Understanding the Stages of Braking

The stages of braking can be broken down into three distinct phases: brake application, threshold braking, and trail braking. Each phase plays a critical role in optimizing braking performance and vehicle control.

Brake Application

Brake application is the zone until you reach the peak percentage braking of any braking zone. A very common approach is to brake pretty quickly to a pressure, and from there we transition into the second zone.

Variations of Brake Application Speed

There are several variations in how quickly you can apply the brakes:

• Fast Application (≈0.0 seconds): Smashing the brakes all the way to 100%, which could work especially if the car has ABS and it benefits from the ABS. If the ABS is very efficient, or if the car doesn't have ABS but the brakes are not hard enough to lock immediately, you can brake as quickly as possible to 100% to get the car to slow down as much as it can without hurting the tires too much.

• Medium Application (≈0.2 seconds): Taking approximately 2/10 of a second between the initial application and reaching the top pressure.

• Slower Application (≈0.4 seconds): Taking around 4/10 of a second to get to the top pressure.

Factors Affecting Application Speed

The decision of whether to brake as quickly as possible, semi-fast, or more slowly depends on several factors:

• The suspension of the car

• The physics and how the tires behave and react to those speeds

• Tire compound

• Brake characteristics

• ABS efficiency

• Specific simulator characteristics

In real life, most brake applications that work best on a straight line are the fastest ones. This involves a very, very quick application for better precision with the reference, and the tires don't really punish you for that. However, in some situations, especially if coming from a different corner or the car is still not perfectly balanced, you might see some slower application (2-4/10 of a second delay instead of braking immediately).

Simulator-Specific Considerations

In iRacing, for example, we have pretty much the longest brake application on a straight line, which is approximately 0.5 to 0.6 seconds until you reach that top pressure. This is because the tire surface temperature actually behaves a little bit better, and you have a little bit more grip mid-corner if you apply the brakes a little bit more slowly, depending on the car. Some other cars still prefer a faster application even within iRacing, so you have to try both approaches across the entire range and see whichever works best.

Braking Reference Points

When you have a longer distance between brake application and target pressure, you must decide where your braking reference will be. There are two approaches:

• Reference at Top Pressure: Having braking references around the top pressure, starting to brake a little bit before, and reaching the target pressure when you reach your braking reference.

• Reference at Beginning of Braking: Using a braking reference for the start of the braking.

Both approaches are used, sometimes in the same car in different corners. It's really arbitrary and personal. You should be consciously choosing the reference for either the target pressure or the beginning of the brakes.

Precision and Consistency

When you brake a little bit more slowly at first, you might actually get a little bit better precision. If you're trying to hit a target of 80% and you brake very quickly, you might end up missing the target and your brake application from lap to lap in the same corner might vary too much. If this is happening, brake a little bit more slowly so that you can hit that target pressure more consistently and have less variance in that target pressure. This solution provides the most consistency if you can't always hit the same target with a very fast application.

Important Application Guidelines

What you will never find is something very unusual, like taking a long time to reach the target pressure to the point where your brake release is actually faster than your brake application. This will pretty much never happen unless there's some unusual corner with a jump or something, but this is very rare. If you see your braking trace perfectly symmetrical, like a triangle, something is probably wrong and the application is probably too slow.

It's critical that you never overshoot the braking past what's 100% or what's ABS in the car. If the ABS limit is at a certain point, you don't ever want to brake past this because every time you start to release while the car is still reading the ABS, the car is not feeling any difference. If the car is not feeling any difference, you think you're trail braking, but you're not, and the car is not going to respond how you want.

Most cars right now, GT3 and GT4, have ABS lights. Try to brake until you see those lights, until you feel that the car has ABS. If you have haptics or an active pedal that allows you to feel the vibration of ABS, see that as a ceiling and try not to exceed it too much. This will help you feel immediately as you start releasing the brakes and you will feel the balance. If you brake too hard and start releasing, you feel nothing until you get frustrated, then you drop too fast and go from over the limit to under the limit too fast. That's why it's so important to always be at the limit from the very brake application, because that's going to allow you to feel more precisely the initial release from the very beginning of the release.

Distance Traveled During Application

The car can travel a considerable amount of distance even when you brake pretty fast. The difference between a fast brake application, a medium brake application, and a slow brake application shows that you can travel up to even 100 meters if you're applying the brakes a little bit too slowly. This reinforces the point that you need to choose a braking reference and determine whether that reference is for the initial application or for the peak pressure of your braking.

Threshold Braking

Threshold braking is the phase when we are braking on a straight line after we reached the peak pressure and before we start trail braking. Threshold braking occurs on a straight line only.

Effect of Downforce on Threshold Braking

If the car has no downforce, then the braking pressure that the car can take is pretty consistent, so you can technically stay on a straight line until you start turning into the corner. However, if a specific car suddenly gets an upgrade and has way more downforce, the situation changes.

Initially you would think that we would have to release the brakes a little bit because the less downforce you have the more you have to release your brakes to not lock the tires. But downforce doesn't remove grip, it actually adds grip. So technically if this specific car with the same amount of pressure had suddenly more downforce, then we would be able to add brakes at a higher speed because we're gaining grip.

Downforce means extra braking grip on a straight line, not less. This is very important. The problem is that sometimes we see graphs showing a certain pattern for a low downforce car and a different pattern for a high downforce car, and you might think that in a high downforce car you have to brake less. But this is a compressed graph of the total available braking pressure of the car.

