The Four-Stage Corner Division System

Many attempts exist on the internet to divide a corner into multiple stages—sometimes 5, 6, or 7 steps. These explanations often fail because they're too complicated. A simpler approach divides corners into four distinct stages that will be used throughout this course:

• Early entry

• Late entry

• Early exit

• Late exit

These stages only exist when there is cornering and braking involved. The hard braking phase is not taken into account. If a corner is flat or there's just a slight lift of the throttle, the approach will be different. These corners will be discussed in detail later in this course.

Some corners will have a hard braking phase in a straight line to control the speed. This is not true for all corners. There will be many corners where you are already pretty close to the ideal speed. In these cases, you only do light braking while already turning into the corner. For corners where there is no need of braking hard on a straight line, we start right away on the early entry phase. For corners where there is a hard braking zone before, there will be the hard braking phase and then the early entry phase.

Early Entry Phase

Early entry is where the initial transition from peak braking should start. This is where the first degrees of steering angles show up and the weight transfer starts shifting backwards due to brake release and outwards due to steering.

Key Actions During Early Entry

• Releasing the brakes

• Adding steering

• Do not keep fully on the brakes while turning or keep the brakes at a fixed pressure

• Do not reapply the brakes if the car is gaining rotation

Common Mistakes

One of the most common mistakes at this stage is initially turning the steering wheel too much or too quickly. The goal is to slowly transition the brake release to the steering input as if pouring a liquid from one cup to the other. In simpler words, trying to reach too much rotation that early in the corner will cause the car to either understeer too much or oversteer too much. You'll spend the rest of the corner trying to fix the problem instead of going fast.

Remember that this discussion concerns early entry under braking. If you're turning into a corner where you're going flat, then you should turn in a lot more quickly because there's no need to slowly transition from braking into turning since there's no braking at all.

Characteristics and Dangers

This is one of the most dangerous phases of the corner because of the bigger tendency of the car to oversteer. This results from the heavy load on the front tires, higher speeds, and in case the car's rear wheel driven, high engine braking effects.

When you do an early entry, it will determine all the next phases drastically since each stage depends on the previous one in a snowball effect.

Late Entry Phase

This is the second half of the entry phase, or the second quarter of the entire corner. We are still under braking. The speeds are still getting lower and lower and we're gaining more and more rotation. This is the build up to the peak rotation that we'll reach right before we start to accelerate.

Common Mistakes in Late Entry

Late entry is where we generally make the big mistake of doing passive driving where we understeer and wait for the car to rotate. If you spin a lot on corner exits, there's a big chance your root mistake that causes the spin is in the late entry phase. This is where we tend to hesitate and not get the car to point, not get the car to rotate as much as the car is capable. Whatever rotation we fail to achieve here, we will have to compensate later in a later phase on corner exit.

The Maximum Rotation Point

The late entry is the final build up to what is called the maximum rotation point, one of the most important concepts you'll learn in this course. A good late entry will depend on a good early entry and a good braking phase. In order to even practice a good late entry phase, you must nail the previous phases and be consistent with it.

If you're bringing a different speed on entry all the time, then mid corner, you're always going to have a different sample to test with and your testing is not going to be consistent. You're never going to know what the difference is from things you do on the late entry phase if your early entry is always bringing a new speed into that area.

Early Exit Phase

The early exit phase starts when we start accelerating. It starts at the peak rotation, which is the MRP (maximum rotation point), which means you should not gain any extra rotation from that point. Rotation will always be inversely proportional to speed. Your speed is going down, your rotation should be going up. When we reach the maximum rotation point and start accelerating, the rotation should start going down as the speed goes up again.

Managing Rotation During Early Exit

Although you should never gain rotation in this phase, you should still have a good bit of it. Don't just unwind the wheel too quickly, because if you do, you're going to lose rotation at the early exit phase and you're going to have to compensate that at the late exit phase. The early exit has still a lower speed than the late exit. If you unwind the steering too quickly on early exit, you'll have more rotation to be done at the higher speeds, which is the late exit, and the car might not be capable of doing it anymore.

Understanding Understeer Snap Oversteer

This is where the understeer snap oversteer problem starts. You understeer on early exit because you're not being aggressive enough in power, or you're just being a little bit afraid on early exit. Then you try to force rotation later into the corner because you realize you're going wide, and you lose the car in the late exit phase. Almost 100% of the understeer snap oversteer moments happen in the same way: understeer on early exit, oversteer on late exit. Always.

Late Exit Phase

This is where we just reap the consequences of the previous phases. Late exit is the phase where we have the least control of the car, because it depends on literally all the other phases. If you think you're doing everything right but you only lose the car on the exit, then you're probably not doing everything right on the phases before.

On the late exit, the speeds are higher, the rotation should be decreasing more and more, and we should reach peak acceleration.

Quick Recap: Characteristics of Each Stage

Early Entry

• The speeds are higher

• The RPMs are high

• Still a lot of heavy trail braking

• The car tends to oversteer a little bit more

• One of the most important phases because it determines everything else from the next stages

Late Entry

• The speeds are lower

• The RPMs are lower

• Much less trail braking

• The car tends to understeer a little bit more

Early Exit

• You start accelerating

• The speeds are still low, so you still should get a decent amount of rotation, but not gain rotation

• It's safer to push for rotation than late exit though

Late Exit

• The speeds are high

• You don't have a lot of room for corrections because you're already going wider towards the exit

• The car does not accept gained rotation at all

• There's a big danger of going off if the previous phases were bad

Where to Push and Where to Be Careful

Early entry and late exit—the extremes of the corners—are places to be careful with generating too much rotation, because the speeds are higher. Late entry and early exit are the places where it's safer to force the car a little bit more, so you can find the limits and feel the limit of the car, especially when learning a car or track.

Don't worry too much about all these stages. This is just an introduction. These phases will be discussed throughout the entire course, with repeated explanations to ensure complete understanding of how they're divided and how each concept will apply depending on the stage.