Ruling a Corner… With the Throttle

22 March 2016 Redazione Techniques and Driving

If you think that brake is the most important pedal you have available, in the precise moment you are approaching a corner, forget about cars! I’m obviously alluding to a sporty use of your vehicle, due to a hot lap on track, where there are no limits or danger to you and the others. In this “protected” environment you have the opportunity to test your skills, but also to test the limits of your car or the car on which you are at the wheel, trying to increase the cornering speed and delay your braking points: an optimal balance between these two phases is the best recipe for improve your lap times.

While cornering so many things happen and can depend on a wrong trajectory, from an emergency maneuver, or a faulty combination of braking or acceleration while exiting the corner itself, and then it comes into play the factor called “slip angle”. What is it? To make it short and extremely simple, it is the distance difference that a tire is facing, compared to that which would face in the case of clean maneuver, ie without any force in play. For “forces” we refer to changes of direction or grip loss, which then involves understeer or oversteer. In order to solve this bad situation, you have to focus on the slip angle and on the weights distribution, and you only need the gas pedal. How can it be? By diminishing the gas in order to transfer weight to the front (in case of understeer) and pressing on the gas to move the weight to the rear (in case of oversteer), regaining traction to the drive wheels and correct the mistake. Simple, but not always obvious.

Carlo Brema