Okay, I have a question here. Not sure if this is the right forum, but it's home to those with far better technique than I do. Look at the pic below:



The blue line is my intended line while drifting around one particular corner we have here.

The red line is the line I actually look.

Note that the pic is NOT of the actual road I was on. The actual road is flat without elevation changes, and it's a sweeping corner. It was the best pic of a corner I could find to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I know that track driving teaches you to either get off throttle or tap the brakes to correct understeer. I did just that, but it didn't really change the trajectory of my travel. I was pretty sure of my approach and entry speed, but unfortunately, I veered off my intended line and almost hit the curb sideways (I didn't).

I just wanna know how you'd "correct" such a situation, and why the car veered this far off course. All I could really do was clutch in and brake. I'm looking to smooth out my rally skills (I bought a 318is E30 just for rally) before I actually go there.

 

Looks like you have the proper technique but you realize its going to take some time for the tires to gain the necessary traction right? It will slide before finally gaining grip pushing you in the direction you want to go. I suppose the solution here is to come in slower.

 

This might not be the right subforum for this, but I'll add some pennies.

Rally requires quite a bit of advanced car control. And a requirement for understanding grip, weight transfer and rotation.

If you're understeering like that, basically you're exceeding the available grip of the fronts. Slow down a few more mph or let the nose weight down for more grip.

Getting the rear to rotate is another issue altogether. Depends on available grip and torque. E-brake (or revving if you have enough torque... difficult on asphalt with low torque). But if the fronts aren't biting, the car won't come around.

I'd start with autocross, rallycross or ice racing to hone the skills before doing stage rally.

 

Thanks for the pennies CKit. I've done autocross to the point of boredom. I'm no expert on autocross by any means, but I just find it so boring. I've since taken my car to the race track, and I still can't get enough of it.

But my first motorsport experience was really Rally-X with OVR-SCCA. It was fun as hell, and I was doing it with my Mazda RX-8 (first car):



So now I wanna get back into the game. The S2000 will never be my rally machine. It's just too nice. Hence the E30 purchase.

I will certainly go back into Rally-X before I even THINK of stage rally, and I will try reducing my speed, although I was really going 30mph tops on a corner that would've been done at 60-70mph dry.

EDIT: Was your advice based on the assumption that I was driving straight? To clarify, I was sideways. Would your advice apply in a sideways situation?

Squirtle, besides slowing down, would giving it some gas help? The way I think of it in my head is that giving it gas will help push the car forward. I always aim the nose of my car towards the exit while sideways, so I'm thinking giving it some throttle will push it towards the correct line... Am I right to be thinking this?

 

Giving it gas will throttle you into the wall more than likely. I think you need to slow down on entry if the understeer is that bad, I don't think gasing it is going to cause your rear to swing around like you want it to. I'm sure more of our experienced drivers will chime in and help you out as well.

 

I think the overall advice still holds. You exceeded the front grip of the tires. Try getting more angular momentum (rotational force) before breaking the front (and then the rear) free of grip. Tires don't have as much grip sliding sideways. If you're sliding sideways, you didn't put your rotation input in before you broke traction. If the tires are going sideways, it's basically like locking up the wheels without ABS, you're going to give up grip.

So don't go "sideways" before you've started rotating.

 

Some concepts:


Sideways = slow (on asphalt)

Radius = Speed

Radius (of the corner) - dictates the speed allowed through the corner.

If you were running wide -your radius is bigger than you want, your speed was probably too high.

A tire can only do 100% of one thing. Yes loading the front (off the gas or on the brakes - trailbraking) adds more grip up front, BUT if you are turning at 80% and you ask for 50% braking ( that = 130% - overworked the front tires) which leads to understeer and your problem.


Food for thought.

 

My first ice race taught me a lot about this. Remember your high-school physics: A=(V^2)/R (That's Acceleration=Velocity*Velocity/Radius)

You have a fixed amount of Acceleration available, it's the grip in the tires. You can add speed, but that makes the radius larger. If you want to make the radius smaller, you have to reduce speed. There's a point where it doesn't matter which direction you're pointed, if you're going too fast you're going to end up off the road.

In general:
- If you're in a corner and going a little wide, reduce power or even brake (braking is usually a "save your butt" move to avoid something hard on the outside of the corner, you've already screwed up bad - now it's time to save the car and/or your life and forget about laptimes)
- If you're in a corner and realize you have tons of room on the exit, apply more power

If you watch expert drivers you'll notice all kinds of throttle modulation a little before the apex (and all the way to corner exit if they have enough power). They're doing the above. It's all part of driving on the limit of the tires all the time.

In a gravel/ice situation, this also shifts weight front to back to adjust car handling in the correct manner to help you get a good exit.

The earlier you can figure this out in the corner, the smaller your corrections become. Beginners figure out they're going wide fractions of a second before they run out of road on the exit. Pros figure out they might be wide just after turn in and adjust corner entry speed to suit.

GrassRoots Motorsports had a great article a couple of months ago on rally car control that covered this in more detail.

 

Unwind the wheel to let the front tires regain grip (turning in more will just make it worse, and chew up your tires, that's a very common reaction by beginners), then turn in again after the fronts have regained grip. Try not to saw on the wheel to much.

I have to add, don't drive at the limits on the street. Find a track day, autocross or rallycross to find your limits. Have fun and be safe.

 

You should define "going sideways". It's safe to assume that means the rear tires were sliding, but what were the front tires doing? Were you steering towards the direction the car was sliding, so that the front tires still had grip? Or were the front tires sliding, too?

In the second case, you would want to straighten the wheel or steer towards the direction that the car is sliding, to allow the front tires to regain grip.

In the first case, if you are not going too fast for the turn, then you could counter-steer less, tightening the turn radius for the front tires, and increasing the angle of the slide. But if that results in a spin, the odds are you were going too fast in the first place.

If you were going too fast to begin with, about all you can do is let off the throttle as much as you can without losing the rear end, counter-steer to maintain grip on the front, and ride it out until you're not in danger of sliding off the road.

I agree with captain_pants.