behaves.
A skilled racecar driver should be able to make an understeery car rotate
more, even oversteer, or an oversteery car rotate less, even understeer, with
the right braking, downshifting, brake release, steering, and throttle
application.
Try your best to make the car behave how you want it to by making driving
adjustments before making changes to the setup. Prioritizing driving
adjustments will save you a lot of time and will help you improve your
driving technique much more efficiently.
 5

FEELING UNDERSTEER AND OVERSTEER

What is Oversteer and Understeer?

I know there is a lot of confusion even amongst high level drivers

regarding oversteer and understeer. Their names suggest that understeer
means you are just turning the steering less, and that oversteer means
that you are turning the steering too much. This is incorrect. As a matter of
fact, understeer generally happens when you are turning the steering too
much.
The best way to understand these concepts is by replacing "understeer” with
"under-rotation” and "oversteer” with “over-rotation.”
Understeer means the car does not want to turn as much as your steering
input would suggest, meaning you end up going straighter than you
expected. For example, your steering might be asking to turn 50 degrees per
second, but the car is only turning 25 degrees per second. Understeer
happens when the front tires try to point the car into a corner, but the rears
are resisting that rotation. The front tires then give up, and the car starts
pushing forwards against the intended steering angle.
Oversteer means the car rotates more than you expected. For example, your
steering might be asking to turn 50 degrees per second, but the car rotates
more than that, turning 70 degrees per second. Oversteer happens when the
front tires point the car into the corner, but the rears are not capable of that
much traction, and they give up. The rear then starts sliding, moving
outwards more than the front end of the car, which makes the total slip
angle of the car way over the acceptable limit. It's important to note here
that oversteer is always a reaction, as the front tires need to initiate the
rotation before the rears start to give up. Remember this.

Feeling Understeer
Understeer is the safest way around the track, when at the right speed. But it
can be quite dangerous if you are too fast since it’ll throw you off track. The
front tires reach their limit first and become incapable of generating a
higher amount of rotation. In understeer, we are on the limit of only two
tires, with the rear tires taking little stress. Through understeer, the car locks
itself into a path (when controlled and done consciously) and pushes
forward like it’s on rails. Because of this, we can predict the path of the car
a lot easier, and we can then “go along for the ride” to understand the
rotational capability of the car at that point and speed on track.
This is remarkably useful. Feeling that understeer will give you an idea of
how much speed the car can carry in that corner, since the speeds on a
neutral or oversteery car won’t be much higher than that. In other words, if
you understeer through a corner, you will have a good idea of how much
speed the car will carry when doing a full send. For beginners, understeer
tends to be easier to deal with, especially during a long stint. The car gets
into a predictable line, and you go along for the ride. As long as your speed
is close to ideal, you can mostly wait for the car to turn until you feel
comfortable to accelerate. You can spend a long amount of time, sometimes
full seconds, doing nothing, just waiting for the car to turn. So, we can say
that understeer is the easiest way to put you in a nice comfort zone as you
are cruising around the corner.

Feeling Oversteer
Oversteer happens when the front tires have done too great of a job – so
much so that the rears could not keep up with such a demand for rotation.
At this point, the car becomes unstable, and things happen fast. racecars are
not made for drifting. When they oversteer, they can go over the point of no
return very quickly and spin. Then, a reaction is required to prevent spin.
Oversteer is always a result of something. Understeer happens when the
fronts fail to rotate the car – it can happen immediately if we flick the
steering, for example. But oversteer always happens as a consequence of
the front tires initiating a rotation that the rears won’t be able to cope with.
Because of this, oversteer happens because of excessive grip on the front
tires. The exception would be when locking up the rears, which drastically
decreases the available grip.
Oversteer may be a bit more complicated to learn at first. At the beginning,
it will happen faster than you are prepared for, which might scare you or
make you spin. Initially, we are not capable of feeling the car start to
oversteer fast enough, and we end up not making a correction in time,
which makes it even worse. But as we start predicting what kinds of inputs
cause more oversteer (like trail braking, engine braking, and steering), we
become more prepared to deal with it and make it happen in smaller and
smaller amounts. When we correct oversteer with countersteer, we end up
stopping the front tires from creating forces towards the inside of the corner,
so during the correction of a big oversteer we're only using two tires, just
like understeer. Remember when I said oversteer is a reaction? It reacts to
the driver giving too much grip to the front tires. So, we do have some
amount of control over how much oversteer we cause, especially if we're
aware of an oversteery setup or car.

Neutral Steer
Based on what we have learned about oversteer and understeer, you don't
want to be doing either of them, right? Then why does everyone keep
saying they want a car that oversteers more or that understeers more? If
both are bad, what should we aim for? None? Both? It is actually possible,
and preferable, to have both ends of the car on the limit (and beyond) at the
same time. This is called neutral steer.
Neutral steer means that the car has the same amount of slip angle (“scrub”)
on both the front and rear tires. Of course, it is impossible to be at this state
during the entirety of a corner. You will have to turn the steering to initiate a
corner, change direction, or make adjustments, so you'll be in and out of this
state, making corrections to try to keep the car in a neutral state for the
longest time possible.
Neutral steer is the ultimate goal of car handling. This is where you'll
extract the maximum grip possible from all four tires. Removing the driving
line from the equation, the faster driver will be the one who spends the most
time in this state.
Neutral steer happens when we get used to both understeer and oversteer to
the point where we start dealing with microscopic aspects of them, and we
start “dancing with the car.” This is when we start spending more and more
time in a state where the car is indeed sliding both ends a little bit. A clear
case of neutral steer is when the car is drifting through a corner, but the
steering is completely neutral. This does not mean that we should spend the
most time possible with the steering pointing straight! We can still reach the
neutral steer state (front and rear tires sliding a bit) with some steering
angle. The lower the speed, the more steering we want.
To summarize, in understeer we are using two tires at the limit, in oversteer
we’re using two tires at the limit, and in neutral steer we’re using all four
tires on the limit.
With the magical ideal neutral steer in mind, we can still ask ourselves if it
is faster to drive an oversteery car versus an understeery car.
Bear in mind that you can still induce understeer in oversteery setups, and
induce oversteer (to some extent) in understeery setups. But the first case is
definitely easier! That's why the vast majority of the fastest drivers will
prefer an oversteery car.

Do I Choose a Car that Oversteers or Understeers?

An oversteery car allows you to spend much more time in the neutral steer
state, as you have some room for correction. It is much more difficult to get
away from just destroying the front tires in an understeery car.
Oversteer is a more controllable state which forces you to drive more
actively, with many small corrections, which makes you more present and
focused. An understeery car is lazy. Sometimes there's nothing you can do
about it, because to correct the understeer you end up over slowing the car
way too much, making you lose seconds of your lap time.
Some cars look like they don't oversteer at all, especially racecars with slick
tires. Why is this? It is because of something called slip angle. The optimal
slip angle is how much a tire should be sliding to give the maximum
traction possible.
Some tires have a much higher slip angle, like road tires, and driving them
on the limit makes it look like the car is sliding all the time. The lesser the
slip angle, the less it looks like the car is going sideways. This is why karts
and historic cars seem to always be sliding while Formula 1 cars look like
they're on rails, not sliding at all. But they are!
Rear-wheel drive cars are capable of maintaining neutral steer for the
entirety of the corner. This is not the case for front-wheel drive cars, since
accelerating out of the corner with torque being added on the front tires
decreases rotation drastically, generally causing understeer on exit.
If you are too used to understeery cars and want to find those last seconds in
your lap time, get out of your comfort zone and think about this. If you are
dealing with fixed setups and the cars understeer or oversteer way too
much, you have to start inducing the opposite behavior through driving
inputs. Inducing understeer and inducing oversteer are two crucial
techniques to reach the neutral state in different cars.
 6

WHAT IS TRAIL BRAKING?

T he brakes have two functions in racecars, one of which is widely

underestimated. The first and most important one is deceleration. It is
the one we all know since it is the only one in urban cars. In racecars,
we use the brakes not only to decelerate, but also to rotate the car. But we
should not individually brake on a straight line, then release the brakes, then
start turning, and then use the brakes to turn the car more. This would create
a gap on the grip usage levels of the tires. We should blend these two
functions, braking and rotation, together while keeping the car on the limit
of traction. Trail braking is the technical term for blending these two
functions in the most effective way. In the next chapters, we will learn ways
to build up and perfect this technique to the highest level.
 7

THE STRING THEORY

A s beginners, we learn that we should not brake and turn at the same
time while at the maximum capacity of either. If we try to do both at
the same time anyway, we will exceed the grip limit of the tires and
lose control of the car in some way. The simplest way to learn this
distinction is to completely separate the inputs by finishing the braking
before we start turning the car. Although this is the safest way to learn, we
then leave a gap in between the two inputs, consequently being under the
limit of grip for that moment. This gap becomes smaller and smaller as we
progress towards high performance driving.
In this first graph, we are using 100% of the grip available under braking,
and as we drop the brakes to zero while still in a straight line, we bring the
grip usage down to 0% until we start turning. When we do that, we're
wasting precious seconds that could have been used to slow or turn the car,
making us spend more time in that corner than necessary. This step is
necessary for beginners, though. Not only do we need to mentally
understand these two inputs individually, but we also need to teach our
body how to control them. We learn in big chunks first. At this point, we
can feel the difference between full brakes and no brakes, or steering a lot
and not steering at all, but the subtleties in between (smaller chunks) will be
perceivable as we develop muscular (and mental) sensitivity.
 Beginners’ braking (red) versus steering telemetry traces
(blue)

As we progress, we either learn that we need to release the brakes more

slowly to maintain a little bit of weight on the front tires, or continue to
brake lightly while turning, for the same reason, or both. These two ideas
can work together, although most drivers won't perfect this right away,
since trying both at the same time generally causes the car to over slow,
which feels wrong and makes us stop braking more quickly at one of the
stages.

Beginners’ braking (red) versus steering (blue) telemetry

traces, with slower release of the brakes, increasing turn-in
rotation.

In the graph above, we still have some brake pressure applied while turning
in, which makes the car rotate more on entry, but as we reach 0% braking
(coasting), the car starts understeering deep into the corner (mid-corner).

Trail braking with constant feathering while turning, which

allows more rotation.

In this third example, the quick drop in the brakes causes the car to turn in
less aggressively (understeer on entry), but the feathering of the brakes until
mid-corner (where we start accelerating) causes a little more overall
rotation.
To optimize the grip of the racecar, we need to efficiently transition the
energy used to stop the car into energy used to turn the car, as if we were
pouring liquid from one cup to another, while maintaining 100% grip usage,
or without spilling a drop of liquid.
For example:

100% braking = 0% turning

90% braking = 10% turning
50% braking = 50% turning
T% braking = 100% turning
The string theory is a way to visualize the entanglement between these two
inputs. The string theory relates the brake release to the steering input, as if
there was an imaginary string between the side of steering and the brake
pedal. This way, when you turn, you feel this imaginary connection pulling
the brakes upwards accordingly. I say "accordingly" because it should really
follow the speed of turning. Turn in slowly, release the brakes slowly. Turn
in quickly, release the brakes quickly.

By thinking of the relation between steering and braking like this we can
create a trigger in our brain, and after enough practice, we will
automatically release the brakes as we increase steering, through muscle
memory, without even thinking about it. It is a mistake to add steering while
maintaining the brakes at the same pressure. The inverse is also true. While
coming from a corner into another braking zone (think about Acqua
Minerale, at Imola) we should never increase the brakes while maintaining
the steering, as that immediately upsets the car into locking the fronts or
spinning, depending on car and setup. The immediacy of response from the
car when you start to apply the string theory is incredible.
Note that this is an extremely simplistic visualization of a much more
complex technique, although it is a foundational technique that will enable
us to master others. I will discuss the idea of the string theory in more depth
to give you a better idea about the types of adjustments that can be done to
it.

