Speed Secrets: How to Rotate Your Car
To trail brake or not to trail brake, that is the question.
Over the past few months, I’ve written a lot about braking into a corner in a way that helps you rotate the car, but it seems I haven’t explicitly explained how to do that. So, here goes: how to deliberately practice and develop your car rotation skills.
First, find a relatively slow corner, one that by definition is going to reward you for getting the car to change direction quite a bit. For example, a hairpin or at least something more than 90-degrees; likely a corner thatʻs taken in a low gear. Ideally, it has a relatively long brake zone leading into it, perhaps a corner that you approach in a high gear.
This is your “rotation practice corner.”
Picture yourself turning into this corner while trail braking – relatively slowly and smoothly releasing pressure off the brake pedal, while increasing the amount you turn the steering wheel. In other words, you’re blending the increase of steering wheel rotation (and, no, this is not what “rotating the car” is about) with the decrease in braking force.
As you do this, your car follows exactly on the arc that you “define” with the steering input; it goes precisely where you expected it to go based on the amount of steering you’ve put in. In this case, your car’s handling is neutral, neither oversteering or understeering.
But you want just a touch of oversteer in the entry phase of the corner to help you turn the car, to rotate it. No, not like a World of Outlaws sprint car, or a Formula Drift car, but just a tiny bit more slip angle on the rear tires than for the fronts.
How do you do that?
You know I’m going to say this: It all comes down to your timing and rate of release of the brakes. Release them too early and the car will not rotate because you’ve unloaded the front tires, reducing their grip level in relation to the rears. Release them too late (too much trail braking), and you’ll overload the front tires, resulting in them losing grip and not turning the car.
In other words, trail braking can help you rotate your car more… or it can make it rotate less! Hey, if this was easy, everyone would do it.
To be clear, let me go over that again:
More load on the front tires (meaning less on the rears) can result in more slip angle at the rear, leading to “deliberate oversteer,” which is one way of thinking of rotating a car.
Too much load on the front tires (again, less on the rears) can also result in more slip angle at the front(because you’re overloading the front tires, asking too much of them), causing understeer – and less, or even no rotation of the car.
And that’s one of the reasons getting just the right amount of rotation is so difficult. Plus – and this is critical – if you simply slow the release of the brake pedal to trail brake longer, you might just take off so much speed that there isn’t what I call “enough energy in the car.” In other words, you’ve over-slowed, and now the load on the front tires is not as much as it should be, and therefore the car doesn’t respond, doesn’t rotate. In fact, the result is... you’re slow.
With that in mind, you might ask, “How, then, do I make my car rotate in a corner?” Thanks for asking.
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