Speed Secrets: A Driver’s Fine-Tuning Tool
Just when you thought the brakes were only for slowing down...
Just when you thought I’d write about something other than what to do with the brakes, I’m back again with more on the topic. But, this may be the last piece focused on braking for a while.
As I wrote this, I was thinking that it might be a good idea for you to go back and read the other articles I’ve written about braking, specifically:
You may even want to go back to the Braking To Go Faster piece I wrote a few months ago, and Using The Brakes to Drive Faster way back when I launched this Substack. (After putting this list together, I started thinking about packaging all of these pieces into one document aimed at helping drivers understand and use their brakes more effectively – but you have them all here on my Substack)
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The brakes are a fine-tuning tool.
Fine-tune what? Corner entry speed, load/balance, rotation, and ultimately how soon you’re able to begin applying the throttle.
You can view using the brakes as a tool to help you get back to throttle sooner, improving your corner exit speed.
Let’s imagine approaching a fairly tight corner after a long straightway, such as heading into Turn 1 at VIR, Turn 2 at Laguna Seca, Turn 10A at Road Atlanta, Turn 5 at Road America, or Turn 11 at COTA (and many more).
For these corners, in most cars, you give the brakes a relatively hard, quick application at the BoB (Begin-of-Braking) point. Depending on how well you exited the previous corner, and whether there were other cars in front or behind you, the exact point where you begin braking could change because your speed may be different.
So, as you move along the brake zone from the BoB towards the turn-in point, and have an idea of how much you want to trail brake to help you rotate the car into the corner, along with an idea of the speed you want to turn in with, you use your brakes as a fine-tuning tool. You fine-tune speed, and how much load you want shifted forward as you turn in.
At some point, then, before the turn-in point, you either maintain the heavy brake pressure, or you begin releasing it slightly. Again, this adjusts your corner entry speed, and how much you’re going to use trail braking to assist with making your car change direction.
If you haven’t done enough braking early in the brake zone, you can’t use the brakes as a fine-tuning tool. No, you’ll then be using them as life support, doing everything you can to slow your car down enough to stay on the track! I like to think that I’m doing two-thirds of the braking in the first third of the brake zone, and that’ll leave me just barely enough margin to be able to fine-tune the speed and load transfer. These fractions are not accurate, but more just a conceptual thing for me to be in the right mindset.
If you’ve done too much braking early in the brake zone, or simply started the zone too soon, you won’t have any energy in the car to be able to manage the load transfer. I wrote more about the idea of having energy in the car in the Don’t Trail Brake More post, so you might want to give that a review.
Take this to an extreme. Let’s say you begin braking 100 yards/meters too early, but you still apply the right amount of pressure. You’re going to arrive at the turn-in point with very little speed, and therefore, you’ll likely have already released the brakes just to get to the corner! Then, as you turn into the corner, there won’t be much weight/load to transfer, and the car won’t react well.
Or, let’s say you begin braking 100 yards/meters… no, that’s way too much! Let’s say you begin braking 20 yards/meters too late (even that may be too much, but I’m taking this to the extreme here). When you get near the turn-in point, you have no choice but to continue to brake hard, and that doesn’t allow you to modulate them to fine-tune your speed and balance.
This is why I strongly suggest you physically and mentally focus on the EoB (End-of-Braking point) when approaching a corner. If you do so, you’ll judge where you need to begin braking, as well as how hard the initial pressure should be. When you do that, you’ll likely need to fine-tune both your speed and load transfer in the final few car lengths just prior to turning into the corner.
Focusing on the EoB when approaching a corner is just like focusing on the stop line at an intersection when approaching a red light. You look ahead, judge when and how hard to brake, and then likely make some fine-tuning modulations to the brakes as you get close to stopping.
Braking. And here we thought it was just for slowing a car down!
I was at a talk by Vic Elford where he talked about using the throttle to help set up the car for the corner. If I look at what he said in the context of your articles, it appears he used the engine as a brake to affect the balance of the car before entering the corner. He was referring to race cars from over fifty years ago so there may have been more effort to preserve braking due to fade given the technology then compared to currently. This talk was over twenty years ago.
When you say "rotate" do you mean a quick transfer of the weight of the car (back vs front) or do you mean actually sliding the rear wheels (in relation to the front wheels) by a foot or more?