Yahoo Autos Why You'll Never Learn to Be Fast Until You Get Rid of Your Fast Car
"It's better to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow." I don't know about you, but if I never heard anybody say that hackneyed, stupid old phrase again it would be totally fine with me. I associate it with old dudes in Miatas who are bench-racing between intermediate-group trackday sessions, quasi-hipsters in boxer-engined Toyotas who are trying to explain away why they didn't wave your M3-driving student by for six corners in a row, and pretty much everybody who has never experienced the incandescent joy of throwing something like a Ferrari 458 Speciale through a long, gentle turn in a four-wheel slide.
In fact, I'm so sick of "slow cars fast," and the passive-aggressive, player-hater mentality that typically accompanies it, that I've come up with a snippy little response that I deliver at every opportunity: "Sure, but it's better to drive a fast car fast than it is to spend your life chugging along in a slow car." You're a fool if you think that some of the big-bore drivers out there aren't pushing just as hard, and just as skillfully, as the most talented Spec Miata racer in your local SCCA region. Not everybody with a "Jake" emblem on his Z06 is an utter moron, you know. Some of them can really wheel.
But there's a kernel of truth in almost every cliché out there, and in this case it's something along the lines of: It's almost impossible to become a truly great driver if you start your trackday career in something that can spin the tires at freeway speed. And there's a solid math-and-science reason why this is so. Allow me to explain.
There are a lot of different skills that make up the toolbox of a top-shelf track rat or club racer, but perhaps the two most important ones are entry speed estimation and midcorner control. Nearly everything else, from "The Line" to tire-conservation strategy, in endurance races, can be learned by rote or by repetition, but those two require a certain amount of genetic talent and a lot of experience in appropriate hardware for the task.
Entry speed estimation is just what it sounds like. Three drivers are approaching the same corner. The first driver thinks he can turn-in at sixty-five miles per hour. He's wrong; that's too fast. So he spins off and winds up in the gravel or the wall. The second driver thinks he can turn-in at sixty-three miles per hour. He's also wrong; that's too slow. So he watches the rest of the pack drop him through the turn and down the straight that follows.
Only the Goldilocks driver has the ability to correctly estimate the entry speed at sixty-four miles per hour. So he doesn't spin off and he doesn't get left behind. Instead, he comes out of the turn safe and sound, at the maximum possible speed, and he goes on to win the race.
Now, if it were just as simple as remembering a certain speedometer readout for every turn, we'd all be Fernando Alonso. But that maximum possible speed changes all the time. When it rains, then the track is cool, when it's hot, when it rained the night before, when there's oil on the track from the previous run group. When your tires are cold, when they're too hot, when the compound has been heat-cycled too many times, when you have a leaky shock. You get the idea. It's more art than science and it's what separates the IMSA pro from the black-group Porsche Club guy who does six trackdays a year.
Some of it you're born with; my son is already very good at maintaining the right entry speed with just ten or so trackdays under his seven-year-old belt. But it's really a skill that you learn by entering ten thousand corners and seeing when you guessed right and when you guessed wrong and by how much. You start by making big mistakes and then you graduate to making small mistakes and pretty soon you're only making mistakes compared to Wolf Henzler or Max Verstappen.
The problem is this: if you start with a car that arrives at a corner in a big hurry, you won't be able to exercise fine-grained control over your corner entry speed. Let's say you're heading towards China Beach at Mid-Ohio. In a stock Miata, you'll arrive at 105mph; in a Boxster, 135; in a Z06, 160; in a LaFerrari, maybe 180. Now let's say that you need to practice choosing the right speed between 46mph and 49mph to hit the apex of that downhill right-hander. Do you think you'll be more precise if you're starting from 105, or from 180?
Obviously it's easier to brake down from 105 to 47.5 than it is to brake down from 180 to 47.5. Even if you have carbon-ceramics and fresh pads and everything else. Braking from 105 to 47.5 is something I can teach most students in a couple of days. Braking from 180 to 47.5 is a genuine challenge for everybody, every single time.
Since nobody wants to wreck their car, most LaFerrari drivers will choose a conservative approach that puts them into the turn at 45mph, or even 40. The Miata driver, with more time to think about it and less energy to shed, can come closer to the right speed with the same effort. It's simply easier to practice your corner entry in a slower car.
Now what happens when you make a mistake and enter the corner just a touch too fast? Well, that's where a slower car with less tire and less grip also shines. It's far easier to fix a slide in a 318i on street tires than it is to make the same correction in a Hoosier-shod McLaren F1. You're not going as fast. The forces involved are lower. You have more time to fix the problem. And if you go off track despite your best intentions, you're less likely to hit the wall and end your weekend. Simple as that.
The more you have to fix small mistakes in the middle of the corner, the better midcorner control you will have. And as Ross Bentley always likes to remind me, the greatest drivers in the sport are distinguished by their midcorner speed, which means midcorner control. You learn that by pushing the limits just a little bit every time and catching the slides and pushes that result.
Some of us are lucky enough to pick up these skills in youth karting. My son's 50cc TopKart has a lot of grip and not much power, so he is learning entry estimation and midcorner control at relatively low speeds on very small, safe road courses. But most drivers don't have the luxury of ten years in karting to prepare them for their first trackday. They are arriving with only the skills they've learned on the road, most of which are useless. The best way to get them up to speed is to give them a slow, predictable car in which they can be bold. One in which they can make mistakes without major penalties. In other words… a 1.6-liter Miata on street tires.
Given enough time and enough innate talent, those novice drivers will eventually be able to transfer those skills to Corvettes and the like. The drivers who started in very fast cars, by contrast, won't learn as quickly. As odd as it sounds, the best way to be a quick Ferrari or Lamborghini driver is to start in something that isn't a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
And that is how the average expert-run-group Miata driver has managed to get such a big ego. He saw himself improve over time while the Corvette owners who started with him haven't made the same kind of progress. It's led to him thinking that he's just better-suited to performance driving, when the truth of the matter is that he was just lucky or smart enough to start with the right tool for the job. It's also led to him becoming a really annoying dude to sit next to during lunchtime at the VIR Cafe or the Snack Shack at Sebring or the scary little chicken trailer at Laguna Seca.
If you're a Shelby or Lamborghini owner who's tired of being lectured by those guys, don't hesitate to join them for a bit. Rent or buy a Miata. Work on your entry-estimation and midcorner control skills. And when you're satisfied that you're driving that slow car as well as you can, then hop back in your mega-power ride and use those same skills to really burn the asphalt off the track. Then you'll have the satisfaction of sitting there at lunch and explaining to all those four-cylinder jokers what the real gospel truth of the matter is: there's nothing better than having a fast car and being able to drive it just as fast as it deserves to be driven.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
You Might Also Like
