Understeer 2

Introduction and Objectives

The objective of this exercise is to induce understeer on purpose during the whole track. Through this practice, we will learn several very important skills that will eventually help us prevent crashes, especially on corner exits. The goal is straightforward: we need to become comfortable with maintaining some understeer mid-corner.

Initial Technique: Inducing Understeer Mid-Corner

To begin, we're going to break early and select second gear. Then we'll turn and accelerate a little bit, and then try to turn more. You may need to touch the brakes a little bit to get the car to rotate more. The process involves accelerating and turning simultaneously. The car will want to go wide, especially on cold tires in the simulator.

At first, we're doing this in a very exaggerated way. Use half throttle and turn the steering a lot just to feel how you can make the front tires break grip very aggressively. Initially, perform this very aggressively, and then we're going to start doing this a little bit more in a subtle way.

Key Parameters and Limitations

The throttle amount needed to induce understeer is between 0 and 50%. If you try to induce it with too much throttle, it might not work. Using too much throttle can induce wheel spin instead. You must be very careful with the throttle so that the lower percentage is used, because that low percentage is really what lifts the front just a little bit enough to induce understeer without stressing the rear tires too much, which would induce wheel spin and then oversteer.

Practice from Apex to Exit

Before moving to the next step, make sure that we're understeering from the apex all the way to the exit in every corner. This may be a little bit tricky at first. Use a lot of steering input and accelerate and turn from the apex onto the exit. The goal is to make this become a natural and easy thing for you to do anytime you want in any car you want.

You can do this in any car, including a very oversteer car, because the inputs that you create are more important to the balance of the car than the setup itself, unless the car is obviously undrivable.

Understanding the Mechanism: Why We Practice Understeer

The reason we want to cause understeer in the simulator is to learn what the mechanism behind it is, because we're going to learn how to prevent it. A very common mistake, especially in real life, is to break a little bit too early into a corner. When you realize that you're too slow, you start accelerating early and you start turning, and you can easily go all the way off track because you induced a lot of understeer by accident, just by accelerating a little bit thinking that you're too slow.

The biggest cause of crashes when it comes to understeer is slow entry and then trying to just gain speed towards the exit and not realizing that the throttle is what is causing the understeer.

Advanced Technique: Throttle Modulation

A very useful way of testing this is by actually alternating a little bit on the throttle and feeling how the rotation of the car is severely affected by the throttle wiggling. You can really feel the car turning more, turning less, turning more, turning less—really to make sure that throttle is controlling the rotation of the car.

Key observations during throttle modulation:

• Lift throttle: the car turns more

• Accelerate: the car turns less

• You can adjust with a lot of precision what is the direction of the car

If you realize that the car is not turning enough, then you delay a little bit of throttle so that you can get that rotation done before you accelerate, because the last thing we want is to understeer and go off on the exit. You can turn a lot and just adjust the throttle to make the car rotate more and less.

Developing Subtlety

At first, it's totally fine to steer a lot—to really turn the steering big time—because we just want to feel that and make sure that it makes total sense that you're abusing the front tires. The more you do it, the more subtle your skill is going to be and the more capable of doing very tiny amounts of understeer you will be.

In the end, you are going to do this while actually driving fast on the real track by inducing micro amounts of understeer mid-corner before you actually go on full throttle. The process involves:

• Turn in

• Have a little bit of throttle as you turn in

• Ramp up the throttle as you unwind the corner

Practical Application During Racing

During the throttle application moment, that first beginning of the throttle mid-corner is actually causing some understeer, or at least shifting some weight to the back of the car and making the car more stable. Even if you're not actually causing understeer, you are minimizing oversteer.

This is a very normal technique, especially in low speed corners. You start turning in and then you touch the throttle before you squeeze up, because that throttle application at 20-30% is settling the rear before you prepare it—as you prepare it—to accelerate as quickly as possible out of the corner.

Using Understeer to Prevent Oversteer

At a microscopic level mid-corner, as the car's rotating, you can use this technique to save the rear. If you don't know how to induce understeer and you get a little bit of oversteer mid-corner, you may not know how to correct it. The understeer that you could have induced at that very fraction of a second where the car was oversteering would have recovered the balance of the car and kept the minimum speed up.

It's very important to understand that if you do use that little throttle for the sake of the balance of the car mid-corner, you can really stay on the limit. After you get really used to inducing the understeer in an exaggerated way, you can start inducing understeer with a much smaller amount of throttle—like almost nothing. Just 10% is already going to be enough in some corners.

Advanced Recovery Technique

You're going to be able to use that tiny amount while actually racing. For example, if you lose the car a little bit on entry during trail braking (which we're going to talk about later), you can save the car from spinning by touching the throttle and inducing some corrective understeer mid-corner. By just touching the throttle a little bit, you can save that very easily.

Exercise Recap and Progression

Before you move to the next exercise, make sure that:

Stage 1: Aggressive Understeer

• You're able to induce understeer in a very aggressive way

• Crank the steering mid-corner with half throttle

• Make the car understeer from the apex all the way onto the exit without going off

• If you're inducing too much understeer and the car is going off, try a few more times until you're able to do pretty much the racing line through very aggressive understeer

The car is going to be slow because we're just abusing the tires for the sake of understanding and feeling that effect.

Stage 2: Moderate Understeer

• Over time, induce less and less understeer by turning the steering a little bit less

• Make sure that you're still on the limit of the front enough that you feel the rotation of the car being affected by how you release or apply more throttle

Stage 3: Subtle Understeer

• Be able to induce understeer by using only 20-30% throttle

• Feel safe mid-corner to turn the steering more

• Make sure you're using all the front grip from entry to exit

Difficulty and Importance

This is actually not a very easy exercise. It looks silly, but to maintain the car on the racing line from mid-corner to exit on a whole lap through very aggressive understeer is quite difficult. Many students thought it was going to be easy and then realized that they could not do it. It takes a little bit of precision and a little bit of understanding of the whole physics, and that's why it's so useful.

It looks like we're playing a silly game here, but it's going to be extremely useful for your technique over time, especially on the next exercises.