This is certainly not a detailed article on car dynamics, but in this stage of the Getting Faster articles, it's just something you should be aware of: your car is continuously pitching forward or backward, and rolling left or right while you are racing. Driving your car on the limit is all about having the knowledge and skill to balance your car throughout the racing track. The more you can control the balance of your car in corners, the faster you will be.

This blog article is the 5th in the Getting Faster series.

Terminology alert: in more abstract terms the car is often called a platform, and they are talking about balancing the platform.

When you are doing deliberate practice and trying to find extra time in each corner, then you should always be thinking: what is my car doing now? Where is the load on the tires? Front? Rear? Left? Right? How would the car react throughout the corner when shifting more load to the front?

In the next sections I briefly touch on some topics that are related to car balance. In a future article on telemetry data, I’ll cover this more in depth.

Braking

This one is obvious and everyone who drives a car in real life knows what is happening: when you are braking hard: your car dives and you put more load on your front tires (and on your front suspension). When you release your brakes suddenly, the opposite will happen: the weight distribution will shift more backward, putting more load on your rear tires and less load on your front tires.

Braking hard before the corner will make the rear of your car lighter, increasing the likelihood of oversteering your car. When releasing the brakes abruptly after braking hard, the front of your car will become lighter hence increasing the chance of understeering in the corner.

When you release your brakes more gently after hard braking, the weight distribution from front to rear will occur much more gradually, keeping the platform more in balance, keeping your car more under control.

Tip: it is often more important to know where you should stop braking, rather than knowing exactly where to start braking (for instance at the 50m brake marker).

Think also about the track elevation when braking: when braking uphill, gravity is working against you, and this helps to shorten your brake distance. Surprise surprise when I say that the reverse is true when braking downhill: your braking distance will become longer.

Often you brake too hard and/or too late into a corner, and the platform is not stable enough to take a corner at that speed. By braking earlier, or by braking more smoothly ("squeezing the brakes") the car is more balanced when getting into the corner hence higher cornering speeds could be possible.

Tip: The slower you go, the higher the risk of locking the tires: start braking hard, then ease off the brake pedal slowly.

Decent braking technique puts more weight on the back of the car, giving you less oversteer when accelerating out of the corner. So, after braking hard, lift the brake a bit to get more traction on the back of the car. This is sometimes difficult to do because it is counter intuitive! You think you are at the limit of your car because you are oversteering so braking less doesn’t make any sense. Yes it does. Try it.

Another example from my own experience: I was braking too hard too soon, at corner entry I realised this and released the brakes for a short instance. This made the front of my car light, inducing understeer. I didn’t need to change my braking point, I just needed to release the brakes slower, keeping the load on the front of the car, giving me more grip and no understeer.

ABS or the Anti-lock Braking System prevents your wheels from locking when braking very hard. It is a common misconception that ABS allows for shorter braking distances. The main benefit of ABS is that your front wheels always keep on rotating, and this is needed to turn your car.

It seems that the ABS in iRacing is triggered quite fast, but in most cars this is a setting that you can control yourself. If you can switch off ABS (in your sim) you better do so. Or at least in qualification to find those extra tenths of a second. In an endurance race of 6 hours you may prefer to leave it on for that little bit of extra security when things get sketchy.

Exercise:

• Experiment with what happens to the balance of your car by releasing the brake abruptly versus releasing it much more gently
• Go into a test session in your sim and test your straight-line braking distance by changing parameters like fuel load, track temperature, brake bias settings, new vs old tires
• Test different ABS settings in your sim, or compare your driving with or without ABS

Tip: consider that your braking will change slightly during a (long) race: you go from high fuel levels (and a heavy car) to low fuel levels; you start with new tires with a lot of grip but at the end of your stint they could be degraded; difference between day and night track temperatures also has a big influence on grip and hence brake levels. That is why it’s a good thing to know how to change your brake bias settings during driving.

Tip: given the importance of a good braking technique, the first part of your sim hardware that you should upgrade is most probably your pedal set, and not your steering wheel (even though those Direct Drives really look tempting ;-) )

Accelerating

When accelerating hard you are moving the load from the front to the back, the nose of your car is lifting, and the backside is pushed down. They say your car is squatting. Now you understand why rear wheel powered cars are so interesting to race. The more you accelerate, the more your rear tires are pushed down, the more grip you will have.

It is also obvious that accelerating is disturbing the balance of your car. When you accelerate hard and then suddenly go off the throttle, you will get the same effect as braking: the nose of your car will dive and the back of your car will lift. The load is again moved from the back to the front of your car.

Just like with braking, when you know what is happening with the balance of your car you could also use this to your advantage when cornering. For instance, by playing with how aggressively you can come off the throttle, you can on purpose make the back of your car light to induce a slight oversteer to turn your car faster into the corner.

Another approach is to come off the throttle very gently, and then stay at a constant throttle level (40% for example), to make sure your car is balanced throughout the corner. By keeping constant throttle, you are not moving the load to the rear wheels, but you keep the revs of your engine high enough to pick up accelerating fast once you can go back on full throttle again.

If you feel the car is getting out of balance, you could add a little jot of throttle to correct the balance, just like you can only tick the brakes to correct the balance of the car.

Steering

Braking and accelerating is moving load to the front or to the back, steering is moving load to the left or to the right. Going into a left-hand turn will put more load on your right tires, and vice versa.

Just like braking and accelerating, you first must be able to keep your car under control when shifting this load from one side to the other. Next step in building up your driving skills is that you deliberately use this change of balance to help you to become a faster driver.

And also with steering the same is true: the more aggressively you are steering, the more you will upset the balance of the car. In general, your steering should be as smooth as possible. This depends of course on what type of racing we are talking about: in rally, rallycross, dirt oval etc you want to upset the balance to throw the car into a drift and this is often done with aggressive steering. Google scandinavian flick and you'll see what I mean.

Another car dynamic to consider when your car rolls from one side to the other, is the loading of your (mostly front) suspension. When the body of your car rolls, first the suspension must be compressed before the load is also transferred to the tire. This is called loading the corner. The softer your suspension, the more you should apply this technique.

In iRacing compare the Mazda MX-5 to the Dallara P217. The first one rolls a lot, the latter almost nothing. If in the Mazda, you fully commit to the corner before your suspension is loaded, you will unbalance your car a lot. If you first load your suspension, and then fully commit to the corner, you'll have a balanced platform entering the corner. In the first part of the corner your steering should be smooth and slow, allowing for the load to transfer and to fully compress your suspension, when you feel this is the case you can apply more and faster steering to commit to the corner.

If you have issues with turning the car, having either too much understeer or oversteer, then try to reverse engineer the issues you encounter. Try to understand what is happening with the balance of your car and how you could overcome this by changing something in your driving style. Remember that if you keep on doing what you are doing you keep on getting what you are getting. In other words: experiment with your driving inputs (brake, throttle, steering) to control the balance of your car.

Exercise:

• Watch replays of your own driving: play with the camera angles, use slow motion and study where your car is diving, lifting and rolling and think what you could do differently to make your car more balanced throughout the corner.
• Watch replays of faster drivers to see how they are controlling the balance in their car.
• Watch replays when you lost control of your car in a corner: try to find out what inbalance caused this outside track excursion.

Photo credit: Sam Loyd on Unsplash under Unsplash licence