How to Plan Your Lines

Understanding the Point of No Return

Another common cause of crashes for a lot of beginners is when you find yourself deep into the corner going wide towards the exit and reaching a point of no return where there's nothing you can do but go off track. Whenever this happens that means you did something wrong but not at that very moment. You did something wrong a second or two before that moment. This lesson is deeply related to the vision technique but in a more practical way where we will think ahead and plan the lines that we need to take at a given corner.

Determining the Best Lines: The 90 Degree Corner Baseline

So how do we determine the best lines to take in a corner? Let's start with a baseline. A 90 degree corner with a braking zone. On a 90 degree corner first of all you have to make sure that you're rotating 50% of those 90 degrees on the first half of the corner and 50% on exit. That means turning at least 45 degrees on entry and 45 degrees on exit.

Why Beginners Crash on Exits

Why do so many beginners crash on exits? Because hesitation gets you and you end up not committing to turn those first 45 degrees on entry and then you have to compensate on exit to finish the corner which means you have to turn more on exit. But by the time you realize that you are already going way too wide and most likely even accelerating so the car will not be able to achieve that missing extra rotation from the entry at the exit.

If you hesitate on corner entry and you end up turning only 30 degrees for example you have to rotate 60 degrees on exit and this speed is going up. You will get into either understeer or oversteer and you will end up going wide and off track or spinning.

Compound Corners

Take this baseline of rotating 50/50 on every corner that is isolated from other corners. On compound corners things get a little bit more complicated because you're combining and blending two or three lines together but the concept is the same. If you miss the opportunity to rotate well on entry you will have to rotate more on exit and the car might not like that.

The Cause and Effect Relationship

Whatever happens on entry will determine your lines on the exit. Entry is cause, exit is consequence and this whole plan to rotate 50% before half of the corner happens in your head before the corner as you look into it and plan the line which is deeply related to the vision technique. Remember that the vision technique is not only looking forward with your eyes but also plenty your lines in your head before you execute them. This idea of rotating 50% before half of the corner is great because it gives you a clear plan of what to even do with your visual information.

Workload Distribution

We can call this concept the workload distribution. To be on the limit you want to be spreading the workload on the tires throughout the whole corner. If you're not on the limit on entry you're shifting that workload towards the exit of the corner making your exits way more dangerous and more difficult. If you succeed in rotating the car well on entry the workload will be more balanced and the exit is going to be straighter which allows you to accelerate early and spiral out towards the exit nicely.

This is why it's so important to never take a nap or hesitate on corner entry because you're saving yourself from having to deal with a big problem on exit. Now you know that you have to rotate 50% of the corner before you get to the apex but what happens if you turn in too early?

Common Turn-In Mistakes

Turning In Too Early: Bouncing Off the Apex

If your car is pointed to the apex too early it becomes impossible to turn more because by doing that you would hit the inside of the corner too early or maybe even cut the track or maybe even hit the wall. So you get stuck on the inside of the race track and you need to correct the steering to go straighter for a while before you can turn again. By doing that you completely miss the opportunity to rotate 50% of the corner by the apex and now you find yourself pointing a few degrees of angle towards the outside of that corner and we have the same problem again having to rotate more than 50% of the corner only on exit.

We can call this bouncing off the apex. If you turn in too early you hit the inside too early and you start bouncing off of it without having enough room to rotate the car properly and by the time you're past that your car is angled way too much towards the outside.

Turning In Too Late

The opposite problem would be turning in too late where you end up doing way too much rotational entry and by the time you get to exit the car has already done most of the rotation needed for the corner and you're pretty much exiting straight or not even using all the track on exit. When this happens that means you're over slowing on entry and losing a lot of lap time.

Turning late can also be a dangerous situation if you're a little bit too fast because we instinctively try to turn to the apex more quickly and more aggressively. Remember our brain is wired to obsess about the apex and never give up so we end up forcing the car and turning more which under braking might induce a lot of oversteer and you can spin on corner entry.

Key Takeaways

So let's recap:

• Plan to do 50% of the rotation of a corner before 50% of the length of the corner

• Make sure you commit to rotate the car the most on that area around the apex because the speeds are lower and the car can take that rotation

• If you hesitate and miss the opportunity to rotate the car on entry you will have a bad angle towards the exit and you will have to compensate to do that extra rotational on exit which will be way more difficult and more dangerous

• If you turn into early you can bounce off the apex not being able to turn more without hitting the grass on the inside and you find yourself in the same situation having to rotate way more on exit which prevents you from carrying exit speed

• If you turn in too late you're shifting too much workload to the entry which can make you oversteer and spin by doing a panic trail braking and even if you don't the exit will be too easy, too straight, too slow because the workload distribution will be unbalanced with too much work on entry and not enough work on exit