Racing Line
Racing line is the line that you place your car on when driving around the track. The best racing line should allow a driver to go around the track in the fastest possible way.
When it comes to a corner, the traditional “Out-In-Out” works the best in most scenarios. This is to place your car on the outside line of the track, turn your car into the apex of the corner (In) and accelerate out onto the outside line.
In doing this, you are “straightening” the corner hence allowing your car to travel at the highest possible speed. While you may say that doing “In-In-In” will give you the least amount of distance to travel through a corner, this does not work in general because your car only has a set amount of traction and in order to do such an acute angle, you will need to sacrifice a lot of speed.
Of course, there are exceptions to this “Out-In-Out” approach, but that is beyond the scope of this blog.
It is important to use all the width of the track, a pro racing driver can often place his/her car at the exact point just at the track limit, this may only make small difference over one corner but for a 20 laps race in a track that has 15 corners, everything adds up!
Practice (a lot!) on a track to find the optimal racing line, together with the braking point for each corner. If you are doing this on a sim, don’t be afraid to go too crazy to start with and then dial it back down (or you can do the opposite too of course).
USE THE CURB!
In many sim titles and if you are driving a GT3, generally you can use the curb as a starting point – usually the braking point is somewhere around the start of the curb before the corner. Also the curb gives you a good idea of how the racing line should be. Try not to always rely on the meter board especially if they are “breakable object” on the track side, instead, try find something that is always going to be there stationary such as curb, guard rail, light box, fences or even trees.
It is not gonna end well if you can only brake at Monza T1 following the 150m board and it got destroyed….
Braking
Braking is an essential element to make one goes faster … sounds confusing and contradictory right? For sure, braking is for slowing down a car, which is the opposite of “fast”, however on a racing track that a driver needs to tackle a lot of corners, being able to brake at the right time with minimal loss of speed will ultimately result in a fast lap time.
There are mainly 3 types of braking techniques:
-Threshold Braking-
This often also refer to as Straight Line Braking – basically means you apply brakes on a straight line to slow down the car without locking the wheels up. Sounds pretty easy eh? In fact it is not difficult at all, the only thing that you may need to learn here is to find out at what point the car will lock up the tyres, which will increase your braking distance and destroy your tyres. Many modern cars have a very good ABS (Anti-Lock Braking System) however if you can master Threshold Braking, it is always going to perform better than letting ABS does the work.
Generally, with this technique, you will be doing threshold braking at the straight line before the corner, slow the car down to the appropriate speed, then lift off from the brake pedal, turn the car in (coasting), and accelerate out of the corner.
-Cadence Braking-
This often also refer to as Stutter Braking, and that’s what it literally is! Your foot will be “pumping” rapidly on the brake pedal, causing the wheel to lock and unlock. The idea is that you are slowing down the car while still having some sort of steering control. This is particularly useful when you are driving cars without ABS, or you are trying to recover from overspeeding during a corner while also avoiding to completely lock up your car. Senna for example is a master in cadence braking!
-Trail Braking-
This is the holy grail in braking techniques. If you want to become fast, this is a must learn! (And I still have not fully mastered it yet). Think back on the Threshold Braking section above, imagine you split up the braking into 10 parts, threshold braking means you are doing all these 10 parts before you turn into a corner, whereas Trail Braking means you do 8/10 parts on the straight, and the remaining 2/10 during the turn in.
This means that your braking point on the straight can be later, and there will be no coasting (time wasted) and as a result you are taking a corner faster.
The theory behind this is that the 2/10 of braking is done in a gentle manner, so that the front of your car is loaded and pressing down onto the road, resulting in more traction in the front end – this also means that the rear end of the car is lifted and has less traction. This generates a “controlled slip” allowing the driver to point the car into the corner a lot easier.
It takes a lot of time and patient to learn trail braking, but it is a must if you want to become a fast driver!
Important thing to note: Always take your foot off the braking pedal gently and gradually, otherwise you may upset the car balance and will send you into the shadow realm.
Slow in, Fast out
You probably have heard this before already, and yes this is a good way to let to you driver faster around corners. Of course, the “slow” here does not mean that you go as slow as when you are doing a school pick up run or grocery shopping in a car park. What this really is saying is that you should not overspeed into a corner thinking that will get your through the corner faster.
Instead, you should slow the car down to a degree that will allow you to maintain a good speed while also be able to turn into the corner comfortably.
In most cases, racing is all about the corner exit. Everyone can go flat out on a straight line but if you can maximize your corner exit speed, you will have a massive advantage over your opponent.
Traction
REMEMBER, there is only a finite amount of things that a car can do at a time before it loses balance and goes out of control. If a car has 10 parts of traction, you cannot ask the car to do 10 part of braking and also wanting to steer (the 11th part), which will results in understeer (or crashing or spining out or … you get the idea)
Imagine traction is like, you have 10 cookies and there are 3 kids waiting for you to distribute the cookies, so that they will have energy to do stuff.
The kids are named Braking, Steering and Accelerating.
– When you give 10 cookies to Braking, Steering and Accelerating are having 0. (Threshold braking)
– When you give 8 cookies to Braking, you can still give 2 cookies to Steering and Accelerating has 0 (Trail Braking)
– When you give 10 cookies to Accelerating, Steering and Braking has 0 so you are overspeeding into a corner and the guard rail is waiting for you.
(example goes on…)
It’s all about balancing act when it comes to traction. Make sure you always have one or more cookies given to one of these kids – if you have 10 cookies at your hand during the race, that means your car is not doing enough and hence you are losing lap times.
I know it is a weird analogy, but I hope you get the idea! (Finger crossed!)