Ratios of String Theory

First, let’s discuss the different ratios of the string theory. The ratio in this
instance is the correlation between how much we turn versus how much we
release the brakes. Try all these examples in your car or simulator, with the
car stopped. It’s impossible to determine “the correct” ratio between the
steering angle and braking pressure immediately, since it will heavily
depend on many factors. Instead, for these exercises we will assume and
practice different ratios to create a range of possibilities in our muscle
memory.

Example One: 100% brakes and 0 degrees of steering angle

T% brakes and 90 degrees steering angle.
In this example, for each percentage of brake release, we turn a little less
than 1 degree of steering angle.

Example Two: 100% brakes and 0 degrees of steering angle

T% and 180 degrees steering angle.

In this example, for each percentage of brake release, we turn two times
more than what we were turning in the first example. This means we’re
turning the steering faster but releasing the brakes at the same speed.
Don’t over-think these values too much. They’re just examples to show you
that we can have infinite types of “strings.” The benefit of this exercise is
creating the connection between the inputs in your brain since we’ll use this
inverse proportion in absolutely any corner, at any track, and in any car, in
road racing. Try this until you can recreate these different ratios with ease
and make this inverse proportion become natural in your driving.
Again, the biggest mistake to avoid is to increase steering input and brake
pressure at the same time. Do this and you will most likely exceed the
available grip of the car and its reaction will be unpredictable and
inefficient.
The string theory is one of the most important pillars for high performance
driving technique. It is the foundation for other more complex techniques
that will be discussed later. These next techniques will require the muscle
memory that you’ll develop using the string theory. Make sure you practice
this in many different situations, in all kinds of corners and cars. Later,
we’ll polish this theory with other considerations, and it’ll feel slightly
different. Allow yourself to practice the string theory and then forget about
it. Your muscle memory will retain the important stuff.

String Theory in High Downforce Cars

At this point, you should be able to release the brakes very slowly using the
Press Less Technique that we need under braking with high downforce cars.
For these cars, you’ll use the very same technique, just increasing the speed
of release as you start turning in.

I: Brake release in a straight line due to loss of downforce. II:

Brake release due to the string theory (pouring grip
availability into turning).

This does look more difficult to accomplish in terms of precision, but it’s
just a matter of time and repetition until the brain is able to separate these
two stages with ease. Repetition with good awareness of these two stages is
going to be the key during your practice.

Advanced String Theory

The string theory discussed in the last chapter takes some time to become
part of your driving. With it, we can get more rotation into the corners and
brake later. But that’s still not good enough. It’s possible to have even more
precise balance control to make sure we keep the same state of neutral steer
(all four tires working equally) for the most amount of time possible during
a corner. By just linking the brake release to the steering, we end up
creating a rather linear relation, which is not ideal.

Brake release when rotation is linear and progressive.

Braking trace is in red, steering in blue, and throttle
application in green.

Brake release according to the advanced string theory. When

understeering, keep the brakes pressed for a little longer
while increasing the steering at a lower rate to regain grip on
the front tires.
 Brake release according to the advanced string theory. When
oversteering, release the brakes more quickly to transfer
weight to the rear tires to regain the grip and control the
oversteer. (Note that there is no correction in the steering in
this case. We will discuss this later.)

We don’t release the brakes at a completely fixed rate. We don’t turn the
steering at a completely fixed rate either. Other factors like downforce,
elevation changes, engine braking, and camber will drastically change the
driving approach into different corners.
Instead of releasing the brakes according to how much you turn the steering
wheel, try releasing the brakes according to how much the car rotates.
When we turn the car, the steering is the input and the rotation is the output.
In the regular string theory, we release the brakes according to the input. In
the advanced string theory, we release the brakes according to the output, or
the response of the car.
The main benefits of the advanced string theory are the following:

1. More freedom. You can turn the steering at different rates without
worrying too much about making those adjustments to the brake
release.
2. You’ll stay closer to the limit. By sensing rotation and releasing the
brakes according to it, you’ll carry more speed as soon as you feel
the car is responding and turning into the corner.

This only works if you do it with subtlety. It doesn’t look very different to
the regular string theory. It’s a way to feel the rotation in a way that will
allow you to make micro-adjustments with the brake release without
affecting the steering too much, for example. These micro-adjustments will
be mostly used to correct the rotation of the car – inducing understeer and
inducing oversteer. There are many ways we can describe how this works,
and in the next chapters you’ll see how we’re just analyzing the same thing
through many different perspectives.
 8

TERMINAL TRAIL BRAKING PRESSURE

W hat was that T% mentioned in the string theory chapter?

T% is what I call terminal trail braking pressure. It is the brake
pressure that we’ll have by the time we start accelerating. Some cars can’t
handle more than 3~4% braking pressure mid-corner before accelerating or
they’ll start locking up the inside front. Other cars require that you keep a
heavy trail braking, with a terminal trail braking pressure around 20%. If
you are coasting before accelerating out of the corner, that means your
terminal trail braking is 0%.
When on the limit, we are using the optimal slip angle of the tires plus a bit
of braking in order to, in the example of the front tires, have some weight
transfer and increase the grip available. That small amount of pressure is
clearly demonstrated when doing that final trail braking stage mid-corner.
The terminal trail braking pressure will be affected by the amount of
mechanical grip available. Trail braking on a low-grip off-camber corner
must be much lighter, so the T% is lower. Trail braking on a high-grip
compression or banked corner can be heavier since the car will have much
more traction.
On cars with very stiff front suspension, where the front inside tire can even
be lifted off the track while turning, the T% must be very low since even
braking at 1% may lock up the flying tire. In these situations, bringing the
brake bias towards the rear helps minimize the issue.
Ideally, you want to generate as much rotation as possible without losing
the rear while trail braking into a corner. The ideal T% pressure is the one
that maximizes the usage of the front tires, making the car rotate more.
There will be an optimal combination of T% and brake bias (as well as
setup) that will determine the rotation of the car and the speed it will carry
mid-corner. Experimentation is the best way to find it, and awareness of this
concept can help you make more precise and surgical adjustments in your
driving.
 9

THREE TOOLS FOR ROTATION ON ENTRY

W hen turning into the corner, there are three ways to make the car
turn related to driving inputs. Car setup and brake bias are not
going to be mentioned since they’re adjustments that cannot be
made during a corner.
The three tools every driver can adjust that will alter rotation on entry,
either to increase or decrease it, are the steering, the trail braking, and the
engine braking. Technically, there is a fourth tool, the maintenance
throttle, 1 but it should be used rarely, and in extreme cases where the car
wants to rotate way too much due to its nature (like having an open
differential or a specific setup). Because of its rarity, I won’t mention it
right away.

Steering
The steering determines the direction of the rotation. Yes, you can make the
car turn depending on the steering angle and how quickly you adjust that
angle, but this characteristic is often overlooked. Turning too much in a
balanced car can cause understeer, and relying only on steering angle to
control the balance of the car is limited. If you only worry about the
steering, buckle up and pay attention to the next two tools.

Trail Braking
Trail braking will mostly determine how much weight there will be on the
front versus the rear tires, and therefore how much traction each end has.
Think of it as a way to empower or lessen the rotational capability of the
car. With the exact same steering angle, you can have a car that understeers
terribly or that spins very quickly just by having a different trail braking
trace. I have encountered hundreds of drivers who started gaining rotation
in the car by turning the steering less and focusing on keeping the weight on
the front tires by trail braking more slowly. By changing the brake bias, you
change how much braking stress goes to the rears versus the fronts, which
will alter how much rotation the trail braking will cause. But again, this
cannot be changed during the corner, so if you get too much rotation in that
fraction of a second, changing the brake bias will not be an option.

Engine Braking
Engine braking (on rear-wheel drive racecars) will act as very light brakes
on the rear tires. When off throttle, the engine’s inertia tries to slow down
the tires a little bit. In this moment, the rear tires are keeping the engine
running. That’s why when you lock-up the rear tires, you can hear the
engine “turning off” for a moment and starting back up when you unlock
the tires.
The higher the RPM, the stronger the engine braking will be. During turn-
in, the engine braking will decrease the resistance to rotation of the rear
tires, allowing the car to turn a lot more. In some cars, the engine braking
has a big effect on rotation: with a fixed steering trace, trail braking trace,
and a change to the downshifting speed, you can have a car that completely
understeers or a car that oversteers and spins.
Downshifting can have two effects on the car. The most pronounced and
discussed effect is the engine braking that comes with high RPM acting as
slight braking on the rear tires. But the abrupt change in RPM itself due to
the engine speed on the new lower gear matching the current wheel speeds
will upset the rear tires in many cars. That means downshifting after turn-in
might create a bigger effect, making the car lose the rear during the fraction
of a second the downshifting takes effect.
Let me give you an example. I was racing in Formula 4 in Miami and doing
a corner where I could choose to downshift to second gear before turning or
after turn-in at a lower speed. In this example, downshifting to second gear
at a lower speed theoretically makes the car rotate less, since we would
have a lower RPM deeper into the corner. But what really happened was the
opposite: I would lose the rear if I downshifted later, while turning into the
corner. The reason is that the act of downshifting caused stress to the rear
tires, making the car slide for a fraction of a second, but that would end up
snowballing into losing the car altogether. While downshifting earlier, I
would get more engine braking, which would theoretically make the car
rotate more, but in a more predictable way, so I was able to manage that
extra rotational tendency with my steering angle and trail braking.
This example shows why its preferable to have the last downshift before
you turn into the corner, whenever possible. Of course, there are specific
situations where you would have to downshift during the corner, like long
corners. In those cases, just make sure you are ready for a possible micro-
slide during the downshift itself.

Summary
In short, the steering may generate the rotation, but the trail braking and
engine braking will amplify that rotation. Now that you know that with the
same steering you can have a car with opposite behaviors depending on
what you do with the pedals and gears, pay some more attention to these
other two tools when turning into corners. You will be surprised at how
drastically they change the behavior of the car. This will unlock a new way
of driving that gives you more options and more possible decisions to make
when dealing with balance into the corner.
The proportion of these three tools will differ depending on the stage of the
corner.
On corner entry, we should not use too much steering since the RPM are
going to be high, causing more engine braking and consequently more
rotation. We’ll also still be transitioning from braking to turning, which
means there must be some considerable braking going on, keeping the front
tires loaded, and causing more rotation (unless you are braking way too
hard and ABS engages on the front tires, which would cause less rotation).
When deep into the corner, towards the minimum speed point (which is also
the Maximum Rotation Point), engine braking should have minimal effect
since the RPM are low. In this situation we’re not trail braking too much
either since the braking pressures are already much lower. Because of that,
the proportion of the three tools for rotation will be different.

Engine braking (EB), steering (S), and braking (B) proportions of influence in
rotation at different stages of the corner

In the next few chapters, we’ll discuss how to make adjustments to each of
these tools in the most efficient way, while keeping all four tires busy and
generating good traction throughout the entire corner.

1 Low percentages of throttle during corner entry to shift some weight to the rear.
 10

ENGINE BRAKING IN FWD CARS VS RWD CARS

E ngine braking is one of the most underrated tools to generate

oversteer in RWD cars. It can be the difference between understeering
on entry versus completely losing the rear and spinning the car. But
what about front-wheel drive cars?
Engine braking in FWD cars versus RWD cars will have the opposite effect
on rotation. Because the engine is connected to the front tires in front-wheel
drive cars, it feels as if there is an extra amount of braking power to the car
when off throttle. If the car is already on the limit of rotation, engine
braking will actually decrease rotation at higher RPM, making it understeer
when you downshift more quickly.
So, if you want to generate more rotation with a front-wheel drive car,
downshift more slowly so that the front tires will have more grip available.
 11

WEIGHT TRANSFER: A TOOL FOR ROTATION

MANAGEMENT

T he weight of the car is thrown around while we drive. We’ve all been
in a bus where the driver suddenly braked hard and we were thrown
forwards due to inertia. The direction we’re thrown tells us what tires
will have more grip during that moment. While braking (in the bus, we get
thrown forwards) the front tires receive the load transfer, compressing more
against the track and gaining grip. While accelerating (in the bus, we get
thrown backwards), the rear tires receive the load transfer, gaining more
grip while the fronts lose that grip.
While driving, we can see the nose of the car squatting as we brake and
lifting as we accelerate. Just think that the lower the nose of the car is, the
more grip the front tires will have, and the higher the nose is, the less grip
the front tires will have.
The most practical way to use weight transfer is by feeling how the pedals
affect the rotation of the car, often a lot more than the steering. What you do
with the pedals will affect how your steering will perform.

