In this instance, what is a low-speed corner?

 

Up to around 40mph.

 

Somebody said it earlier, if you are faster with an early apex then you are over-slowing the car during the first half of the corner. The stock S2000 has enough power to benefit from a late apex but most schools over-emphasize them and exaggerate the change in shape of the line.

On an unrelated note I must be a reincarnated flat tracker because I have always been better with left turns with both cars and motorcycles. I really notice it with dirt bikes and I've been like this since I first started building berms with an 80cc two-stroke back in the 70's. I even did figure 8 laps to try to improve my right turns but I just got better in both directions. In my old S race car I felt perfectly comfortably sliding the car left under heavy braking to just before the apex but could not push the same way in right turns. I kept the car well corner balanced so in theory it should have handled the same in both directions. I know I could shave a full second off my Summit Main lap time if the course ran counter-clockwise. Is this common or is it just me?

 

Much more comfortable sliding a car in a right hand turn than left. I'd say this is primarily because of tracks run clockwise so there's more right turns than left, which means I have more seat time turning right than left.

 

Many cars have a weight bias to the side of the car with the driver. As a result, cars often are faster turning in the direction where the driver is on the inside of the turn. Many race cars based on production sports cars used to be English right-hand drive versions, presumably because the tracks were clockwise. Lime Rock has one left hand turn and 5 right hand turns.

Is the S2000 balanced right-to-left with the driver in the car?

 

For those that corner 'spiritedly' fairly regularly on the street, right turns tend to get a bit more 'seat time' in countries that are 'left-hand drive' since on-coming traffic isn't always there. But I guess I feel more comfortable turning left at the limit at intersections since I'm not worried about on-coming cars. So, not sure if I'm better at right or left turns. I don't really think I have a preference. Though, I haven't objectively analyzed driving data to see if I actually am better at one or the other.

And as bgoetz said, I am also curious as to what kind of lap times others are setting at Pitt Race and what kind of mods they have. I've pretty much been driving my S2000 in a vacuum up here not really knowing where I stand in terms of driver skill given the car at hand. I wonder if we need our own Pitt Race thread here to really get some discussion going! There might be some track specific things that we can BS about. And as an extrapolation, how fun would it be to get together as a group and drink some beers while we use our hands to demonstrate what we think our car was doing as it was going through that corner that one time I love such things For example, at Pitt Race, there is an uphill right hander where I use the change in elevation while slightly sliding to help slow the car down, which results in being able to enter that corner way faster than I would if it was flat. I'm sure there are other such interesting points of discussion.

 

Not even close.

 

Nope

 

Driving on the street is nothing like driving on the track. Streets have traffic, police, pedestrians. They don't have the lane width, runoff areas, race track speeds, corner workers, or emergency equipment on hand.

It only is meaningful if scaled as raced. Mark Donohue recommended scaling it so the rear wheels had equal loads although that would seem to let the car be balanced in one direction and either understeer or oversteer in the other. The real solution would be to set it up for the most important turns on the track, which in most (nearly all?) cases is a right hand turn.