What makes you fast in racing? There's a lot of things in this lesson that intermediate and advanced drivers forget and just ignore because they kind of focus too much on the details of driving and they end up forgetting what is the main principle of racing, what are the main things that you should focus on to actually find lap times and go fast. So pay a lot of attention to this lesson regardless of your level because everything that I say here is the base foundation regardless of how advanced the techniques you are trying and learning.

In this lesson we are going to revisit the objective of motorsports, the basic physics behind racing, and how to reach perfection. This lesson is also a summary of everything else that we are going to teach you throughout this series of courses and the order of priority of things that you have to learn before you go to the next step and to the next step as you get better.

The Objective of Motorsports

What is the objective of motorsports? First of all, be the first to reach the finish line. And in order to be capable of doing that you have to learn how to be the fastest around the lap. But in order to be the fastest around the lap, first before anything else, you have to learn how to carry the most speed on a single corner.

It's very important to say a single corner because a lot of people think that motorsports is about going fast and fast and fast and breaking late, but you have to remember that motorsports is about cornering speed, not top speed. This is actually way more important for real life drivers, but sim racers also tend to crash a lot or just try to break super late and pray that the car is going to make the corner without understanding how to build up the cornering techniques so that you get up to speed more quickly and without getting frustrated and crashing on the time. The top speed will come after, after you improve your cornering speed, after you improve your corner approaches. Naturally you will reach the top speeds without even thinking about it.

The Basic Physics Behind Racing

The basic physics behind racing essentially lie in that little contact patch between the tire and the track. That is where everything happens. That is where understeer happens, that is where oversteer, tires slip, tire locking, ABS, traction control—everything depends on what happens at that very small portion of the car that is connected to the track. So the more you understand how that works, even at a basic level not necessarily a chemical or physical level, you can way more quickly improve your driving and feel more connected to the car, into what's happening to it.

Longitudinal and Lateral Forces

Through that contact between the tire and the track we can have two forces, forces that are going to guide the car and accelerate and decelerate in cornering. We will break down these forces in two:

Longitudinal forces: Basically acceleration or deceleration. The acceleration is going to be limited by the engine and at high speeds the car will stop going faster and faster because of drag, because of the wind and the air that the car is trying to cut through. There will be a limitation at that point, but at very low speeds there might be enough power to cause wheelspin. That's when the tire breaks grip and starts sliding against the track, not being able to push the car enough and breaking that grip.

We also have deceleration, which today with the quality of the brakes that we have it's very easy to reach that limit consistently. So through deceleration you are going to be on the limit most of the time, which makes it one of the most important things in racing: learn how to decelerate the car properly, because we are going to end up using that when we transition from that deceleration to cornering.

Lateral forces: Which are essentially any type of cornering. This is a pretty simple one. When the car turns, the tires deflect laterally, creating forces towards the inside of the direction the car is trying to go. And if they reach their limit and start giving up, the car starts sliding sideways.

If the front tires start sliding first, the car starts to refuse the rotation, then starts going straighter than you think. That is called understeer. If the rear tires break the grip first, then the car is not capable of keeping that rear and the rear tires start going outwards more than the front, increasing the angle of slide of the car and causing that drift or oversteer, which will need a quick correction if it's too much.

Inertia and the Competition for Grip

Now one very important thing to note is that these longitudinal and lateral forces are both limited by the same thing: they are both limited by inertia. And inertia tells that a mass that is moving to a direction will want to keep going to that direction until some sort of force is created to a different direction.

So if the car is going at 100 kilometers per hour and you want it to stop, you have to create a lot of forces against that direction, which is what the brakes do. And when you try to turn the car, inertia still wants the car to go straight, so you have to force against that, and the tires will really grab the track and try the best to create that force to fight inertia and force the car to turn. The better the tires, the more forces we can make, the better the car will turn and break and accelerate.

Now these forces are competing for the tire. The tire has its own limit of grip, and that grip can be used completely to decelerate or accelerate the car, or it can be used completely for cornering. You can't really combine both. You can't have peak longitudinal deceleration and peak cornering at the same time. You can have peak longitudinal deceleration only if you're completely straight, and you can have peak cornering only if you're not too much on the brakes or too much on power on acceleration.

