Sunday, March 6, 2011

ESP: What you need for on-track high performance driving.

Yes, use your ESP, no crystal balls required.

Drivers at High Performance Driving Events (HPDE), Driver’s Schools or Driver’s Education events are exposed in classroom sessions to a wide range of concepts, theories and the resulting hard-to-remember terms.


A wise author compared learning at a driving school to a thirsty person trying to drink from a roaring fire hose - much too much stuff coming at you much too fast.


In the classroom, I do my best to explain what racing terms mean and why they're important concepts for understanding and performing high performance driving.

In the car, coaching a novice track driver, I simplify, then prioritize what's vital to know while driving flat out on the track. First, let’s reduce things to just three easy-to-remember letters:  ESP.

ESP stands for Eyes, Smoothness and Path. First, you’ll drive where you look, next, smoothness in all of your controls for speed and safety, and finally, being in the right place at the right time is vital for fast, safe laps. ESP - first three things to work on, and in that order.

Eyes. “The car goes where the eyes go,” as Enzo so rightly remembers in Garth Stein’s bestselling novel, “The Art of Racing in the Rain.”  Instructors have been saying this for years and it’s true. Humans have evolved from creatures of the savannah into visual hunters. We will guide the car by where we look.

We must first train our eyes to look where we want to go. Sounds simple, but doing so requires constant reminders. It’s natural to fixate on one place, an apex cone, for example, and then to drive from cone to cone in short abrupt motions. Target fixation is yet another reason one driver will follow another right off the track when the leader makes a mistake.

The trick is to train your eyes to look through the corner and down the track. To always be preparing for the next corner and not reacting to the one in front of you.  The further down the track you look, the smoother you’ll drive.

We can often tell where you’re looking by how you drive. When students begin to fixate, they are abrupt on the track. As drivers gain confidence and skill, they begin to look further, at the apex of a corner before arriving at the turn-in point, and down the straight while just turning in toward the apex. The ride smooths out. The driver is always planning for the next corner, not reacting to this one.

Learning to have 'horizon eyes,' training yourself to look down your intended path, will keep your car away from danger too. As drivers gain situational awareness on track they don't fixate on cars ahead, but see through them (think outlines to look through) as they look down the track. They begin to pick out visual waypoints around the track to help keep them seeing as far down their path as possible.

Smoothness is one of the keys to speed. With a car only touching the track in four small playing-card sized contact patches, it’s vital to not overload the tires’ ability to grip the road. Quick, abrupt steering motions will transfer the car’s weight suddenly and vastly lower the total grip available. Gradual build-up of load will mean the tires have a higher limit of grip. Add cornering load more smoothly and you’ll have more total grip.

Slow hands mean fast lap times. Pretend your hands are underwater. Take a peek at a Formula One driver’s pole-setting qualifying lap sometime.  Unless they have exceeded the tires’ grip and have to ‘catch the car’ with some quick opposite lock, slow flowing movements are the rule of the day. No wasted motion, no sawing at the wheel, economy of movement. Slow hands, quick laps.

The same smoothness techniques apply to the pedals, but faster. the old adage holds true, "Slow hands, fast feet." On the brakes, the smooth technique with wheels straight means a hard initial squeeze to full threshold braking as soon as possible, then, as turn-in approaches, smoothly melting off the brakes to allow you to start rolling onto the throttle.

This allows the driver to manage the huge transfer of the car’s weight from the rear, while accelerating, to the front, while full on the brakes, and then back rearward when on the gas again. Hard squeeze, melt off, roll on: these are the very words I use in the car.

It’s path (rather than line) because a technique called ESP you'll remember (rather than ESL).  Simply put, it’s being at the right place at the right time. Sharp turns (driving the shortest distance on the inside of the track) must be handled slowly and wide turns (going along the outside of the corner) goes too far, so what’s a driver to do?

The best compromise is to find the line that starts at the outside of a corner, the turn-in then crosses the inside of the track at, or shortly after, its center, the apex, then takes the car out to the outside (track-out or exit) again.

This outside-inside-outside technique is the default line for any track, and will be modified depending on what follows the corner in question. Soft, grippy racing tires often shed rubber which accumulates off the racing line, forming ‘marbles’ which lie waiting to throw an unwary driver off the track.

Corners that lead onto the longest straights, are the most important, so we’ll compromise on less important corners in order to gain speed on more important ones to maximize overall speed and lower laptimes.

All of this changes, of course, in the rain, where we may often drive around the long way in a corner, hoping to pick up grip where rubber has been thrown ‘off line.’ The goal in the rain is to decrease the cornering load and to find some grip on the wet track.   We will also adjust the line for any number of other road and track conditions.

So there you have it.

Brad’s guide to high performance driving reduced to just one phrase, ESP: Eyes. Smoothness. Path.

Master your ESP and you’ve gone a long way to fast, safe laps on track.

Brad Pines
OneTrackMind.brad@gmail.com
http:///onetrackmind-bradpines.blogspot.com