Here's how you're going to learn any car track combo, be it in real life or in a simulator. Even if you're one of the fastest drivers who already knows everything, you're gonna have to go through these steps if you want to reach the limit in the fastest way possible in a safe way without crashing.

The Four-Step Learning Process

We're gonna divide this into four steps that will help you systematically find the limit of any car and track combination.

Step 1: Finding the Basic Line

The first step is the most basic one. You're gonna find the basic line, which means pretty much the biggest radius possible. Remember this is just gonna be a baseline and we're going to adjust these lines after we go through the next steps and we realize that some specific behaviors are applicable to that specific car or to that specific track.

That literally means being totally on the outside on entry, totally on the inside mid-corner, and totally on the outside on exits. Like literally where the corners go. So if you have a different corner right here, then you already know that this circle here is gonna be here like this, which means that to make that work as soon as you exit this corner you're gonna have to bring the car as quickly as possible to the outside here, which might mean you have to sacrifice a little bit and so on. So it's just literally finding the fastest line possible in a very basic way.

You can do that by watching onboards, by watching guides, just figuring out where you go. This is always the first step. Now of course you were doing that under the limit, right? You were not going too fast because if you go too fast in real life and misjudge the entry, you go just a little bit too fast, you end up going off and you can damage your car. You can crash and that session is over for you, so you don't want that. You're gonna do that under limit.

Step 2: Finding Understeer and the Workable Speed Range

The next step is to find understeer, and to find understeer what you're going to do is be a little bit under the limit on entry. So make sure you're under the limit. You're 100% sure that you're bringing a speed that is not too fast for that corner because you already seen the guides, you're already seeing the lap times and the onboards.

Then you're going to start doing kind of a half throttle a little bit earlier and start turning to feel more or less how much the fronts grip until you get into some sort of understeer. Be careful though because if you're accelerating like that and you get into understeer, you're gonna have to lift a tiny bit. So you're gonna have to be playing with the throttle to make sure that you minimize that understeer so it's not too much understeer to go off. So you kind of aim for understeer consistently on the corner.

Why is that useful? Because it's gonna give you what I'm gonna call a workable speed range. Through understeer you're gonna be on the limit of at least the front tires. You're definitely not gonna be on the limit of the rears because the car is just destroying the fronts. The fronts are not able to rotate the car more and the rears are just relaxing and doing nothing. That shows you that you are very close to the ideal speed of that corner and that's why we're gonna call that the workable speed range.

Let's say this corner is supposed to be done at 100 kph. If you get into understeer, for sure you are more or less at least at 70 maybe 75 maybe 85 maybe 90 because through understeer you know you're gonna be on the limit of the front tires. At least you know that you're not too far away from the speed limit and if you're capable of maintaining a very consistent and controllable understeer throughout the entire lap, that means you have a much better idea of how much speed you're gonna carry in each corner. That's step two.

In a situation like that, what generally happens with your speed graph is this: We're braking a little bit earlier, right, so we bring the speed down and let's say the apex is right here. You start accelerating early and really just keeping that understeer and like you see it and I'm drawing it like up and down because you're controlling the yaw of the car with the throttle.

So in this exercise you turn a lot the steering and you get the car to really screw up the front tires and then you're gonna notice that if you lift the throttle it's gonna point more. If you accelerate a little bit more it's gonna point less. Of course if you smash to 100% and you're in a formula car you're gonna spin, so be careful with how much power you're applying. You have to be under the limit of wheel spin. You're gonna control control control and then finally when you get out of the corner you can accelerate more.

Step 3: Minimizing Understeer

The next step, step three, is to minimize that understeer and here's how you're going to do it. You're gonna start braking a little bit later and carry a little bit more speed into the corner so your speed graph is probably gonna look a little bit more like this and then what's gonna happen is because you're carrying a little bit more speed you're gonna have to brake a little bit more which is gonna shift some more weight to the front tires and with that weight on the front more, the car is gonna want to turn more.

So you're gonna minimize that until you brake a little bit later and you start figuring out that oh wow now because I'm braking more deeper into the corner there's even more weight until the car starts to minimize the understeer so much that it actually becomes a little bit of oversteer. When you reach a point where the car is actually a little bit oversteer as you're trying to do that, that means you found a very very close workable speed range to what is gonna be the limit and this is the process that we do in any car track combination to find the limit in the most effective way possible.

So if you go to Formula One drivers, there's a very good example of Sebastian Vettel where he was testing for the first few laps driving at Monza. He was braking at the 200 and then 190 and then 180 and then 170 and then he was so freaking precise with how late he was braking because he was testing that. He was testing the limit of the front tires first and then he was starting to bring more energy, more speed into the corner to a point where he was actually doing the trail braking into the corner and naturally that trail braking was making the car rotate more and more and more.

On step three you have a much better idea of how much speed we're carrying to the corner so we're closer and closer and closer to the limit, always being aware of how much understeer we have still left and minimizing that understeer until we get to a point where we're actually on that neutral almost oversteer. So when you start correcting a little bit on entry, that means your speed is very very close to ideal.

