Testing the steering?

Now I’m not one to complain… much… but when a generic sports guy is hired to do racing commentary my hide gets a bit chapped. Most famous case in point was when Jim McKay did the Indy 500, years back, and started prattling on about how the drivers were “testing their steering” by weaving back and forth. Uh… no Jim, not really, go back to ski jumping please...

As readers of this blog know what’s really happening is they are just trying to get, or keep, some heat in their tires. Their soft compounds work best hot. But that still leaves the question for a driver new to the Mazda GT, warm the tires, or not.

The answer is emphatically, no. The Toyo RA-1 is a hard compound tire with excellent character that is nearly as sticky cold as it is warm. But when racing on a dry surface you do tend to overheat it. Usually, starting out cold, your best lap will be on lap two or three. They will stay pretty grippy for a while, and then depending on how hard you’ve used them, you will start to get a bit of a spongy feel about twenty minutes in. My very first race I didn’t pay attention to the spongy feel and did a half loop in the cotton corners. Anyway, if you slide around trying to warm up the tires, all you are accomplishing is using up grip before the race starts.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t have stuff to get warm. Namely the brakes. First time out I didn’t touch the brakes until I went for some deep braking in the first corner. Trust me when I say this is not a pleasant experience. After that I tried, during the formation lap, to zip ahead a bit and brake. Speeding up and slowing down got enough temperature into the brake pads to make the car happy without putting much heat in the tires. So you can imagine that I felt like a bit of a moron when, after suggesting to someone that ‘all you need to do is brake a couple times to get the brakes a bit warm’ another driver pointed out that he just dragged the brakes for bit and accomplished the same thing.