Weight Transfer Under Braking and Turning

Under light braking, some of your weight is transferred forward,
“empowering” the front tires. This means when you steer under light
braking, the front tires will be more capable of turning, increasing overall
rotation.
Under heavy braking, the turning may reach the limit of the tire, causing
locking and dropping grip effectiveness to zero immediately, causing the
car to go completely straight.
We can then create three levels of braking effects on entry while turning:

First level (braking too light)

Causes a little more rotation since we’re just bringing a little bit of
weight to the fronts without causing too much stress.

Second level (ideal braking)

Causes a little bit of oversteer since we’re right on the limit of the
front tires, squeezing as much grip as we can from them, causing the
car to rotate a lot more. In this second level, we are in the sweet spot
of rotation for the front tires, and if we think the car is oversteering
too much, we can simply release the brakes a little quicker to be
closer to the first level. This will allow a little more rotation, but less
than the second level. This is called inducing understeer through
brake release. We’ll discuss this a little bit more in the next
chapters.

Third level (excessive braking while turning)

Causes tire locking and consequently total loss of grip.
In cars with brake bias towards the fronts but without ABS, the front
tires will lock and immediately lose grip, causing the car to go
completely straight.
In cars with brake bias towards the fronts and ABS, the front tires
will engage ABS and lose grip, causing understeer, but the car will
still turn a little since the ABS prevents full locking.
In cars with brake bias towards the rears but without ABS, the rear
tires will lock and immediately lose grip, causing the car to spin.
In cars with brake bias towards the rears and ABS, the rear tires will
engage ABS and lose grip, causing oversteer, but the car may still be
 catchable, since the ABS prevents full locking.

Weight Transfer Under Acceleration and Turning

Under light acceleration, some of your weight will be brought to the rear
tires, increasing rear grip and decreasing rotation (since the front tires will
be lifted a little and will be less capable of turning).
Under heavy acceleration (in cars with enough power for that), the rear tires
may get too much stress and will start losing grip, causing wheel spin, more
rotation, and even total loss of grip, snapping the rear tires, and causing a
spin. We can then create three levels of throttle effects on exit:

First level (under the traction limit, no wheel spin)

Causes understeer as we’re bringing some weight to the rears
without causing too much stress.

Second level (at the traction limit, edging wheel spin)

Causes a controllable oversteer since we’re on the limit of the rear
grip, while being able to make some micro-adjustments to maintain
the car balance. This is the optimal level.

Third level (over the traction limit)

Causes loss of rear grip, wheel spin, and possible power
slide/drift/spin since we went past the grip limit of the rears.

While these are the three possible effects of throttle application on the
balance of the car, remember that some cars have too little horsepower and
will be stuck between the first and second level, while some cars are
powerful enough to be at the third level way too easily. Know your car and
setup to know where these three levels sit within your throttle percentages.
The throttle application trace in this image could be under the
limit in a low-powered car, causing understeer, but way over
the limit in a Formula 1 car, causing instant spin.
 12

STEERING ANGLE VS STEERING FORCE

T he car communicates a lot through the steering wheel. The steering

input is traditionally measured in degrees of angle. You will most
likely hear “I turn less than you” rather than “I turn with less force
than you.” In this chapter, I want to think outside the box and expand the
ways we can communicate with the car. Before going further, let’s dissect
some concepts.

“Gripping the steering wheel” is how hard we grip our hands on the
steering wheel itself. You can, for example, grip the wheel very hard while
not turning a single degree. This is not efficient. Too much grip means less
sensitivity to what the car is telling you, less precision when adding steering
input, and it could hurt you. The other end of this spectrum would be
“driving with your pinkies,” which is well known advice from many
coaches around the world that seeks to induce the driver to use just enough
grip, no more. The Light Hands Technique will be discussed soon and will
bring more detail to this concept.

“Steering angle” is the state of the steering at a given moment, measured in

degrees, like 45º, 90º, etc.
“Steering force” is the force added by our hands and arms to initiate the
movement of the wheel. Note that this is not the grip. We need to grip the
wheel to be able to apply some force – just enough so our hands don’t slide
around it.
Simply put, we add angle by using force. You grip the wheel, and to turn,
you pull it down with one hand and push up with the other. Without force,
the wheel does not turn. Add more force, and you’ll steer more quickly.
Add less force, and it will turn more slowly.
This may sound obvious since we’re bringing some basic concepts to the
surface, but you may develop extremely important habits in your driving if
you think about these concepts more analytically. You may identify
inefficient force applications and unnecessary tension as well as develop
better sensitivity to understeer/oversteer mid-corner.
The benefit of thinking about steering force instead of angle is that this
allows you to have a conversation with the car. You can know how much
grip is available in the front tires by feeling how much the steering wheel is
resisting to the input. When thinking about angle, you end up “overriding”
this sensation.
 13

EXPONENTIAL STEERING VS LINEAR STEERING

B eing free from the linear relation between brake release and steering
might cause a little bit of confusion. You might ask yourself: what
would be the ideal steering trace, then?
The most basic answer to this becomes the distinction between two types of
steering input: exponential and linear.

Exponential Steering
Steering input will be more progressive in cars with low downforce. These
cars can’t rotate well at high speeds and the V-shape nature of the racing
line will show up in the steering trace. The initial rotation is going to be
very progressive, following the elliptical trace of the V-shape line, but will
increase at a higher and higher rate (or exponential rate) as the car slows
down. Because of this, a low downforce car will most likely have a steering
trace that looks like this:
 Exponential steering

The Light Hands Technique allows you to find the ideal trace more
naturally from car to car.
Some cars with aggressive engine braking reinforce the need for an
exponential steering trace. This is because by the time you do the last
downshift and turn into the corner, the RPM are still very high, causing a
higher tendency to rotate. That is the most common reason a lot of cars tend
to oversteer on early entry. As the speed decreases into the corner, so do
RPM and the tendency for extra rotation.
Exponential steering. This is a more extreme example, with some slight
countersteering as the car slides into the corner dancing between neutral
steer and oversteer.
The example above will be re-used several times in the next few chapters,
each with a different analysis or point of focus. The car used was a Ray
FF1600, in iRacing, at Okayama, Turn 1. The corner was near perfect in
terms of lap time, with good track usage, racing line, well-timed
downshifting, and good braking and steering technique.

Okayama, Turn 1 (From the left to the right)

Above is a breakdown of the telemetry in that corner. Number (1) on the
steering graph shows just a bit of initial steering (8 degrees to the right),
which in combination with the downshifts, extra engine braking (blue circle
on the throttle graph), and the peak braking, make the car point into the
corner nicely. Since the car is already pointing well due to the braking and
engine braking, some light countersteer is needed (2). The countersteering
action (2) is maintained as the car points even more into the corner (yes, the
car is gaining rotation to the right even though we’re still turning very
slightly to the left!). Finally, when the RPM and braking pressures are
lower and the car is deeper into the corner, we add more steering to the right
(3) as we’re about to accelerate out of the corner and unwind the steering.
The blue line on the steering graph represents the theoretical exponential
steering line, which would be much closer to the actual steering telemetry in
less oversteery cars.

Linear Steering
Cars with more downforce behave as if they had more weight force acting
upon the tires (pressing them further against the track), without the
downside of inertia that said weight would bring. This means that they can
brake more, accelerate more, and turn more, the higher their speed.
Because of this, when a high downforce car approaches a corner, it can
rotate more on early entry. This means we can start turning later into the
corner, and the difference in rotation from turn-in to MRP will be much less
noticeable than it is in low downforce cars.

Steering traces in high downforce cars (blue) versus low downforce cars
(purple)

Since the car will accept more rotation on entry, the steering angle becomes
less exponential. You’ll still turn slowly into the corner if there is braking,
but the rate at which you increase the steering is higher on entry compared
to low downforce cars.
I don’t like telling students how a trace should be. Instead, I prefer to teach
students to feel the car and find approaches that will eventually lead to the
correct telemetry trace. The next chapters about Light Hands Technique and
inducing oversteer and understeer will show you how we can get the right
driving inputs if we chase the right behavior from the car using our senses.
Camber and Elevation Changes
Remember that the steering trace will be affected by the corner
characteristics. If there is a crest on corner entry, your steering will have to
be gentler, but as soon as that becomes a compression or cambered turn,
then you can add steering at a much higher rate. This will create unique
steering traces for some specific corners. This is one of the reasons I don’t
like telling students what to do and to instead look for the right feeling of
rotation where they’re using all four tires at all times (neutral steer). The
traces will have to adapt to these corners to make it happen.
 14

LIGHT HANDS TECHNIQUE

T he Light Hands Technique is a topic that I have mentioned many

times leading up to now. A precise racing technique requires constant
communication with the car. We don’t just oversteer or understeer on
a given corner. We can have multiple different states, all the way from entry
to late exit, in a corner. In real life, the g-forces will give us information that
can be used to assess the state of the car. The steering wheel, on the other
hand, gives us information on the state of the front tires (and consequently
on the rears as well) through resistance to turning.
Different cars can have a wide range of steering resistance. Cars with power
steering will have much less resistance, while cars without power steering
could have incredibly heavy steering wheels. In Formula 1, for example, the
drivers have the option to choose the amount of power steering, so their
steering wheel can be heavy enough to feel the car through the tires, but not
so much so that it becomes difficult to endure for the full race. Cars with
too much power steering may give you very little feeling, decreasing
precision and sensitivity.
The Light Hands Technique is the ability to adjust the amount of force
applied to the steering wheel. It does not necessarily mean to drive with
extremely light and relaxed hands all the time, but rather to be aware that
the force can vary depending on car, corner stage, and even state of the car
(understeer, oversteer, tire locking, etc.).
Add less force on entry to induce the initial rotation with more precision.
Add more force mid-corner to generate more rotation and “test” the amount
of available grip, and so on. What matters here is being able to move this
force slider up and down to feel the car as much as possible.
It is incredibly common to grip the wheel too hard. As a matter of fact, even
with my extensive coaching and driving experiences, one of my coaches for
Super Production Challenge pointed out that I was too tense and gripping
the wheel too hard. It is possible to still be too tense even when we believe
we’re relaxed enough. Examine this with a magnifying glass since this
technique determines the amount of communication that flows between you
and the platform.
Drivers that grip the wheel too hard are most likely not thinking about the
two other tools for rotation on entry: trail braking and engine braking. A
driver that pays proper attention to all three tools will most likely have more
relaxed hands, since they’re necessary for the driver to feel the effects of
trail braking and engine braking on the balance of the car. Tension hinders
the driver from feeling the car.
The most important place to have your hands more relaxed is under hard
braking and turn-in. In threshold braking, having the car balanced 50/50 left
to right is necessary for maximum braking performance, and gripping the
wheel too hard will prevent the car from naturally adjusting to the track
surface, meaning you will have to make micro-adjustments to the steering
angle. Or you’ll be forcing the car to turn a degree or two without noticing,
and the lateral balance of the car will not be 50/50. If you are pressing the
pedal as hard as you can, a 1% shift in lateral weight balance can be enough
to cause lock up on the unloaded side.
When turning in, you should still be braking a decent amount since you are
starting to transition from braking into turning (trail braking). Because of
this, the front tires will still be heavily loaded and stressed from the braking,
which makes the car very sensitive to steering. Steer too much on turn-in
with tense hands (gripping the wheel too hard) and you might get excessive
rotation, spin on entry, or lock the rear tires (also spinning on entry) or the
front tires (making you lose rotation and go straight if you lock both front
tires). Steer with light hands and you’ll feel the effects of trail braking and
engine braking during the initial rotation of the car.
The most practical way to apply this technique is the following: The
harder you brake, the lighter your hands should be. When turning in,
turn only enough to feel the car responding to the turn. If you want to
experiment forcing the rotation a little more, try to do it at lower speeds
first, then doing it at higher speeds, progressively.

