Inducing Understeer

Understanding Understeer as a Safe Learning Tool

One of the safest forms of reaching the limit wall cornering is to reach the peak grip capacity of the front tires first. When the car starts understeering, your rotation becomes limited. At this point, more steering does not make the car rotate more. It reaches a plateau where the front tires just extract a somewhat fixed amount of rotation.

The magic in all this is that as soon as you reach understeer, the car starts tracing a predictable line limited by the front tire's capacity. This is why we also say that when the car is understeering, it is front limited.

What Happens During Understeer

In understeer, the front tires are at the limit, but the rear tires are not. This means the front tires are asking for an X amount of rotation and the rear tires are resisting that rotation, making the car go straighter than the intended steering angle.

Benefits of Learning to Induce Understeer

The benefit of learning how to induce understeer is that you can actually stay in it for a long time, which gives you enough time to absorb the experience and learn from it. In contrast, when the car oversteers, a quick correction is necessary, otherwise the car will spin. And this is not a very good learning opportunity for beginners, because it can be scary and frustrating.

Another benefit of inducing understeer on purpose is that it gives you a better idea of what speeds you will eventually carry in each corner. Because to be able to reach understeer, your car has to be fast enough to use up the grip available from the front tires.

Speed Considerations for Inducing Understeer

When the Car is Too Slow

If the car is too slow, it will be capable of rotating so much that by trying to get to the limit of the front tires, you would actually just turn towards the inside of the corner.

When the Car is at the Right Speed

If the car is at the right speed range, you should be able to feel and maintain the understeer for some time, which gives you valuable information about the car's capacity and ideal speed range on that corner.

When the Car is Too Fast

If the car is too fast, we have a big problem. Through understeer, the line taken will throw the car outside of the track. A normal reaction to this is to lift the throttle and start breaking a little, which can actually make you accidentally induce oversteer in spin. And this is why you've got to be careful as you approach your speeds progressively so that you can avoid inducing understeer with the car being way too fast.

Step-by-Step Guide to Inducing Understeer

You know that to induce understeer, we need to shift the weight of the car backwards by having some throttle application of a corner. Because of this, our speed has to be at least maintained or going up slightly. That means that our entry speed should already be low enough so that we can afford to use the throttle mid-corner without the need of any emergency breaking mid-corner that would induce a rear end snap.

Follow these steps:

1. Break confidently to a relatively low speed.

2. As you enter the corner, pick up the throttle slightly. Half throttle is a good baseline.

3. Start turning the steering more and more and more and more to test what happens with the car.

Interpreting the Results

If you start getting into understeer, the car will refuse any extra rotation and will start doing our predictable line that we want. If the car continues to turn too much to the inside and you have to unwind the steering to prevent hitting the inside of the track, that means the car is still too slow and you should carry more entry speed on the next lap to be able to reach understeer.

The perfect understeer scenario happens when you're capable of maintaining a consistent understeer while the car is moving itself towards the exit of the corner. A perfect understeer exercise is maintained from the moment you hit the throttle until the very exit of the corner using all the track on what would be the natural racing line.

Can You Induce Understeer in Oversteer or Lose Cars?

Yes, you can induce understeer in an oversteer car because the effects of weight transfer are normally much more drastic than car setup. Unless the setup is extremely off-balance, which is when we say that a car is undriable, the effect of your pedal has a huge impact on whether the car will understeer or oversteer.

How Much Understeer Should You Induce?

Initial Practice

At first, induce an extreme amount of understeer in the simulator to get an obvious idea of how it feels. Initially, I wanted to do a lot of understeer for a long time. All this while trying to stay as close as possible to the ideal out and out racing line.

Progressing Your Technique

After a while, you can start decreasing the amount of understeer which will allow you to carry a little bit more speed, just a few kilometers per hour or more. At this point, you still want to have some understeer during the whole corner but using less and less steering.

The Ideal Understeer Scenario

The ideal understeer scenario, the one you will eventually try all the time when warming up your tires or testing the grip on the rear track, should not have too much steering so that you don't wear and damage your tires too much.

Important Safety Reminders

Remember, with too much entry speed, there's nothing you can do. Make sure you have proper entry speed control before trying higher speed understeer experiments on the real track and approach these speeds progressively. Always try these grip testing exercises on the lowest speed corners of the track first and then build up from there.