If we were to actually put an absolute comparison between how much you can brake on a formula car versus how much you can brake on a low downforce car, we would see that there's a lot more braking pressure and braking performance on a high downforce car. In order to visualize the same percentage in a graph, we compress that graph. In absolute terms, high downforce means better grip at high speeds, which means more brake performance. In the end, the tires on a formula car are getting a lot more braking force than a low downforce car.

Effect of Elevation Changes

Threshold braking is also affected by elevation changes:

• Compression: If we're braking on a flat surface but suddenly get into a compression, we could technically add a little bit of brakes during the compression and then go back to the flat braking percentage. The car would actually have a little bit more grip because it would crash against the track a little bit more, getting more compression and more grip.

• Crest: If we are suddenly getting on a crest and the car starts falling, we can't keep the same pressure otherwise we will start locking. We have to release the brakes a little bit during the crest and then release the brakes normally after in the trail braking. We may even have time to reapply the brakes if the crest is over before turning in.

Downforce Level Variations

Threshold braking in high downforce cars will depend on the level of downforce. If you have a car with not a lot of downforce, the braking trace will look a certain way, but if you have a car that has a little bit more downforce, you'll see a different pattern. The more downforce you get, the more braking pressure you can have at higher speeds, although when the speeds are lower, you kind of converge back into the normal trail braking.

Sometimes in the same car, if you have a high downforce setup and you're driving at Brands Hatch, the same car (for example, a Formula 3 with a high downforce setup) will allow you to brake more compared to the same Formula 3 driving at Monza with a low downforce setup. The downforce is really variable and you have to adjust your braking pressure depending on the amount of downforce, and that includes setup changes.

Two-Stage Braking Pattern

It's very important to know that the brakes always have two stages. It's a very common thing to see drivers in high downforce cars brake super fast without a clear change in angle on the steepness because they are just releasing more slowly and then starting to turn into the corner. While this is somewhat acceptable if the car doesn't punish you for doing that, it's actually inefficient. At some point you're probably over the limit and then at some point you're probably under the limit, rather than taking the threshold braking with decreasing downforce on a straight line and then a steeper release as you're turning into the corner.

Trail Braking

Trail braking is any part of the braking zone where you have a little bit of steering.

Downforce and Trail Braking Characteristics

In a car with very low downforce, the trail braking is going to be very present. You're going to have a quite exponential steering line compared to a high downforce car where you would have a more straight steering and the brake release would be a little bit more sharp as well. This depends a lot on the downforce, the weight of the car, and other factors.

There's no one size fits all for trail braking. You have to adapt the trail braking and the steering trace depending on the car and sometimes depending on the corner, because some corners might have a little crest or compression or camber or off camber. The way you trail brake will have to be adjusted to make sure that you're maximizing your grip usage in every part of the corner and in every part of the track.

Coasting

Sometimes we don't trail brake at all. When you see a telemetry trace where there is a gap between the end of braking and the acceleration, this is called coasting.

Coasting is used in some places when the car already has a lot of rotation going on mid-corner and you don't really need to keep trail braking. This is way more common in cars with a lot of downforce, especially front downforce, because the front downforce will act like a little trail braking—it just forces the front down and that gives the car a lot of rotation. It's unnecessary to trail brake because the car might be oversteer enough that if you kept trail braking you would actually get too much rotation and not be able to maximize the grip, resulting in an oversteer.

When the car has too much grip and it has a lot of rotation available, you don't need to trail brake all the way until the end. You still need to trail brake to some point and you still need to do the transition—never do a sharp drop. Even if the car is oversteer, you still have to do the trail braking; it's just that mid-corner you're probably going to have an area of coasting where the rotation is already good enough and you don't have to trail brake as much.

If you try to trail brake just because someone told you to connect the brakes with the throttle but the rotation is available, this is just slowing you down too much and you're losing time. Remember that the idea of trail braking is so that you can get more and more rotation mid-corner so that you can accelerate earlier. But if the car is already rotating too much, then coasting can be a good possibility.

You shouldn't assume that coasting is the right thing to do or assume that trail braking is the right thing to do. You have to try it yourself and see which works better depending on the car, the setup, and all the other factors already mentioned. What you should do is feel the difference when you trail brake a little bit more and when you coast, and feel the effect on the balance of the car so that you gain more and more control, precision, and consistency in your driving.

Maintenance Throttle

Here's an interesting scenario: if the car rotates too much mid-corner and is extremely loose, the technical solution would actually be to do something like the opposite of braking, like braking -5% or -10%. But what is braking -5% or -10%? It's actually the throttle.

An anti-trail braking approach will help the car hold the rear a little bit more by accelerating a tiny bit, around 10%. This is called maintenance throttle. Maintenance throttle is an anti-trail braking technique used when the car rotates too much and you need to hold the rear a little bit to make sure that you're turning the steering without having to do too many corrections because the car is too loose. In this case, the -10% trail braking or 10% throttle is the solution.

This should be very rare, but it is used in some open differential cars that have the rear completely disconnected between the tires and the car just rotates a little bit too much. In this case, maintenance throttle is useful. However, we're talking about that middle phase—not corner entry. Corner entry still requires trail braking because that allows you to brake later.

Make sure that you try these approaches and feel the difference between 5% brakes, 0% brakes, and -5% brakes (which is 5% throttle).