Light Hands Technique – Countersteering

The Light Hands Technique allows you to feel precisely when the car starts
oversteering. More important than that, with light hands you can allow the
natural resistance of the steering to bring the car back to centered without
the need of active intervention from the driver.
Passive countersteering happens when the steering wants to turn itself in
the other direction on its own because of the forces that come from the
contact between the tires and the track. The wheel will be drawn back to the
center when not oversteering (self-centering) but will be turned past center
and in the opposite direction when oversteering (passive countersteering).
This effect is much stronger in cars without power steering. In these cases,
the driver generally never needs to deliberately turn back to a straight line
(using active force) since the passive countersteering force is higher than
the turning force from the driver. The immediacy of the physics makes this
effect happen with absolutely no delay and with no need of human
intervention.
 Ray FF1600 at Okayama, iRacing

The example above shows passive countersteering. Although the steering is

pointing slightly to the left (red circle), I’m still adding force to the right –
towards the inside of the corner. I’m fighting against the natural feedback of
the wheel, allowing it to make the corrections the car is requesting due to
oversteer. This allows me to countersteer very precisely and immediately
without losing the racing line or going wide. Passive countersteering is only
possible when the amount of oversteer is subtle, which means you need to
be very close to the perfect limit for it to be effective.

Active countersteering is a direct action from the driver to turn the

steering the other way. It should happen when the driver senses oversteer
and needs to take action to correct the slide.
Active countersteering depends on a person’s ability to react. For reference,
Formula 1 drivers have a reaction time of around 200 milliseconds.
Practicing the Light Hands Technique enough could move the number of
corrections in your driving towards the passive countersteering realm.
Active countersteering is a disruptive action and has many downsides when
overdone, like changing the line of the car towards the outside. Active
countersteering may be necessary in some cases (call them Holy Sh*t
moments), but they must be minimized.
Try to do some laps on the simulator and identify if your corrections are
active or passive. If your wheelbase is not powerful enough, like 2Nm, you
will probably make almost 100% of your corrections actively. As soon as
you get around 6Nm or more, it becomes easier to allow the steering to
make the corrections on its own, and you can then work on your passive
countersteering skills.
The benefit of passive countersteering is that the driver needs to do less
work, leaving space for more precise driving and better lap times. Doing
passive countersteering while gripping the wheel too hard is impossible.
15
 LIGHT HANDS TECHNIQUE PART 2
KEEPING THE FRONTS ENGAGED ON ENTRY

A s we gain precision with proper steering force and the Light Hands
Technique, we become more capable of adjusting this force in each
stage of the corner. But until we find the perfect amount of steering
force, we keep alternating between too little force and too much force.
When we start oversteering with the hands being overly relaxed, the passive
countersteer might bring the steering back a little bit too much, which puts
the car under the limit.
Keeping the fronts engaged at all times is crucial to maintaining 100% grip
usage. Think about it: every time we make an oversteer correction with
countersteer when the front tires are pointing away from the corner, we’re
only using 50% of the available grip in that fraction of a second (since the
rears are on the limit but the fronts are not), and the front tires are moving
the car away from the ideal line.
So, we need a solution to keep the fronts pointed into the corner at all
times. That solution is inducing understeer. We can do that with the pedals.
The pedals have the power of transferring grip back and forth, enabling or
disabling grip from each end. In this case, we can induce understeer by
shifting weight back to the rear tires, decreasing the grip on the front tires
even while keeping the same steering angle. This is one of the most
important tools to make sure we’re always using all four tires as much as
possible.
Let’s summarize:
During entry the car oversteers. It is using 100% of the available grip but
starting to slide and needs to be corrected.

Correction Tool 1
By inducing understeer with pedal release or some throttle, the car
will correct the slide but keep turning into the corner. The grip usage
is at 100% and the car stays close to the racing line.
 Correction Tool 2
countersteer so the car points out to correct the slide. The grip usage
is at 50% and the car loses its line and goes wide.

Inducing understeer (Tool 1) is the most efficient tool and must be a

priority, but it might not be enough. When sliding, we can combine both
tools to maximize lateral traction. We want all tires to be creating a force
towards the inside of the corner. If you passive countersteer very gently
where the front tires are still pulling the car into the corner, you are still
using 100% of the grip. The problem appears when the countersteer is too
big and the fronts stop creating the lateral force towards the inside, starting
to point away from the corner.
You can create a muscle memory programming that looks like this:

1. Try to keep the fronts as loaded as possible and rotate the car.
2. If the car is oversteering, try to release the brakes more quickly to
induce understeer (Tool 1).
3. If that’s not enough, micro-countersteer using passive countersteer
(Tool 2).
4. If that’s still not enough, actively countersteer (aggressive Tool 2).
This should be the last resort.
This all takes place within a fraction of a second. After being properly
trained, this will become an unconscious reflex.
16
 LIGHT HANDS TECHNIQUE PART 3
KEEPING THE FRONTS ENGAGED ON EXIT

O n corner exit, we have the following tools to make sure the car is
100% loaded, in order of priority.

1. Throttle modulation: We want to keep the car in the second level 1

range (medium acceleration) to maintain the rear tires at the edge
of traction (almost wheel spin).
2. Slight passive countersteer: We use the Light Hands Technique to
allow the fronts to make micro-corrections without having them
point too much to the outside.
3. Active countersteer: We are sideways and we need to point the
front tires totally to the outside (grip usage now down to 50%) to
correct the power slide, which is not efficient but is necessary to
save the car from spinning.

As you can see, we can still think about the front tires even on corner exit,
since they’ll have an important role in finalizing the lateral traction as we
gradually decrease rotation. A power slide (generating rotation through
acceleration and inducing oversteer through wheel spin) is slower because
the rear tires are used excessively, losing traction and corner exit speed.
Tools 1 and 2 are the best in most instances. The third tool should be used
minimally. We can induce understeer with the throttle by having less
throttle application and staying closer to the first level (under the traction
limit and no wheel spin), or we can induce oversteer by having more
throttle application and going over to the third level (over the traction limit),
which is almost always a bad idea.
On corner exit, it’s okay to use the Light Hands Technique more to allow
for passive countersteer. Perfect exits generally include the steering being
totally straight while the car is still rotating a bit with the help of the
throttle.
Inducing Understeer
To induce understeer, you need to remove grip from the fronts while adding
grip to the rears. We do that by transferring weight to the rear tires using
one of the following tools:
Releasing the Brakes more Quickly
This is the very first tool we'll use on corner entry when trying to induce
understeer. When trail braking, we determine the amount of weight
traveling back to the rears, and the rate at which the fronts will lift. Release
the brakes quicker and you’ll quickly unload the front tires, decreasing their
grip while increasing the rears’ grip. This will create resistance to rotation,
inducing understeer on the car immediately.
Be careful: cars with very light brakes and ABS might give you the
sensation that releasing the brakes makes them rotate more. The reason is
simple – with too much braking, we’re activating the ABS on the front tires,
which decreases rotation. When we release the brakes, ABS stops, which
makes the car rotate more. Releasing the brakes further from that point
would then cause the effect described here.
The harder the brake pressure required, the easier it will be to induce
understeer through brake release.
Turning in very Quickly
Turn in too quickly and you’ll immediately make the fronts scrub. They
will try to rotate the car at a rate at which they’re incapable, causing
understeer.
The funny thing about this tool is that this is what almost all students do
when I ask them to spin the car deliberately in the simulator. They say
“sure, it’s easy!” and proceed to flick the steering into the corner expecting
to spin, but immediately getting heavy understeer. They accidentally induce
understeer while trying to induce oversteer. The fronts are almost never
capable of throwing the rear of the car that quickly. The car is a heavy metal
box and requires proper “rotational acceleration” to be able to throw the
rear around and spin.

Adding a Little Throttle on Entry

Also known as maintenance throttle, this technique consists of applying a
tiny bit of throttle to bring some weight to the rear tires – 5~15% pressure
would do. Drivers apply maintenance throttle in cars that oversteer too
much – to the point they still oversteer even when coasting – so in these
cases the throttle tames the rear. This technique should not be overused. It
decreases trail braking efficiency and generally causes too much understeer
in most cars.
Adjust the string theory's speed by releasing the brakes and steering more
quickly and the car will most likely understeer, since it will be attempting to
turn quicker and at the same time have less grip available on the fronts. A
quick release of the brakes also feeds the rear with a lot of grip, and they
resist rotation. In other words, steering too quickly while releasing the
brakes too quickly will cause understeer.

EXERCISE:
Understeer deliberately in the simulator. Try to make the front tires
scrub and carry that state of understeer around the whole corner. Try
 doing this while staying as close as possible to the racing line. This
exercise will force you to pay more attention to how much speed
you are carrying into the corner and will help you feel how you can
alter the racing line with the pedals, while keeping the steering
cranked.

1 See chapter Speed of Throttle Application Towards Traction Limit for more information.
 17

INDUCING UNDERSTEER TO CORRECT

OVERSTEER ON CORNER ENTRY

I s it possible to induce understeer to control rotation?

When we oversteer on entry, our instincts tell us to immediately
countersteer. It’s a reflex: we see that the car is pointing too much to the
inside, so we correct it by pointing the steering wheel the other way. We
generally do this while still trail braking, which keeps the front tires loaded.
This is not necessarily the most efficient way to correct the oversteer,
though. There is a better way: induce understeer through brake release.
We can induce understeer through the pedals, trying to leave the steering as
is, still turning into the corner. Why is this way better? And why do this
instead of just countersteering?
In an ideal world, we always use 100% of the grip. That means both the
rears and fronts are engaged, scrubbing, and supporting the platform
laterally. When we countersteer, we are telling the fronts to stop working.
We’re telling the fronts to stop supporting the car and let the front point
back towards the outside. During the fraction of a second we countersteer,
we’re using only 50% of the grip available (only the rears). Although this
works and corrects the oversteer, you end up losing the line and going wide.
When you get an oversteery car, it’s challenging to keep the fronts loaded.
You have to stay active (remember?), making corrections every fraction of a
second to try to keep not only the rear tires, but also the fronts, on the limit,
with vectors pointing towards the inside of the corner on entry.
When we induce understeer through brake release, we are sending more
weight to the rear tires (which are the ones that needed more grip in the first
place – remember, we’re oversteering), while keeping the front tires
engaged. This decreases the amount of grip on the front tires, correcting the
oversteer, while at the same time keeping the front grip usage at 100%
during the entire corner entry phase.
Inducing understeer is a light correction. It can correct micro-oversteer, but
it won’t work if the oversteer is bad.
Countersteering is an aggressive correction. It should be used when
inducing understeer is no longer effective due to the severity of the
oversteer.
These two corrections can work together. It is a fine art to find the balance
between both. Ideally, the order of priority will always be to induce
understeer through brake release first and then start countersteering
(roughly some tenths of a second after the inducing understeer attempt).
This type of correction is one of the most secret and powerful techniques in
motorsport. With it, you can correct the balance of the car while
maintaining the grip on all four tires to as close to 100% as possible at all
times. It’s also one of the most difficult techniques to master in real life,
since it requires fast reaction times, incredible precision, and fearlessness.
Inducing understeer through braking release is the pinnacle of the trail
braking technique.
Imagine that you are looking for the perfect balance. You trail brake heavily
into a corner, and the car develops a little bit of oversteer. What is the first
thing we think about to correct it? countersteer. It works. You proceed to
correct the oversteer and then turn the steering back to keep the car rotating.
I want you to pay attention to one small detail. I mentioned “turn the
steering back,” which means we need to re-engage the fronts to turn the
car… which means we stopped using the fronts to correct the oversteer!
Because of that, we had brought our grip usage from 100% to 50% for a
fraction of a second (the duration of the correction).
Correcting oversteer with countersteering causes a loss of grip efficiency
and the car slides more to the outside of the corner than optimal. Think of
doing a big slide and catching it. What happens with the direction of the
car? It stops turning since we’re now so focused on saving it that we lose
the ideal racing line. The same thing happens on a smaller scale when we
have a little bit of oversteer and correct it with a little bit of countersteer.
Okay, so countersteering to correct oversteer is bad. What should we do,
then?
We induce understeer with the pedals, releasing the brakes a little quicker,
or, in some rare cases, adding a little bit of throttle.
That means we’re using the pedals to bring the weight balance of the car
towards the rear tires and correct the oversteer. When we do it that way, we
can keep the front tires engaged and turning into the corner, maintaining our
racing line as close to optimal as possible. When you master this technique,
you can alternate between understeer and oversteer with just your pedals,
without affecting the steering.
It’s not always going to be that easy, though. When the oversteer is very
subtle, inducing understeer with the brake release is the best way to go. But
if the oversteer is bigger than expected, only releasing the brakes will not be
enough, and brake release and countersteering will have to join forces. We
can then create an order of priority for corrections.
When the car starts oversteering:

