The Lost Art of High-Performance Driving (Speed Secrets) by Ross Bentley

Author:Ross Bentley [Bentley, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motorbooks
Published: 2017-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

SPEED SECRET

Control understeer and oversteer with your vision and managing weight transfer.

1. Ease your foot off the throttle to transfer weight onto the front tires, giving them more traction.

2. Slightly straighten the steering wheel, just enough so that the front tires regain grip on the road/track surface.

Let’s now take a look at oversteer: remember that your rear tires have less traction than the fronts have in this situation.

Imagine going around a corner, and the back end of your car slides out. You’re oversteering. What do you do? Give those rear tires more traction. Now. It’s a challenge, because there are two opposite ways of doing this, and the right one is dependent on what caused the oversteer. Yes, there are actually two kinds of oversteer: oversteer and power oversteer.

The first kind of oversteer is simply when the rear tires have less traction than the fronts. This is most often caused by the weight balance or handling characteristics of the car, but speed is also a big factor.

Power oversteer is driver induced: it’s caused by the driver applying too much throttle and generating wheelspin, which breaks the traction of the rear tires and causes the car to slide—to oversteer. If you’ve ever played around in a snow-covered parking lot, pouncing on the gas pedal and kicking the rear of the car out into an oversteer skid or slide, you know what I’m talking about. Oh, and, power oversteer can only occur in a rear-wheel-drive car (or all-wheel drive that is biased towards rear drive).

With power oversteer, simply ease a little off the throttle to give the rear tires back some of their grip. If it’s regular oversteer, squeeze on the throttle to cause some weight transfer to the rear, giving the rear tires more grip.

I wish it was simple, with only one solution to handle every case of oversteer, but it’s not. You have to decide, in a fraction of a second, whether the oversteer is caused by too much or not enough throttle. That’s why practice time on a skid pad is so valuable.

When you ease on more throttle to transfer weight to the rear, remember that speed is one factor that caused the oversteer. In this situation, you don’t need more speed, so when I say ease on more throttle, I mean “ease,” and not “stand on the throttle”! Be smooth and gentle.

There’s one other thing that you must do in whatever oversteer situation you face: look and steer where you want to go.

I’m sure you were told when you first learned to drive to always “steer into the skid.” That’s valuable advice, but it’s confusing, and maybe one of the most confusing things we’re ever taught in our lives.

If you’re going around a right-hand corner and your car begins to oversteer—say, the rear slides out to the (left) side—which way should you turn the steering wheel? “Into the skid” sounds easy, but for many people it’s not a natural choice: which direction is that? If you’re oversteering in

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