There are exceptions. Remember when I told you that if the car is going too fast and the wind is actually preventing it from going faster? Well, in that scenario you're not really on the limit of the longitudinal forces, so you can still reach the peak cornering forces even though you're fully flat. But you will never be able to reach peak deceleration while having peak cornering, because like I said, the brakes are good, they are going to stop the car a lot, and you will not be able to rotate as much as the car would be capable if you weren't breaking very hard.

Speed Versus Rotation

Now this is a very, very common thing that advanced drivers forget for some reason: the speed and the rotation of the car will always be inversely proportional. That means if the car is faster you have to rotate less—you will not be able to turn as much. And if you want to turn more, you have to decelerate to gain that capability of turning a tighter corner.

Even though this sounds very obvious, we will show you many advanced examples where people just forget it because they're very busy thinking about some other advanced things like trail braking, jumping curbs, compound corners, left and right, and so on. So it's very important to get back to this because we are going to refer back to speed versus rotation in more advanced lessons. So the faster the car is going, the less it will be able to turn. The slower the car, the more it will be able to turn. We will talk about this in an advanced way in our spirals lesson on the level two course from the series.

How to Reach Perfection

Now I'm going to show you how to reach perfection. The way I organized the series of courses follows specifically the techniques that you have to learn in the right order to find the limit fast in a safe way, without crashing or without guessing things, by actually feeling and testing and understanding the physics of a race car to such a level of understanding that you will not find anywhere else, because I've been spending my whole life finding and building this structure.

Level One: Safety and Consistency

The level one course, this first course that you're watching right now, is going to teach you safety and consistency. And if you apply everything that I teach here, I guarantee that you can get into the top 10 percent of the best drivers in the world. That's because just by learning how to apply these things, you're going to have enough understanding to be maybe four or three seconds off consistently and really hit the lap times all the time and never go off and ever crash, because you're going to be learning how to really, really feel the grip and use that grip as a constraint, as a way for you to define your braking references, to define how much speed you're going to carry in the corners, and you're going to be able to replicate that.

This allows you to do more laps, and if you do more laps you have more fun, you drive more, and naturally your brain starts picking up more and more details. So I say four and three seconds off—that sounds like not a lot, not great, right? But that's the starting point. If you're a beginner right now, your objective is to get to four seconds off, three seconds off consistently, and be able to do 20 laps. That is why one of the challenges on this series is to actually do 10 laps in a row and hit a specific target, not necessarily going faster but just being consistent, because that is going to help you learn and absorb as much data as possible for the future.

To reach safety and consistency, you have to first understand:

• Breaking consistency: The number one thing, be it in real life (well, especially in real life) or in the simulator, because you don't want to be crashing around or just guessing your breaking points. So you need to learn how to get to the correct entry speed lap after lap and understand the breaking limits in different cars.

• Basic track learning: I will teach you how to learn new tracks quickly without making big guesses. You see that I'm talking a lot about big guesses here. That is because if you're not sure about what to do and you just try something just for the sake of trying, it might make your training a little bit too frustrating. It's very, very easy to develop bad habits if you try to do big guesses.

• Inducing understeer and oversteer: The very, very, very important techniques of inducing understeer and oversteer. A lot of people after years of driving still don't know how to induce understeer and oversteer, and I'm going to teach you here at the end of level one because that is going to be the foundation to the next levels, the beginning of the true understanding of the limit. What is the limit? We don't need to really understand that to get to four and three seconds off yet. Yes, it's going to help, it's going to happen, you're going to have to deal with it, but the true deep understanding will come on the next levels.

Level Two: Balance and Speed

Then we are going to learn balance and speed. This is the level two course, and if you learn and do everything that I teach you there, you will have all the tools to become a top five percent driver in the world, and you should be able to be around two seconds off the best lap times. And again, you're going to carry over that safety and consistency from level one, and you're going to find more and more lap times by understanding more precisely your inputs. You're going to learn trail braking and many other little things that will allow you to really become more and more competitive compared to the majority of people that end up not practicing properly or that end up not doing coaching, for example.

In level two, we cover:

• Trail breaking mastery: How to use the pedals to steer the car properly and most importantly safely.

• The strength theory: How to create a correlation between the steering and the braking for maximum grip usage for as long as possible during the corner.