1. Release the brakes a little more quickly to shift more weight to the
rears and induce some understeer. At this point, keep turning into
the corner and increasing the angle as the car slows down towards
the MRP. Remember that this needs to be done carefully, as
releasing the brakes too much may make the car carry excessive
speed into the corner.
2. If the brake release alone doesn’t solve the oversteer, the car
should start some passive countersteering (which is a more
aggressive correction that tells the front tires to stop turning the
car, therefore turning off the fronts’ grip for a brief moment).
Remember that even the countersteering can be incredibly subtle if
you can rely on passive countersteering (using the Light Hands
Technique). Think of passive countersteering when you see
onboards of drivers turning into a corner with a small input and
then straightening their wheel as the car turns in even more. Looks
like magic, right? That is just oversteer and some passive
countersteering to keep the steering in the right place.
3. If passive countersteering is still not enough and the car is still
oversteering (at this point, 3 or 4 tenths of a second should have
passed), you should actively countersteer to correct the car more
aggressively. At this point, the car should be drifting more and
more towards the outside of the corner, which is sub-optimal.

These corrections should almost always be made in this order of priority,

and the decision to actively countersteer when passive countersteer fails
should happen in a matter of tenths of a second. Because this happens so
quickly, it cannot always be done consciously. This is a skill that needs to
be trained as a reflex and will eventually become automatic in your driving.
This method won’t work for all cars. Some cars will start understeering as
you release the brakes and lift the fronts, but other cars can have the exact
opposite effect. The reason is setup. Some cars with aggressive ABS and
too forward brake bias will make the fronts lose grip with trail braking
(since the brakes will be abusing the front tires more than the actual weight
transfer that comes with it) and releasing the brakes will actually “let the
fronts breathe” a bit, causing more rotation. This is far from ideal, since you
end up gaining rotation while being unable to control speed, causing
understeer to snap oversteer on entry. Cars that are set up this way are more
difficult to drive, since when you release the brakes, the car will get more
rotation than you expect, and you will have to countersteer anyways,
decreasing efficiency on the front versus the rear tires.
When testing a new car, you must quickly identify how the car reacts to
brake release while turning into the corner. To recap:

In some cars, quicker brake release with heavy trail braking into
the corner causes more rotation.
In other cars, quicker brake release while trail braking into the
corner causes less rotation.

Opposite effects. Make sure you find which one suits your car setup so you
can better predict the behavior of the car. The inducing understeer technique
only works in cars where releasing the brakes will decrease front grip.
Remember that engine braking from downshifting will change the car’s
rotational tendency. Higher RPM on entry may cause the car to rotate more,
so make sure you are always adding up every possible factor that might be
affecting the balance of the car to prevent unpredictability and
inconsistency. Always remember the three tools for rotation on entry:
steering, engine braking, and trail braking. They are the three pillars of car
handling in motorsports.
 18

TRAIL BRAKING – MAKE THE CAR ROTATE OR

LET THE CAR ROTATE?

T rail Braking can feel very different from car to car when it comes to
rotation management. Some cars feel like adding brakes will make
them rotate more, while others feel like braking while turning will
make them rotate less. This happens because as soon as we reach the limit
of grip (longitudinal + lateral), the excess braking stress can have a stronger
effect on the front or rear tires, depending on the car setup, suspension
geometry, and brake bias.
Yes, forward weight transfer will always transfer more load to the front
tires, but sometimes the geometry of the chassis or brake bias will make
more braking density mean less cornering grip to the front tires – enough to
compensate for the higher grip from the weight transfer, accounting for a
lower total grip difference, and causing the car to understeer with more
braking pressure.
Let’s recap a few effects of braking while cornering.

1. The weight transfer, which increases the load on the front tires and
decreases the total load on the rear tires. The effect of weight
transfer under braking is more grip on the front tires, allowing for
more rotation.
2. The stress caused by the braking itself (creating longitudinal slip).
By isolating this stress from the weight transfer, we can have two
possible effects on the rotational tendency. Let’s analyze two
 extremes, for clarity purposes, which would be 100% brake bias on
the front tires and 100% brake bias on the rear tires.
3. With 100% brake bias to the front and 0% to the rear, the stress
would be so high that it would be very easy to lock up the front
tires, making the car go straight. This effect is contrary to the
benefits of weight transfer to the front tire grip, and in this extreme
example it would completely cancel the extra grip from the weight
transfer, making the car understeer even before completely locking,
and go completely straight as soon as the two front tires lock
completely (if we added even more brakes). Reaching ABS on the
front tires first has the same effect as drastically decreasing the
amount of rotation the car is capable of doing, causing understeer.
4. With 0% brake bias to the front and 100% to the rear, the stress
would be totally concentrated on the rear tires, decreasing the grip
even more on the rear while allowing the front tires to use all the
available grip for rotation. In such a situation, the car will already
rotate more with braking even before locking, and then completely
spin as soon as the rear tires lock (if we added even more brakes).
Most karts only have rear brakes, which is why they are so prone
to rotation under braking. In this situation, the weight transfer and
the braking work together to create a huge difference in lateral grip
between front and rear.

Most cars will have the front brake bias in the 50-65% range. The higher
this number, the more we feel that we let the car rotate with the brake
release. The lower the brake bias, the more we feel that we make the car
rotate with the brakes applied. This is a very subtle topic, because the
difference between making it rotate and letting it rotate can be very
subjective and two different drivers can have opposite feelings in the same
car, depending on how heavy their braking density tends to be while
turning.
Another factor that influences the “make it rotate” versus “let it rotate”
sensations is the brake pedal resistance. If the car has brake boosters and
you can reach ABS easily without a lot of brake pressure, it will almost
always feel like you have to release the brakes to let it rotate, since it will be
very easy to just be over the limit (and most cars have the brake bias
towards the front for safety reasons). But if the brake pedal is very heavy
and requires high pressures to work, you will have a bigger range of
pressure to work with on turn-in, which might make it feel like you are
making it rotate.
It’s important to note that it’s still possible to lock the fronts and understeer
mid-corner even if your brake bias is low enough to lock the rears on a
straight line. Be careful with this. If you change the brake bias in order to
gain more rotation mid-corner and ignore the effects on a straight line, you
might lock the rear tires on initial braking and spin.
Trail braking in stiff cars, like Formula cars, can be tricky. If you trail brake
too hard, imagine that you are “choking” the front tires, and they can’t
breathe – they lock. This can happen even if you have a low brake bias. If
this is happening, then let the car rotate with less trail braking density. Let
the front tires breathe and they’ll give you more rotation.
 19

INDUCING UNDERSTEER TO CORRECT

OVERSTEER ON CORNER EXIT

O n corner exits, we’ll also have an order of priority to make sure we’re
optimally using all four tires.
Let’s say we hit our MRP and start accelerating. We’re dancing around the
traction limit of the throttle while turning (for example, 80% throttle). The
car starts oversteering a little bit. What should you do? countersteer first?
Lift the throttle first?
We’ll follow a similar procedure to the one we used on corner entry: we
want to keep the fronts engaged as much as possible, so countersteering will
always be the second or third priority. The first priority is to lift slightly off
throttle (around 10 or 20% less pressure) to decrease the stress on the rear
tires and correct the oversteer. If the oversteer is still not solved, then we go
back to the passive countersteering to active countersteering order of
priority mentioned previously.
Of course, this is assuming you are already on the optimal line for the exit.
This example considers that we don’t have any extra space and that we need
to keep on that elliptical exit line (losing rotation progressively, while still
staying on the limit all the way to the late exit). If there’s more room on
exit, you should then just lighten up your hands and allow the car to use the
whole track on exit while maintaining the throttle modulation.
I see a lot of students trying to accelerate too hard out of the corner, causing
wheel spin and oversteer. They then countersteer, losing the line and going
too wide. Because of this, they end up having to lift the throttle to prevent
going off track or hitting the wall. All this can be prevented if the correction
is done through a small release in throttle while minimizing countersteer to
keep the car on the right line.
Remember to always focus on correcting the balance with your pedals
before moving on to aggressive steering corrections.
 20

THE PROBLEM WITH BRAKE RELEASE FOR

BALANCE PURPOSES

T he primary function of the brakes is deceleration. When we start

managing the brakes to balance the car, we end up affecting the
deceleration as well. This creates a double reaction, which will affect
the speed for that corner.
For example:

1. If the car is understeering and we use a more aggressive trail

braking technique to make the car turn more, the extra brake
pressure will also decelerate the car more, decreasing minimum
speed.
2. If the car is oversteering and we release the brakes to induce
understeer, we end up carrying more speed than expected, affecting
the exit line and preventing us from committing to the throttle
application.

In motorsports, one change in approach could force many other factors to

change too, like braking references, turn-in points, and acceleration points.
When experimenting with inducing understeer and oversteer with brake
release, keep your senses open for further adjustments that may be
necessary to make the new approach work.
The bigger the braking correction for balance purposes, the more the speed
will be affected. The perfect trail braking technique has the least amount of
corrections possible, keeping the intended entry speed similar.
Be careful not to fluctuate a lot in brake pressure when making corrections.
This will prevent you from feeling the subtle effects of smaller brake
release attempts.
 21

FISHING THE GRIP – DEALING WITH

OVERSTEERY CARS

W hen the inducing understeer technique is not enough to correct

excessive rotation in the car, keeping the fronts engaged without
losing the rear becomes impossible. If the car is too loose, the
amount of brake release needed to make the car rotate less is so high that
the car would not decelerate at all (0% braking mid-corner = coasting), and
braking would have to be done mostly in a straight line with a sudden brake
drop to shift weight to the rear tires on entry. This would force the turn-in to
be quick in order to keep the front tires optimally engaged, which goes
against the optimal elliptical line. This would also force the turn-in to be
later, creating a “square” abrupt turn-in. This approach works well in light
cars that manage a high amount of slip angle, like karts or entry-level
Formula cars.
In most cars, in order to trail brake optimally and keep the elliptical line, we
have to gently control the amount of steering input to manage the rear tire
slip manually with the steering. This means we will not squeeze everything
from the front tires on turn-in right away as trying to turn-in more would
make the rear snap out. Instead, we turn gently (with less steering force)
and manage the rear tires through the steering. This is what some call
“fishing for the grip,” as the driver needs to be actively judging the rear
slip, adding more steering angle as speeds decrease to keep the lines
elliptical until the Maximum Rotation Point, and keeping the rears healthy.
Fishing for the grip is a technique that naturally occurs in drivers who drive
relaxed. Death-gripping the wheel will make this technique incredibly
difficult and even more tiring.
 22

COMBINING HANDLING TECHNIQUES IN

RACECARS

W hat makes driving at the limit difficult is the fact that we can adjust
many separate inputs, all of which affect the bigger picture. While
you can try to alter just one input and see how the car reacts to it,
when sending it you will need to make different adjustments in different
combinations and proportions to compensate.
Trial and error will always be the easiest method to find these behavior
changes and decide the ideal approach (for example, whether you should
release the brakes more quickly and barely trail brake, fish for the grip with
the steering while still trailing the brakes heavily, or a little bit of both).
Remember to always try to move from understeer to oversteer
progressively, as this will keep you safer from losing the car too quickly. If
you are trying to test the front grip, a little maintenance throttle (5-20%
throttle) or total coasting (0% braking) may ensure the rears are loaded so
you can progressively feel the balance starting from the safe side. Starting
with understeer is always the way to go. Then, you can start adding grip to
the front tires until the rear tires start to let go. Finally, you try to stay in
that middle zone, the neutral steer.
 23

INDUCING OVERSTEER ON ENTRY – CAN YOU

SPIN THE RACE CAR DELIBERATELY?