Step 4: Refining the Line According to Specific Behaviors

When your traces are looking more or less like this, we get on the stage four which is refining the line according to the specific behaviors of each car. So some cars like Formula cars will have a more U-shaped line and some low downforce cars will start showing in a little bit earlier and these specific behaviors and specific lines start to show up a lot more when you find the limit of the car and then you realize that the lines are going to have to be adjusted specifically to that car.

Again this is just a baseline that you can always come back to and the reason I'm putting this on the very beginning of the course is that you can already go there and apply it. If you go to the simulator and try this you're going to learn a car track combo like that very quickly but what you're going to watch after in this course is going to give you better and better control over the balance of the car, over the line choices and then you're going to always be able to apply the same process here but in a much more refined way.

Important Considerations for Understeer and Oversteer

Inducing Understeer Safely

Now this is very important here. In order to reach understeer you have to be shifting the weight back to the rears, right? Accelerating a little bit but mostly accelerating in a place where when you're on the limit you're going to be braking there. So right now in this exercise in order to induce understeer you're going to have to be slightly under the speed limit of that corner because if you're too fast you're just going to run off track and that's not useful at all. But also make sure you're not too slow because if you're too slow then your car is going to go to the inside way too much even without reaching understeer and you're going to hit the inside of the track too early and that's also not useful.

Inducing Oversteer Safely

In order to induce oversteer you have to be with the weight on the front. You have to get the car to point the front and the rears not be able to cope with that amount of rotation. In order for that to happen you have to be a little bit over or very close to the speed limit because if you're too slow when you try to get the car to oversteer you're just going to hit the inside too early and that's also not very useful.

What you can do is in order to generate some safe oversteer you can carry a little bit less speed but you turn in very late so you have the room on the inside to do that exercise of throwing the car a little bit. Of course if you're too fast with oversteer both ends will slide and the car is just not going to be able to stay on track because it's way too fast so you can get the oversteer and still slide all the way to the outside of the track which is definitely not useful.

Three Types of Corners

By doing this exercise you're going to figure out that there are kind of three types of corners:

Type 1: Flat-Out Corners

The ones that you can take flat. The car is already on the speed limit. The car has the grip to do that corner at that speed so you pretty much don't have to do anything, just use all the track and try to turn the least possible so you don't screw up speed.

Type 2: Near-Limit Corners Requiring Speed Management

Then you have the second type of corners which are the ones where you're very close to the speed limit but you still have to manage your rotation. If you're just with flat then the car is going to understeer and go off or oversteer. So you're just a little bit over limit. These ones you're going to have to accelerate a tiny bit, just a tiny bit, maybe a lift, maybe a lift in like 20 brakes and these ones are very dangerous in real life so here's how we're going to approach them.

Let's say we have a corner like that and the ideal line is something like this with a little lift so you cannot do it super flat, you have to do a slight lift. Now here's the thing: if you realize that you're too fast and you lift, let's paint the lifting orange and you do the lift more or less here, that can be very dangerous because you're already on the peak of rotation and then when you lift you shift the weight to the front and you can get oversteer and lose the car and spin and crash. So that is very dangerous.

So what you want to do when you're approaching this corner, remember doing the exercise, you are lifting early and doing the entire corner all accelerating. So the lifting point was before the corner. So what happens is you decrease the speed here and then you can pretty much do the entire corner accelerating and inducing that more or less understeer, right?

Now as we try to minimize the understeer in these corners we're going to lift a little bit later and then later and then more or less here when we start lifting while doing the beginning of the corner entry phase, then the car is going to start to be a little bit tricky to manage. So you're going to realize how much you need to lift but the deeper the lift the more dangerous it's going to be, so be careful with that. So in this case the timing of the lifting is going to determine a lot how much the car is going to rotate but that's a trial and error that you have to do very carefully. Again just always lifting a little bit later to see how much neutral steer, how much oversteer you get.

Type 3: Heavy Braking Corners

And then we have the third type of corners which is the one where we have to do a lot of speed control before we turn into the corner. So let's say the workable speed range here, turning point speed is around 100 kph but you're at 300 here, right? So you have to slow down a lot on a straight line and that's going to be hard braking zone to get you to the right speed and then you start working on that build-up that we are talking about as you start turning in.

So initially you slow down a lot to like say 100 and then you kind of like do that exercise of understeering all the way off and then you're going to decrease the speed a little bit later and then a little bit later and then a little bit later until you start to combine a little bit of braking with a little bit of turning. So here when you start getting that braking deep into the corner, then the car is going to start to be a little bit more oversteer and then you're going to find the limit of rotation and then finally you're going to be able to brake deep into the corner until you get to the MRP which is the maximum rotation point we're going to talk about that in the course.

And finally have the optimal braking, the optimal speed into the corner and the optimal acceleration point without having to induce any unnecessary understeer. So initially we created that artificial understeer to have an idea of how much this speed is going to be and then we start braking a little bit later and later and later. With the weight transfer going forward we're already naturally minimizing that understeer and dealing with the balance of the car and knowing more and more the limits of that car and then finally carrying as much speed as possible.

Of course it's not that simple. This is just the beginning because as soon as you get there, how much of your braking are you gonna have to do? Are you gonna have to do this and then drop and carry like that the brakes or are you going to brake like hard and then start releasing like that? How are you going to release the brakes? That's for another lesson.