adithorp wrote:What you discovered is trail braking . You brake later, stay on them as you turn in and feather off as you turn and then feed the power in from the apex. Faster, but come off the brakes or get on the power, too quick/suddenly and you'll get oversteer and spin out. It's particularly effective with cars that understeer.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but I've had 2 different instuctors tell me the same thing.
You're completely right. Trail braking is absolutely necessary to make a car go really quickly. If you watch the F1 boys then you can often see when they release the brakes by watching the inboard footage and watching the unloaded front. It applies to the Maclarens particularly, as they seem to be more prone to picking up the inside front than others, but you can often see that the driver's only completely come off the brakes some considerable distance into the corner.
What's going on is that you're using more of the "friction circle" (a term due to the late, great, Mark Donohue who popularised the term in his book "The Unfair Advantage") available from the tyres. To a first approximation the tyre has equal grip in all directions and the available acceleration can therefore be envisaged as a circle. When you're just coasting along on a neutral throttle you're in the middle of the circle. When you're accelerating as hard as possible (assuming the car is tyre grip limited) you're at the top of the circle (N); braking hard, right at the bottom (S); going round a corner, at the side (E). If you brake in a straight line and then turn your path through the friction circle goes from N to S, back to the middle and then over to E. If you're trail braking then what you're trying to do is to go from N to S and then blending braking into turning as you go round the outside of the circle from S to E.
The notion's become so important that it's normal for racers to pore over friction circle plots from their data loggers to see where they're not using the tyres to maximum effect. Here's a plot from my last race of one trip through the Maggots/Becketts complex at the Silverstone National circuit:
This trace starts at the middle top where I'm going as fast as I can up the hill to Maggots. This is a left kink and the lateral g gets up to about 0.8 where I hit the brakes and try to blend right hand lateral into left hand lateral around the right hander that is Becketts. As you can see, I don't quite keep it on the circle but it isn't too bad. (1.2g, btw, is about all an A048 can manage, unlike the 4-5g that the F1 chaps get from their Bridgestone slicks). As you can see, half way round I let off the brakes a bit before going back onto them. This is probably because I really braked too early. However, as others will attest, Maggotts is a bit of a potential brown race-suit scenario.
HTH,
Tim