W e know we’re optimally using the steering into a corner when the
trail braking increases the rotation of the car even more. This
happens when our front tires are on the perfect slip angle. Because
we’re slowing down the car as we turn in, this perfect slip angle (and
consequently perfect steering angle) will be a moving target. There is a
magic combination of steering and braking (that is also a moving target,
changing as the car slows down) that will make the car rotate more. Indeed,
it can rotate so much that we can get the car to spin. Different factors will
affect this rotation, like engine braking, car setup, and brake bias.
Depending on these factors, it may be very easy to induce oversteer with
trail braking, or it can be virtually impossible.
A good exercise is to try to find this magic combination and get the car to
rotate a lot (even spinning, if you are trying on the simulator), and then
back off the brakes just enough to have a controllable oversteer into the
corner. If you are just on the edge of oversteering (or neutral steer), that
means you are pretty much on the limit and you have found the ideal
cornering speed for that radius. If you are using the whole track and you
manage to get that rotation all the way around the corner, you are at a good
limit.
This exercise (spinning the car on entry) will help you develop a skill called
inducing oversteer. It is easier to do in cars with a lower brake bias. If you
are trying to do this in a car with ABS and a brake bias that is too high
(towards the fronts), you’ll most likely end up understeering first.
If you notice that the car is turning so much that you are hitting the inside of
the track too early – bingo! You unlocked extra turning capability and you
can carry a little more speed into the corner on the next lap.
Tip: Inducing oversteer works when you steer a little less than you think.
The goal of this exercise is to get the car to rotate as much as you can with
as little steering as you can. Inducing understeer, on the other hand, is the
opposite – trying to make the car rotate the least amount possible while
using a very high steering angle.
In short:

Induce oversteer: Less steering, more rotation (and the source of

the rotation comes from brakes and engine braking).
Induce understeer: More steering, less rotation.

Normally, when you oversteer too much because of this exercise, the
solution is to start releasing the brakes as the car gets into this extra-
oversteery state, or inducing understeer. You induce understeer when you
release the brakes more quickly at a given micro-moment to shift more
weight back to the rears, feed them some more grip, and regain the balance
of the car. If you try to do this too late, though, you will end up crossing the
point of no return, which is when the car oversteers too much and spins.
You can also induce understeer using the throttle with the maintenance
throttle technique. This consists of small throttle inputs to shift even more
weight to the rear tires when the release of the brakes isn’t enough. Be
aware that this technique must be a last resort as it can decrease braking and
trail braking efficiency in cars that don’t require the technique. Maintenance
throttle is used mostly in cars with an open differential on the rear tires.
Inducing understeer and oversteer can happen several times in a single
corner. You’ll basically “dance” with the car through the brake pedal inputs.
Slower brake release means more rotation. Quicker brake release means
less rotation. You’ll find the right balance after practicing this for a while.
The more you practice, the more you’ll gain the reaction speed to play with
the car on the limit without being afraid of spinning.
 24

SPEED OF THROTTLE APPLICATION TOWARDS

TRACTION LIMIT (SECOND LEVEL)

Speed of Throttle Application

“S queeze the throttle” and “smooth is fast” are two sentences that
beginners hear a lot. The reason is simple: the phrases are intended to
explain ways to prevent excessive wheel spin on exit upon throttle
application.
Now that we know that we have three levels of throttle application, we can
be more specific about how the throttle application should be done.
We don’t want to get into the third level (excessive acceleration) at any
time, since the wheel spin makes us lose traction in both ways (laterally and
longitudinally). We also don’t want to get into the first level (light
acceleration) and cause unnecessary understeer. Level two (ideal
acceleration) is difficult to find at first, as it has a much smaller throttle
percentage range than the other two.
Although we can quickly learn how to avoid the third level (excessive
acceleration), it’s very easy to think we’re nailing the ideal throttle
percentage. The issue is not necessarily the percentage itself, but how
quickly we should get there.
Let’s say that at the apex of a given corner, the ideal throttle percentage to
maintain perfect rotation is 50%.

How quickly we go from 0% to 50% will impact the behavior of the car.
Some cars will keep the ideal rotation if we smash the power straight to
50% as quickly as possible, but others will oversteer if this is done. Other
cars prefer a smoother application to the 50%. That speed must be found
through trial and error. This also depends on how the car handles weight
transfer, which can be heavily affected by car setup, for example.
If you are an intermediate or advanced driver, you might already find the
second level with ease. However, it’s likely that you never thought too
much about that fraction of a second between 0% and the ideal throttle
percentage. If that’s true, that means you probably apply the throttle at the
same speed in all cars. For some cars, that may end up being perfect, but for
others, you may be losing some hundredths on every exit. Try different
speeds of throttle application and see how the car behaves. If you get the car
to rotate just a few degrees more without getting into oversteer, boom! You
just gained some time.

Throttle Application in Different Horsepower Ranges

Perfect acceleration comes from reaching the traction limit right before
wheel spin and maintaining that as you modulate the throttle upwards and
exit the corner.
Reaching the traction limit will depend on how powerful the engine is, and
how quickly the torque is transferred into the wheels.
Below you will find a good visualization of what perfect acceleration would
look like across different cars.
Remember that we have two ways of adjusting the throttle application:

1. Initial application to traction limit. This will mostly determine

balance. A quick kick in this initial application might give you a
little more rotation. If this rotation is accepted by the car, it should
be the preferred method.
2. Modulation of that traction limit, when reached. This is to keep
the car on the very limit before experiencing wheel spin as the car
gains speed and loses rotation during the exit phase.

This means we can adjust the speed of that steeper (sometimes vertical) line
of throttle application during the initial application, which is rarely
discussed. We can also change the percentage of that first application before
it starts moving up more slowly (modulation).

Initial application, then modulation.

Have this idea very clear in your head and analyze your telemetry to
identify how you are doing it.
Let’s use three examples: low horsepower, medium horsepower, and high
horsepower engines.
Low horsepower:

Medium horsepower:
High horsepower:

Remember to experiment at different speeds for the initial application, and

experiment with different percentages of modulation. This can be tricky to
master, as you need to train your right foot to quickly reach specific
percentages of throttle.
 25

THROTTLE APPLICATION VS STEERING ANGLE

J ust like the string theory, where you inversely relate the steering angle
to the braking pressure, we can analyze the relation between
accelerating out of the corner and how we unwind the steering wheel.
After analyzing thousands of students’ steering techniques, I’ve come to a
few conclusions and tips to help you maximize exit grip, speed, and safety.
Think about what stages of a corner are safer to force rotation and
maximize grip usage. You should get more rotation around the lowest speed
point of the corner, and the rotation should decrease as the speed increases
towards the late exit phase. Because of this, it is important to keep the
steering busy as we get back on power and hustle the car on exit.
One of the most common mistakes regarding steering versus throttle on
corner exit is starting to unwind the steering before getting back on power.
My view on “hustling the car” is strongly related to getting as much rotation
as possible to maximize lateral grip. If you are hesitant about getting back
on power because you are afraid of losing the rear and you end up
unwinding the steering precariously, you’ll lose a few degrees of rotation on
the early exit phase. It will then be necessary to compensate for that amount
of rotation later (and might be dangerous).
The fear of oversteering on power due to too much steering input can be
solved with a simple exercise of inducing understeer on corner exit,
discussed a few chapters ago:
 1. When applying the throttle, reach a lower initial percentage of
acceleration to induce understeer on purpose. This way, you’ll
safely feel the rotation limit through understeer.
2. Start progressively applying a bigger initial percentage of throttle
input until you start feeling a small amount of oversteer.

These two steps will give you the ability to find the limit while being
confident that you are on the limit of the front tires through the steering
angle.
To recap:

NEVER unwind the steering angle before accelerating.

ALWAYS unwind the steering angle after accelerating.

When I say after, I mean a fraction of a second after. As you start feeling
the car on the limit and requesting less steering angle due to the now
controlled oversteer, you are able to induce rotation through your precise
throttle application.
 26

THROTTLE APPLICATION IN FRONT-WHEEL

DRIVE CARS

M ost racecars are rear-wheel drive. This is because when accelerating,

the weight is shifted backwards, adding grip to the rear tires, so
accelerating with those loaded tires will be much more efficient.
But some racecars are still FWD, so we need to know how to deal with
them.
Adding power in a FWD car will cause understeer. This happens because
the front tires are unloaded at the same time they are stressed. This means
the tires have less grip precisely when we need it the most.
Every time you accelerate out of a corner in a front-wheel drive car, weight
will be transferred to the rear tires, adding grip to the rear while we’re
asking for the front tires to pull the car forwards and still turn. This means
the front tires get easily over-stressed and break loose, causing the car to
plow forwards.
The best way to visualize a FWD car on power is to imagine a rope pulling
the front of the car forwards. This is the reason it is impossible to generate a
power slide in these types of cars.
To compensate for this behavior, FWD cars are set up to be more oversteery
off throttle, so you can get more rotation on entry since we know the car
will struggle to rotate on exit.
When accelerating in a FWD car, make sure you don’t abuse the steering
angle, as this will prevent the car from gaining speed and make the
understeer even worse. Because the torque is on the front tires, pointing
them towards the inside will change the vector of acceleration accordingly,
so steer the least amount possible on exit to get a better exit speed.
 27

PLATFORM – THE IDEA OF UNITY

W hen learning what understeer and oversteer are, we tend to split the
car into two halves: the front and the rear. We also tend to think that
the car can only oversteer or understeer at a given moment. But this
is not true. The car can do both at the same time. The challenge is to
maintain a perfect state where all four tires are sliding a little (micro-
oversteer and micro-understeer – just on top of the ideal slip angle)
throughout the entire corner.
That’s where thinking about the car as a single body can help a lot. When
you think about the chassis slipping or sliding through the racing line, the
front and rear tires will work together to maintain this sliding state.
Imagine that you are driving a go-kart. The fastest way around the corner is
achieved by having the entire chassis sliding at an obvious angle and
maintaining that angle through the entire corner with some slight
countersteer. At that point, all four tires should be closest to the optimal slip
angle.
What we forget is that cars work the same way. The only difference is that
the slip angle is so small compared to karts that we don’t notice it as easily.
If you look closely at the fastest drivers, you’ll find the entire chassis
sliding around the corners, instead of one car just going “on rails” through
understeer, for example.
Try to imagine a “platform slip angle,” rather than a separate slip angle for
the front and rear. This will make getting the car to the limit twice as easy
since you won’t need to think about the rears and fronts on their own.
Instead, adjust the steering and pedals in relation to the entire chassis’
rotation.
Some cars will accept higher amounts of slip angle, while others will
require a much smaller slip angle value before getting into scrubbing
territory.
 28

