What is The Limit

The term "limit" is frequently used in racing, with students often claiming, "I was definitely on the limit on that corner," only to discover they were still a full second off pace in that corner alone. Many people mention the limit without being completely certain what it actually means. When asked to define the limit, most drivers respond with answers like: "the limit is when you lose control of the car and crash," "when you go off track," or "when you spin." These varied responses reveal that the limit is actually a very generic term that people use differently and understand differently. This confusion makes it nearly impossible to use the term in a way that will improve your driving.

To address this issue, we need a clear way to describe the limit that provides a consistent foundation for this course.

Breaking Down the Limit into Components

There's no single limit. There are different forms of limits. The limit a single tire can achieve is the maximum force it can create to move the car. These forces can be:

• Longitudinal: deceleration and acceleration

• Lateral: cornering

Exceeding the Limit Under Different Conditions

When you go over the limit under acceleration, the tires break grip and you get wheel spin. When you go over the limit under deceleration, the tires break grip and lock up.

While cornering, we can break the limit down into two pieces:

• Understeer: If the front tires reach the limit first, the car will start understeering, meaning refusing any extra rotation. If you abuse the tires and understeer too much, the tires actually start creating less forces than you would if you were just at the peak grip before abusing them.

• Oversteer: If the rear tires reach their limit first, the car will start oversteering, meaning the rotation will be excessive and the rear end will not be able to hold the car on the intended line. It's very important to know that when you oversteer, the front tires point to a line and the rear tires cannot hold the back of the car to that intended line. Therefore, the rear tires go straighter compared to the front tires.

Four Pillars of Car Handling Skills

When cornering, there are four important pillars of car handling skills:

• Feeling understeer

• Feeling oversteer

• Inducing understeer

• Inducing oversteer

In order to drive safely, we need to quickly and easily identify what is the current state of the car, as well as develop the ability to cause these states on purpose while driving. This is the essence of proactive driving technique.

Developing Sensitivity to the Car's State

As drivers, we must train our senses to become connected with the car. The more we feel, the more we can act. In the beginning of your technique development, you might be able to identify when the car oversteers or understeers at a given corner. But we can generally only identify one state at a given corner. You can say, "I understeered into that corner," or "I oversteered in that corner."

But as you get better and more experienced, your sensitivity to the state of the car will actually be faster and more precise, and you will even be able to say, "I understeered on entry and oversteered on exit." Meaning, you will be able to feel two different states in one single corner. This point is where most drivers stop being able to identify anything further, getting stuck at being able to identify only two different states per corner.

A good way to develop the sensitivity is to deliberately induce understeer and oversteer as you practice on purpose. Because technically speaking, you can lock a little bit on the braking, then oversteer a little bit on turn-in, and then understeer a little bit on the corner, and then oversteer a little bit on exit, and so on. All those states can happen and shift very quickly depending on what you do with your inputs, especially when you start getting closer and closer to the maximum speed possible you can carry at a given corner.

Defining the True Limit

We can then say that the true limit is when you're at the best speed possible that the car can take, which will require fast and precise adjustments between oversteer and understeer to keep all four tires as close as possible to generating the maximum forces they're capable of generating.

The Danger of Spending Too Much Time Under the Limit

What does that even mean? Why is it dangerous to be under the limit for too long? The problem is imagine you're trying to go fast, but you're afraid of really reaching that limit, and you spend a lot of time under the limit, not really experiencing how it actually feels or what you actually have to do when the car breaks grip, either understeer or oversteer.

The problem is you have a lot of room under the limit. You can be very under limit or you can be just a little bit under limit. Because of that, you never get punished for varying drastically your speeds. Sometimes you're going to be very close to the limit. Sometimes you're going to be way under the limit. And you don't really notice a difference because the car is still behaving the same. You're not understeering. You're not oversteering until you go a little bit too much over the limit.

Now here's the problem: You're over the limit, but you don't have the experience of dealing with it because it rarely happens. You spend most of your time under the limit. So now, you're in real danger because the car is going to behave in an unpredictable way to you because you didn't spend enough time on the limit. You don't know what to do when the limit happens and most likely you will either go off track or spin or crash.

The Benefits of Exploring the Limit

There's a benefit to actually exploring the limit because the more time you spend super close to the limit, the more experience you have in dealing with it. And now you know with more precision that you cannot go way further than that. Now you have the experience of staying on that limit for longer and the more time you spend on the limit, the safer it gets.

This is the most unobvious thing. If you're way too safe and you're trying to go fast, eventually you're going to jump over and have zero experience on how to deal with it. But if you spend a lot of time on the limit, you start developing that precision that allows you to stay in it and to always stay in it. And if you go over the limit now with that experience, you go just a little bit and you can bring it back. You go just a little bit more and then you bring it back again. Because that is your experience and now you have the tools. You developed the technique to stay on the limit for longer because of how much more time you were exposed to it.

And this is the secret: You have to spend more time on the actual limit because that is going to become your new comfortable zone and that is when you really become a racing driver.

How to Safely Approach the Limit

The best way to achieve the true limit is by breaking it down to pieces and starting with the safe forms of limits first. The safest forms of limits to find are the ones that you can try immediately without any bad consequences if you do them wrong. The way you overcome this fear is by gradually exposing yourself to these safe forms of limits in controlled and safe scenarios. This means practicing these things in specific areas of the track where mistakes will not bite.

Each stage described will have its own dedicated lesson with step-by-step practicing exercises on module 3 with the simulator exercises. In the end, you should be able to apply these things step-by-step on the real track.

Stage 1: Peak Deceleration

Push the car to its maximum braking force in a straight line. This is the very first thing you should ever do in a race car. This helps you understand the longitudinal limit of the tires under braking and builds confidence in controlling the car when grip is fully utilized for speed control.

Speed control is the most important skill to learn in motorsports by far. Hundreds of students have crashed and spun just because they were hesitant to slow down the car. Being afraid of braking is the worst mistake you can ever make in racing. Being hesitant under braking is the most dangerous mistake you can ever make in racing. This comes before anything else. If you're too fast for a given corner, there's nothing you can do. You're just along for a bad ride.

Stage 2: Explore Peak Minimum Speed Understeer

Push the car to a safe state of understeer to understand how much rotation the car is able to offer. This will work if you actively put the car on a balanced state through your pedals, which we're going to talk about in its own dedicated lesson. Through understeer, the rotation is fixed and predictable, and you can judge your speeds and the grip of the tires, which will be extremely important to build up to more difficult forms of limit that will require faster corrections.

These two first steps are essential, and you should be totally comfortable reaching those limits in all corners and with any car before moving on.

Stage 3: Minimize Understeer and Start Dealing with Oversteer

Unlike understeer, oversteer requires a quick correction, because if you don't do anything, sometimes all it takes is half a second until the oversteer becomes too bad and throws the car into a spin. Being super aware of how oversteer happens and how to quickly correct it is one of the most important skills to develop for safety and consistency, especially when you start pushing the car more and more.

It's important to know how to induce these more dangerous scenarios, because if you can cause them, you can also know how to prevent them. On Module 3, we will have simulator drills and exercises, so you can test these limits in a very safe environment and then work on a step-by-step approach to find the limit that you can apply in real life.

In the end, this step-by-step approach should then become your own personal system that you can always do whenever you hit the track in real life.