Looking under the cushion…

… of my couch may lead to some extra spare change. Looking at my cushion, the amount and type of room I leave myself for those small mistakes and corrections I need to make in a corner may lead to a change in my lap times.

Now the term, “Go slow to go fast” is the most overused, hackneyed cliché in racing. But it got that way by having a lot of truth to it. My problem with it is that the people who use it most often have rarely thought through why it works. To me the “why it’s true” is more important for a beginning driver since it’s the reason why too many drivers just reach a certain point, not all that high on the food chain, plateau and ultimately give up the sport in disgust. While others get unnaturally fast with far less seat time. All too often drivers will look to friends who will just tell them they are over-driving the car, which may work but again, is only the half of it. And while getting that half often leads them to fix the other half naturally, without having to think about it, I prefer to think things all the way through.

No matter how good and consistent a driver you are, you need to leave yourself a cushion in each and every corner. No one is absolutely perfect, using one hundred percent of grip and one hundred percent of the track, no more and no less, each and every time, is beyond anyone. Part of getting faster is being able to consistently use more grip and more track than the other guy, without ever exceeding a hundred percent of either. It’s about needing less of a cushion, in total. But that’s the long term solution, a small, bit by bit improvement that getting more seat time leads to in the long run.

The initial, beginners mistake that the “go slow to go fast” cliché is implicitly, but not explicitly, designed to address is to change the kind of cushion not the amount, which is more important to initially getting fast. No amount of seat time, while constantly over-driving the car, will lead to much improvement because while trying to get fast, too many drivers will push the car harder, which means using up more of the tire’s available grip. Since the driver still needs a cushion, the only place to get it once he’s used up all the grip is to leave more space on the track. This is the mistaken mindset that the cliché will implicitly address. It’s enormously clear that a car using one hundred percent of grip and ninety percent of the track is going to be much slower, and much harder to control, than a car that is using one hundred percent of the track and ninety percent of the grip.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come up on somebody trying to wrestle his car into submission, and using every last ounce of grip his tires have, but who I could just casually drive around the outside of, since he’s left two or three car widths of track-out for me. When doing track days they would often be convinced I had some special engine or trick suspension and when I tried to explain why I could pass their Corvette in my little 98 horsepower Miata they would either get it and get faster right away or they wouldn’t. But most of us had to at least be told the cliché once or twice, even if we never thought about why it works.

The reason I like the full explanation is that the first instinct for a driver told he’s driving the car too hard is to look to his apex, and that won’t necessarily help either. You can over-drive the car while hitting the apex every time. The driver needs to look at the whole arc. Track in, apex and track out. Friends and coaches might tell the driver he’s over driving the car, and that he’s not on the line, but the response is usually “I’m hitting the apex every time, so it must be something wrong with the car.”

Many drivers have an issue with ego, or like me, with memory or perception. To beat either, the best exercise is to take some video (with the sound off) and pause it at turn-in, apex and track-out of each corner. With a piece of paper (many of us are tactile learners) in my hand I write down how far I am from the edge of the track. If it’s just a few inches, ok, but I’ve spotted myself both crabbing in from the edge of the track while anticipating the turn-in, and using up all of the tire while leaving five feet of track-out as my cushion. Everybody watches their apex, and remembers when they get it right or wrong, but you don’t start getting really fast until you start paying just as much attention to your track in and track out; the whole arc.