• More advanced track learning: How to master new tracks and get to the true limit in as few laps as possible. You don't need to spend three, four, five hours again doing big guesses and driving and driving and driving around until finally you get fast. No, you can study the track and you can understand how to drive the car, how to test the limit, so that you can get up to speed in as many as two, three, five laps depending on your level. Obviously, if you're a beginner, I can say hey, in 30 minutes you can be very fast in this track, because I see a lot of people getting used to needing a full day of practice until they can be competitive in a track. That is unnecessary. If you learn how to learn a track fast with these lessons, you're going to save a lot of time and you're going to get up to speed and you can race way more quickly.

Level Three: Cornering Precision

Then we're going to learn cornering precision. With that, you should be able to get into the top two percent, even if you didn't go to level four. Just level one, two, three already allows you to get to top two percent.

In the level three, I'm going to teach you how to understand the track to such a level of depth and precision that even a lot of real life drivers ended up not understanding when I went to compete with them in real life. I'm going to teach you how to break down corners in a way that allows you to set up a plan about how you're going to attack the corner depending on the car that you have, depending on what next corner you have, and so on.

After you get this strong foundation of being safe, consistent, and starting to find more speed and starting to be more competitive, we can start getting into more details. We can start getting into cornering precision only after you do these previous steps properly.

In level three, I will teach you:

• How to find the ideal lines of each car depending on downforce levels, weight, and even the nature of the car.

• Spirals and the maximum rotation point: The best way to structure the corners to a higher level of precision, staying on the limit consistently. Now we're going to start spending more time on the limit. That's why it's so important to learn how to feel the limit, how to visit the limit at first, and then we start to be able to sit on the limit and carry that nice slide throughout the whole corner.

• At this point you should have enough experience to have enough energy in your mind to focus on the details of the track, to focus on really specific corners. I will teach you some more advanced types of corners: compound corners, double apexes, double lefts and double rights, deceiving corners that shoot you to the wrong spot (but if you know how to avoid that you can find yourself in the perfect line still), blind corners, and even more, more types of corners and more techniques when it comes to understanding specific sectors of very difficult tracks and more.

Level Four: Mastery

And finally, level four mastery should allow you to get in the top one percent in the world. Everything that I teach there are things that I learned while getting myself into the top 0.1 percent over the years of professional sim racing that I did, and a lot of advanced things that I had to learn how to explain to teach my fast students—students that went on to become professional drivers or professional esports sim racers and so on. So that is the good stuff.

But in order for you to really benefit from level four, you have to really nail level one, two, and three. You have to really understand the concepts and to really get a good strong muscle memory, precise muscle memory, because the things on level four are very subtle, are very difficult to really feel, because you need to be very sensitive to them, because we're going to be talking about tips that are going to give you what, 10 or 2 per lap, or maybe hundreds of seconds per corner.

By then you should be able to go to level four where I will teach you the perfect limit: how to spend more and more time on neutral steer and extract peak lateral forces from the tires. That is reaching the actual point where you're using the tires to their limit and getting as close as possible to the perfect lap time.

Pro level tips in level four include:

• Dynamic brake bias: Which includes the actual brake bias and the engine braking.

• Three tools for rotation: How to combine steering, engine braking, and trail braking perfectly to get the car to rotate as much as possible without getting too much speed, without destroying the tires, and so on.

• Breaking at different downforce levels: How to break on a straight line on a Formula One versus a Formula Four versus a Porsche Cup, and how to trail brake on a super high speed on a low downforce car versus a high downforce car, and so on.

• Active versus passive driving: How to really, really manage the balance of the car all the time without having to wait for an understeer and so on.

• How to manage the tire surface temperatures.

• How to drive cold tires, because it's so important—the race tires—and a lot of people just avoid practicing on cold tires because it doesn't feel good.

• And more.

At this point you will experience your own precision development, get to a point where hundredths of a second matter, and reach a professional level of consistency, tire management, driving styles. You will be able to have different driving styles depending on what the car wants, and you will become a complete driver.

Summary and Recommendations

So if you're a beginner, make sure you're really spending a lot of time on level one and two. If you're an intermediate driver, do one, two, but then spend a lot of time on level three until you understand the corner details and everything else, everything about MRP and spirals. If you're a very advanced driver, really, really digest well level four and don't forget to revisit level one, two, three to make sure that you're not missing out on any bad habits or that you didn't forget any sort of foundational aspects of your driving style.

And the next lesson we are going to talk about what makes you a fast driver right here: racing psychology. I'll see you there.