SMOOTH IS FAST? INPUT SPEED VS

CORRECTION SPEED

G ood racecar drivers know when to make quick changes in inputs, like
steering or braking, and when to make them more slowly. Even in
ideal situations, there are places where the inputs will be much
quicker than others, like turning the steering more quickly when there’s no
braking involved (versus turning in progressively when releasing the
brakes).
In situations where the ideal inputs should be slower, but a problem shows
up (like oversteer), the corrections can be quicker if the driver knows what
they are doing. Correcting an oversteer through steering is a good example,
as we discussed in previous chapters. If you correct for too long though, the
car will slingshot wide and lose the line, or, in extreme cases, even spin
towards the outside of the corner. In that case, the correction should be
made fast, and as soon as the car regains grip, the steering input should
immediately go back to where it was supposed to be before the oversteer
started.
Watch some onboards of quick drivers and notice how their corrections
happen in a much shorter timeframe, preventing the car from losing the
line. Then compare their corrections to amateur drivers who make slow
corrections that can be dangerous and cause a spin or a crash.
The point of this chapter is to be smooth when it’s ideal, but to make
corrections as quickly as possible to regain control of the car without going
off line too much.
 29

HESITATION

A good racing driver spends the most time possible at the edge of
traction, from early entry to late exit. This edge is expressed through
micro-sliding, oversteer, and understeer, where the car is just about to
refuse your inputs. When we go substantially over these limits, we can
totally lose control and go off track or crash. Finding these limits can be
daunting as the stakes are very high, especially in real life. Because of that,
it takes courage and precision to reach these limits in a safe manner. In the
end, staying right at the edge of grip is the way to faster lap times. So, we
can’t really run away from it.
In this chapter I’m going to give you tips on how to deal with hesitation and
maximize your learning efficiency. I say learning efficiency because (and
this is important!) if you are not at the limit of grip, you are not only losing
time, but you are also not learning. I’m a fierce believer that if you spend
more time over the limit rather than under the limit, you’ll develop skills
more quickly to manage the car in these states. If you are practicing car
handling skills in the simulator, for example, spending time driving under
the limit is going to be less productive than spending time overdriving the
car.
We have discussed how grip is strongly related to how much rotation we try
to extract from the racecar. In this chapter we’ll mostly examine hesitation
in the form of being afraid to keep the car turning more and more,
maximizing lateral grip.
Let me tell you a story of two racing students, how their driving was related
to hesitation, and how they overcame it.
Student A was an ultra-consistent driver who stayed very close to the limit
at all times. He could maintain his lap times within the same 2 or 3 tenths
with no issues, for dozens of laps. His driving looked impeccable. The
racing line looked ideal, his braking and steering traces looked smooth, but
he was always around one second slower than the ideal lap times.
The biggest problem with Student A was that every time he tried to go
faster to chase the last second he was missing, he would get into a small
slide and lose his flow. The sliding would get into his head, and he would
take a long time to get back to turning the car as much as possible. Note that
the time frame discussed here is happening in the same corner. So, we’re
talking about losing the car and being afraid of pushing it again in the same
few fractions of a second that part of the corner would take.
Being under the limit after a slide due to hesitation is common for drivers
like Student A. Let’s call this post-slide hesitation. The longer the post-
slide hesitation, the less time Student A spent on the limit, and the later he
was able to accelerate out of the corner.
Student B had a much more aggressive driving style. She overdrove the car
consistently, and even went off track or crashed from time to time. She tried
to brake later, oversteered on corner entry, and due to having so much track
time with this aggressive approach, she developed a way to manage the
slides and keep the car on track. She quickly caught the rear and
immediately came back to forcing the car mid-corner, somehow staying on
track and aggressively getting out of the corner. Although her driving
looked sloppy and full of mistakes, she was also around one second slower
than the ideal lap times.
Student B was so used to always sliding the car around the track that she
became unbothered with small slides, as she quickly caught oversteer and
stayed focused on getting the maximum lateral grip possible. This means
the speed of corrections from Student B allowed her to quickly go back to
using the grip to rotate the car as much as possible, allowing her to
accelerate earlier out of the corner.
How can Student A and Student B find the respective solutions for their
driving plateaus?
Student A needed to gain confidence in being over the limit and making
corrections without disrupting his craving for lateral grip. He needed to
focus on maintaining peak rotation and get used to making these corrections
quickly and immediately getting back to his plan. To help with that, we can
determine specific stages of the corner in which to force the car more –
places where a big slide would be easily corrected with a lower risk of
going off track and crashing. This would allow Student A to get used to the
feeling of making corrections, to the point that he would start making these
corrections more naturally. The best places to force more rotation and work
on becoming comfortable with oversteer are the lowest speed corners on a
track. Forcing the car in a hairpin, for example, allows you to stay calm and
pay attention to what is happening to the car.

Fear inhibits learning.

By focusing on inducing oversteer in corners where the consequences of a

spin are smaller, we can remove fear from the equation. This way, Student
A will be able to work on his post-slide hesitation and will get a grasp on
how it feels to be over the limit. The next step is to get used to dealing with
smaller amounts of oversteer, up to the point where he’s able to spend more
and more time on top of that sharp edge of micro-oversteer.
Student B is part of a very common group of drivers that share a common
habit: to go faster, you should brake later. But it’s not that simple.
Remember that going faster is about being on the lateral grip during the
entire corner, getting as much rotation as possible without losing the rear,
and accelerating earlier. Since Student B is already used to making quick
corrections and maintaining lateral grip at an optimal level, her solution was
much simpler: to focus on maximizing grip usage on late entry and early
exit, rather than early entry. Drivers who tend to brake too late struggle with
maintaining rotation at the same level, which hurts their racing line
precision. By braking a tiny bit earlier, she’ll be able to unlock much better
control of the car. In other words, Student B will shift her focus to force the
car towards the lower speeds of a corner rather than corner entry, where the
speeds are higher.
The solution for Student B will be much easier to internalize. She’ll quickly
find time, whereas Student A will have to work on his solution for a much
longer time. This is because Student B had not developed much post-slide
hesitation, allowing her to spend more time on the limit and learning a more
precise car handling technique.
Somehow, there is a common thread between the solutions of Student A
and Student B. It is the fact that they should both prioritize forcing the car
more towards the center of the corner before starting to force the car more
on corner entry. This is already well discussed in the previous chapters, but
it’s a nice reminder of what to do regardless of your current level of racing
technique – especially if you are learning a new car/track combo.
There is really no point in hesitating while practicing on the simulator.
There are no negative consequences – you can reset at any time. It is a great
tool to try overdriving the car and working on your post-slide hesitation.
The more you spin in the simulator, the less you’ll spin in real life.

If You Can Cause It, You Can Prevent It

Another super effective way to deal with post-slide hesitation is to not only
be unafraid of making mistakes, but to actively try to cause them during
practice. Trying to cause a problem will familiarize the feeling of inducing
them so that when they happen by mistake, you’ll quickly know what
caused the problem.
One of the most effective ways to solve the fear of spinning on corner entry,
for example, for many students I’ve worked with, was to ask them to spin
the car on purpose (in the simulator, of course). What’s funny about this is
that they would fail to spin the car. They would use different inputs when
trying to spin than the inputs they used when they spin on accident. The
most common attempted method to spin on purpose is to turn the steering
very quickly. Doing this is actually the opposite of what they were doing
before, when they spun on accident. And, of course, when trying to steer
very quickly, they would just get into instant understeer. After a while of
trying to actively spin the car, they would finally understand the tools
necessary to induce oversteer. Then, when they were driving normally again
and they would spin, they would finally understand what they did that
caused it.
Here are a few examples of issues that you can induce to learn how to deal
with them:

Understeer
Oversteer (and spinning)
Front tire locking
Rear tire locking
Throttle understeer
Throttle oversteer

Inducing mistakes is incredibly effective, as learning the techniques to

correct them will allow you to be on top of every driving issue you might
run into when trying to find the limit.
 30

PERCEIVING OVERSTEER AND UNDERSTEER –

CAR HANDLING’S REFRESH RATE

A s drivers, we must train our senses to become more connected with

the car. The more we feel, the more we can act. In the beginning of
our technique development, we might be able to identify when the
car oversteers or understeers at a given corner, but we can generally only
identify one state. As we progress, we become able to identify oversteer and
understeer distinctly at each point of a corner.
Imagine that a racing student learns to feel oversteer and understeer for the
first time.
At this point, let’s say they’re able to identify one state per corner:

Turn 1 Oversteer
Turn 2 Understeer
Turn 3 Oversteer
After becoming advanced and more comfortable with their driving
technique, they start noticing that sometimes the car understeers on entry
but then oversteers on exit. This is commonly called understeer to snap
oversteer, where the driver tries to gain rotation after failing to rotate the
car on entry, causing oversteer on exit.
We can then say that the driver is now able to identify two states per corner:

Turn 1 > Understeer on entry + oversteer on exit

Turn 2 Oversteer on entry + understeer on exit
Turn 3 Understeer on entry + understeer on exit
This is where most drivers stop being able to identify anything further,
getting stuck at being able to identify only two different states per corner.
Just thinking that more states might be possible at any given corner may be
the way out of this plateau. Try thinking about dividing the corner into four
stages:

Early Entry
Late Entry
Early Exit
Late Exit

A good way to develop this sensitivity is to deliberately induce understeer

and oversteer at the same corner entry or corner exit. It’s possible to shift
weight back and forth to make the car rotate more or rotate less, and it’s
easier to feel it happening when you are doing it on purpose.
Remember that the car can oversteer and understeer at the same time
(drifting or sliding), which means you are just going too fast if you are
doing it and still missing the apex.
Fast drivers can sense and induce these states many times with quick
reactions. I call this car handling’s refresh rate, which is the number of
states a driver can identify per corner. Beginners have (as an example), a
refresh rate of one state per corner. Intermediate drivers can sense an
average of two states per corner, and highly experienced drivers can have a
refresh rate of four or more states per corner.
The best example of many states being handled by fast drivers is racing in
the wet. The car shifts quickly between understeer and oversteer (and both
at the same time, going sideways), and yet fast drivers are able to make
several corrections while trying to keep the car on the best line possible.
That doesn’t mean that their reaction times are simply better. Repetition
brings experience and predictability, so many of those states become
predictable and the driver is ready to correct some of them before they even
happen (imagine being ready for a bump or curb hit). Also, corrections
become automated (muscle memory), so they just happen before we’re even
aware of them, when properly trained.
Muscle memory development also goes for inducing understeer and
oversteer. We can actively practice inducing these states, but after some
time, the trigger (for example, “if oversteer, induce understeer”) becomes
natural in our driving and we don’t have to think about it too much.
Let’s recap the four pillars of racing technique:

1. Feeling understeer
2. Feeling oversteer
3. Inducing understeer
4. Inducing oversteer

Lap times start improving when you minimize the time necessary to process
these skills in your brain. We learn to make big corrections and big inputs to
learn the idea, then they start becoming more polished, efficient, and quick.
Smaller corrections will increase the amount of time we’ll spend on the
limit.
Active countersteer is an example of a correction that is most likely bigger
than necessary, since excessive countersteer may decrease the effectiveness
of the front tires, decreasing grip usage by 50% at those tiny moments of
correction. Actively steering outwards tends to be a longer input than just
allowing the steering wheel to make natural corrections (passive
countersteer), which in contrast can happen much more quickly and more
repeatedly, decreasing inefficiencies.
Since active countersteer is a human action, it will take much longer to
happen. Passive countersteer can happen several times in the same amount
of time a single active countersteer happens. So, although the driver can
make several corrections in a single corner through passive countersteer, the
number of corrections perceived by the driver will most likely be lower
than the actual number of corrections. Using the right techniques, the driver
will make corrections to micro-oversteering moments without even noticing
it.
“Fishing for grip” is a common way to describe a careful but agile steering
input on corner entry, especially in oversteery cars. The driver turns a little
bit to find the oversteer and tries to manage the fronts, almost in an on-off
motion, to keep the rears at a healthy limit, and keeps slowly adding
steering, consistently feeling the oversteer generated as they get deep into
the corner, every fraction of a second.
The driver would then: turn-in feel slight oversteer relax hands (less force)
repeat.
Of course, this technique must not be overused, as it’s also a potential cause
of inefficiencies.
For this technique, I recommend that you try to add these little forces only
towards the inside, avoiding active countersteering. Any active
countersteering while fishing for grip will decrease efficiency. Remember
that to have less excessive oversteer (and therefore less need of active
countersteer), utilize the means to induce understeer (downshifting, brake
release for weight transfer, and maintenance throttle in extreme cases) at the
right time. Using these methods to prevent oversteer will always be much
more efficient.
Ask yourself what your own refresh rate is and try doing some laps with
that in mind.
 31

ROTATION TENDENCIES

I mentioned in the previous chapter that we’re not always consciously

reacting to every little thing the car does. More than that, I’d say that in
a race, during the flow state, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it.
The moment to actively think about everything is during practice. A good
driver will let as much information as possible about the behavior of the car
sink in and then experiment with ways to find time. One powerful way to
find the limit and be consistent is to understand the patterns of behavior of
each specific car.

