Speed Secrets: A Tale of Two Steer-ers
To what degree do you turn the steering wheel — and what does that do to your speed?
Two young drivers, on their way to the top of the racing world (that was their goal, at least), driving for the same team, in equally-prepared and set-up Formula Mazda open-wheel cars, at Portland International Raceway. A young Graham Rahal won the race that weekend, but that’s not the point. The point is what I learned coaching these two drivers.
It was after the second practice session, while reviewing both of their in-car videos that I noticed something — something very obvious. Even though they had just turned lap times within a couple of hundredths of a second of each other, there was one huge difference: steering input.
One of the drivers used a minimum amount of steering angle. I would refer to his steering inputs as “tidy, smooth, efficient.”
The other driver? “Wild, not smooth.” He was cranking in massive amounts of steering angle, and his hands and wheel movement were fast and jerky.
But again, they turned almost identical lap times.
Thinking that I needed to do more than just tell the second driver to “be smoother” with his steering, I went to the team’s race engineer and asked her to write a math channel in the data system for me: one that added up the total amount of steering angle that each driver used to make a lap of the track. So, every degree of steering angle, whether clockwise or counter-clockwise, would be added together (without the negatives cancelling out the positives) and I would end up with a single number for each lap, for each driver.
Thanks to the engineer, who was a whiz at that type of data challenge, within a few minutes we had quantified the difference in steering techniques between the two drivers:
Driver #1 (“tidy, smooth, efficient”): approximately 700 degrees of steering angle for his fast lap
Driver #2 (“wild, not smooth”): approximately 850 degrees of steering angle for his fast lap
Wow, what a difference, right?!
My coaching suggestion for the next on-track session for Driver #2 was simple but challenging: “Focus on less movement of the steering wheel — less initial turning of the wheel, less overall rotation of the wheel, and take out whatever amount of rotation you put in as soon as possible.” I gave him the target of using only 700 degrees of steering movement. He knew that could be done since his teammate had just done it, so off he went for FP2.
Want to guess what happened?