Speed Secrets: No!! Do not release early!

Oh, the problems I cause...

My recent My Aha! Moment article is driving me crazy. Why? Because it seems I didn’t explain myself clear enough. Or at all. Or something.

I’ve gotten tons of emails and comments here on Substack (Please don’t stop commenting. I love them. I read every single one of them, and I learn from them.). Some asked for clarification, and some readers appeared to have gotten the wrong ideas on how to use brake release to help you increase corner entry speed by rotating the car.

I read something in a few comments that I’ve heard from drivers in the past: releasing the brakes fast, and snapping one’s foot off the brakes causes the car to rotate.

No, it doesn’t. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of what causes a car to rotate. Please don’t do that.

In the My Aha! Moment article, I shared an illustration that I’d created meany years ago of the “Classic Line.” I took that same illustration and added a layer that shows the line (in green) you can drive when you rotate the car entering the corner. Notice that its radius is never as sharp, or tight, so you can carry a little more entry speed, and still get back to the usual apex – you’ll start accelerating out of the corner at the same place, but from a higher speed.

Maybe I better define what I mean by rotating a car.

Imagine looking down on your car from directly above, as if from a drone. You’re heading straight ahead towards a 90-degree right-hand corner. Layer in a clockface on top of your car, and notice that you’re driving directly toward the 12 o’clock position.

As you get to the corner, you turn the steering wheel, aiming to ultimately get to the 3 o’clock position. As you know, things don’t happen instantaneously. You turn the steering wheel so that you’ll eventually get to the 3, but it’s a gradual arc or path towards it. Let’s say you initially aim for the 1 o’clock, and that’s where your car goes.

Now, do this same thing, but imagine you do some “magic” (I’ll get back to what the magic is shortly) with the balance of your car so that the rear tires have slightly less traction than the front tires do. As you turn the steering wheel to aim for the 1 o’clock position, the rear of the car slides a little, causing your car to head toward the 1:30 or even 2 o’clock position.

It’s this rotation, beyond what just the steering is telling the car to do, that I’m talking about. If you want to see an extreme version of rotation, watch World of Outlaws sprint cars or Formula D drift cars enter a turn. They rotate a LOT.

To be clear, rotation is a form of oversteer, since the rear tires are slipping more than the fronts. But I think of rotation as what you, the driver, are doing to the car; oversteer is what the car is doing to you. Rotation is deliberate, intentional oversteer, with the goal of helping the car turn more.