Corner Entry
Imagine that a driver tests a new car and says: “The car is oversteery on
entry but then pushes mid-corner before throttle.”
This means that the car tends to oversteer on early entry but then tends to
understeer on late entry.
This behavior may be a pattern in this specific car. We can say, then, that
the car tends to oversteer on turn-in but doesn’t want to turn towards the
minimum speed.
Now that we’ve identified the rotation tendency of that particular car on
corner entry, we can then predict that it will behave in a similar way in most
corners. This minimizes the amount of brain processing needed to drive the
car on its limit. We can then be more careful with the steering on initial
turn-in and try to induce more rotation mid-corner to compensate for the
car’s behavior.
The driver should adapt their driving style to each car, depending on
whether the setup of the car might compensate for its behavior. Some
tendencies may be related to the setup of the car, but others might be how
the car behaves because of its construction.
Cars with an open differential, for example, tend to rotate a lot more while
decelerating, so the turn-in should be more delicate, and the driver must be
ready to oversteer and make some corrections with brake release (and in
some more extreme cases, maintenance throttle, where the driver
accelerates a bit to bring even more weight and grip to the rear tires on
corner entry).
Engine braking can impact the rotation tendency of the car on entry. For
example, with an aggressive downshift to second gear into a corner, the car
will have high RPM on turn-in (where the engine braking is making the car
rotate more) and the RPM will progressively decrease as the speed
decreases. In this case, the car tends to rotate more on turn-in and may tend
to understeer mid-corner. Modern Formula 1 cars can adjust the effect of
engine braking at different stages of the corner.
It’s more common for cars to oversteer on initial turn-in and progressively
understeer towards the minimum speed, especially because of the effects of
engine braking. Cases of understeer on turn-in and more rotation mid-
corner are rarer, but may still be possible, depending on the car and its
setup.

Corner Exit
First, remember that, ideally, the rotation of the car is highest at the
minimum speed, decreasing as the car accelerates. Because of that, trying to
increase rotation on late exit is more dangerous.
The understeer to snap oversteer happens when not enough rotation is done
at the lowest speeds, sending the car into a bad and wide line towards late
exit, forcing the driver to generate too much rotation when speeds are high.
This possibly causes a spin or sends the back of the car onto the exit grass
or into the wall.
The root cause of the understeer on early exit can be hesitation from the
driver when applying initial throttle. The driver squeezes the throttle pedal
too slowly, shifting some weight to the rear tires without adding enough
stress, causing understeer.
Throttle understeer happens when the amount of power applied is too low
or done too slowly under the traction limit that the power doesn’t make the
rears stressed enough to keep rotating the car.
The solution to this situation is achieved when the driver “kicks” the
throttle a little more quickly, getting the throttle percentage to the traction
limit more quickly. This will add more stress to the rear tires, preventing
them from killing the rotation on early exit and maintaining the car on the
right line. Some cars might even need an aggressive punch to the throttle to
keep rotating, which might be trickier to try since they may quickly switch
to oversteer and spin.
Another root cause of the understeer might be car setup. Let’s say the driver
identified the understeer but fails to solve it with a more aggressive throttle
application. In this situation, the car might be sending too much grip to the
rears, and the stress from the throttle is not enough to compensate properly.
In this situation, a change in setup would be necessary to fix the car’s
behavior. This generally happens in low-powered cars since wheel spin
would cause oversteer in almost all cases.
Feel the car. Find its tendencies. Being able to describe its behavior to other
drivers and engineers shows how good of a driver you are and how aware
you are of the situation.
 32

HANDLING PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

F or the final chapter of this book, I wanted to discuss some common

problems I have encountered while coaching over two thousand
students. Use this book as a reference when practicing. Remember that
this book is long and complex, so just reading it once and then forgetting
about it might not be the best idea. Always come back and try to find
techniques or details that you haven’t applied on track yet.

PROBLEM
I can’t hit the apex. While forcing the car to get to the apex, I lose
the car or understeer wide.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
Too much speed. you are braking too late, and the car doesn’t have
the traction to turn into the corner and hit the apex. Whenever you
oversteer and still lose the apex, you are carrying too much speed. In
some rare cases, you may be generating way too much rotation too
quickly on turn-in, either by trail braking too hard and turning in too
quickly (especially in karts), or by using too much engine braking
and trail braking too hard. Try to spread the rotation through the
corner instead of concentrating a lot of it on turn-in. If this still
doesn’t work, brake earlier.
Turning in too late. You might be expecting the car to already give
you too much rotation on entry. Remember that your rotation should
increase as you slow down, so you must turn in a little earlier and
more progressively, creating a more V-shaped line.

PROBLEM
I keep over slowing the car into the corner.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
you are probably turning in too late, keeping the brakes pressed too
hard for too long. you are most likely building an arc that fits on a
tighter track than the one you have available. Make sure you are
using the entirety of the track and try turning in earlier, which will
force you to start releasing the brakes sooner and carrying more
speed into the corner. Trail braking is necessary to keep the rotation
going while making this adjustment. With the extra speed mid-
corner, your exits will also feel different, so take some time to adjust
to that.

PROBLEM
I keep losing the rear on corner entry.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
Remember the three tools for rotation: steering, trail braking, and
engine braking. When we start oversteering on entry, we tend to try
using less steering, but that will probably not be the solution.
Remember that if you induce understeer by trail braking less and
downshifting later, you can understeer such that no matter how
much you turn, the car will not lose the rear. With that in mind, try
to release the brakes a little quicker or downshift slower to prevent
rear locking or micro-locking and move the balance towards
understeer. If you are alternating between oversteer and understeer
while trying this, that means you are just too fast.

PROBLEM
I keep understeering on corner entry.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
You might be either braking too much or too little. There is a sweet
spot in trail braking where the grip in the front is higher because of
the weight transferred to them, but not enough braking that you
engage the ABS on the front tires or lock them up. Find the perfect
amount of braking (remember that it’s a moving target, it decreases
as rotation increases) that increases rotation, rather than decreasing
it.
You may be turning the steering too fast or too much. Remember
that if you turn too much, your front tires will exceed the optimal
slip angle of the tire, causing scrub, wearing the tire, and decreasing
grip. You can ask the fronts to turn the car until a certain point, after
which you’ll be losing traction and gaining less rotation. Remember
the rule: if you are braking, you turn in slowly. If you are not
braking, you can turn in more quickly.
If it’s a rear-wheel drive car, try downshifting a little quicker. The
engine braking might be stressing the rear tires a little more and
carrying that extra stress into the corner (with higher RPM) might
help the car rotate.

PROBLEM
I keep understeering on power.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
You might be squeezing the throttle too gently. The throttle has two
functions. It makes the tires spin more quickly, but that shifts some
weight to the rear tires, giving them grip. At low percentages of
throttle, the amount of grip the rears gain beats the amount of stress
from them wanting to spin more quickly, causing the rear to have
unnecessary extra grip. At high percentages of throttle, the amount
of stress from them wanting to spin quicker beats the amount of grip
the rear tires receive from the weight transfer, causing the car to lose
the rear. There is a perfect balance point where you get the ideal
amount of wheel stress versus grip from weight transfer, which
makes the car maintain a controllable rotation, or micro-oversteer.
This perfect balance point is a moving target and depends on the
speed of the car and the available grip. At each point, there will be a
specific ideal throttle percentage. If you accelerate to that point right
away, you’ll get a nice rotation. If you smash the throttle over that
point, you’ll get oversteer. If you squeeze the throttle too slowly
below that point, you’ll get understeer.
you are not getting enough rotation on entry, and you need to
compensate for it with even more rotation on exit. Remember that
cars are much more effective while decelerating than while
accelerating. Because of this, a higher portion of the rotation must
be done on entry, such as 55% on entry and 45% on exit. If you
don’t make the car rotate enough on entry, it won’t be able to cope
with the throttle plus the excessive rotation it has to do on exit.

PROBLEM
I keep oversteering on power.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
you are just going over that perfect sweet spot I mentioned in the
last problem. Squeeze the throttle just as fast, but to a lower
percentage initially.
If the car still can’t make the corner, going wide on exit, and you are
just alternating between understeer and oversteer, you are not
getting enough rotation on entry, just like the second point of the last
problem.

PROBLEM
Under braking, the car is unpredictable, sometimes understeering
too much and sometimes oversteering too much in a snap.
CAUSE and SOLUTION
you are gripping the steering wheel too hard. Relax your hands in
proportion to how hard you are braking. Brake hard, relax more.
Brake less, grip the steering a bit more. Never grip the steering too
hard – only enough to move the steering against its own resistance
or feedback.
you are turning in too late. Try turning in earlier and slightly slower
to see if the car is capable of dealing with a gentler radius initially
without breaking loose or understeering.

PROBLEM
I’m new and my main struggle seems to be resisting the temptation
to overdrive the car, making little errors, and chewing through tires
– my brain knows I need to be smooth but come race time it’s so
easy to get caught up in trying too hard when chasing or under
pressure. What should I do?
CAUSE and SOLUTION
Overdriving the car generally comes from just braking too late. But
you can test the limits in other ways:
Trying to get more rotation as soon as you turn-in, pointing the car
more and being able to accelerate earlier.
Trying to release the brakes a little quicker but keeping some brake
pressure to keep the car rotating.
Trying to smash the throttle a little more aggressively and in
different ways (trial and error).
Do all of this while keeping the braking point the exact same.
 FINAL THOUGHTS

Remember that this book encompasses techniques that will be developed

over many years of your career. you are not supposed to master everything
in a month, but rather over many stages of your career, bit by bit, as you
chase the last tenths, then hundredths. You might have noticed that I didn’t
mention or define some techniques, such as traction circle, slip angle,
driving in the rain, heel-and-toe, and many other concepts and techniques
that are widely available online. My intention in this book was to explore
unique concepts that I believe you won’t find anywhere else.
This is the first book of a trilogy that I plan to release over the next few
years. This first volume was solely about car handling. Volumes 2 and 3
will discuss racecraft (battling for position, attacking and defending
strategies, and much more involving actual racing, not only hot lapping)
and car setup.
To continue improving your technique, use BOOK30 and get 30% off The
Motor Racing Checklist. This course contains over 60 video lessons on all
of the techniques described in this book, along with bonus exercises and
practice sessions with professional drivers. Join on my website,
www.suellioalmeida.com.
You can also watch all my free YouTube racing technique content at
youtube.com/suellioalmeida
Have any questions? Join our discord community and discuss anything
from the book or the online course with this QR code:
I hope this helps get you closer to perfecting your driving technique.
Remember to always, always have fun while doing it. Having fun is the
main reason we do this.