Bryan Watts

Having backed a car or two into a wall, I only speak out of humble experience. Luckily, experience really does work...I haven't found myself behind the car in a long time. (knock on wood).

richard glickel.

My friend Frank (a/k/a, "GUMS) is a personable guy (viz., not "flinty" at all) and an accomplished racer, who enjoys sharing his experiences through well-written (we're not talking Pulitzer prize) accounts of race weekends to his PCA region's monthly newsletter. Which is why I found his initial reply and less-than-axiomatic (shall we say) conclusion - at first - humorous.

When all is said and done, Frank's (and the other points) raised here are well-taken and undoubtedly 100% well-intended (except, maybe, for mine).

Ciao.

flatsics

I hope I am still allowed to enter the state of Wisconsin, it would suck to miss the Road America club race.

RedlineMan

Hey }{;

It never occured to me that you could not handle these online volleys. Neither did it impress me that you or anyone esle should have to.

How bout this idea? How bout you give yourself a tune-up. You don't need any instructors or nuthin fancy like that. Now, I don't know what kind of 911 you drive, or what kind of setup you have even, but all you really need to get yourself right in sync is a set of slippery tires.

I have spoken many times about my old ancient Yoko 008Rs that I pull out from time to time to tune up my reflexes. These tires are like any Yok in that they are extremely communicative, and they stick surprisingly well for being at LEAST 10 years old. But... they do have their limits, and that is the key.

I can drive at a pretty good clip, and then they comfortably tap me on the forehead and say we are going to start sliding now. When I get the feel for them again, I can go sailing into corners fairly quickly and play the grip and slide like a fiddle becasue it is coming at a fairly low threshold. That is the key. Low threshold of fear = good lesson learned instead of tip toeing around in terror, or so much grip that you can't access the limit until it JUMPS on you.

RedlineMan's tip for success; Crappy Tires!

TD in DC

Although I cannot speak for Tim O'Neal, I did not understand him to say that having the ability to feel the car is a bad thing. Not at all. Rather, you need to manage the car, in advance, to prevent the car from having excessive understeer or oversteer. For example, with experience, you know that a car is likely to behave in a certain way under certain circumstances. If you know this, you should take the necesssary steps to prevent unwanted understeer (e.g., trailbraking) or unwanted oversteer (e.g., opening the wheel) BEFORE you feel the car actually starting to do what you think it probably will do. The closer you get to the limit, the less time between taking these anticipatory steps and the car actually entering unwanted understeer or unwanted oversteer. But viewing your role as a driver who needs both (1) to "anticipate" what your car will do and (2) ACT BEFORE it does the unwanted thing is very different than most of us novice drivers do. Most of us novice drivers pick up skills and start driving closer to the limit and start reacting to those little slips over the limit. We tell ourselves that we are picking up skills and are becoming good drivers (well, in one sense we are, because being able to recover from going slightly over the limit is a skill in and of itself, and a necessary one at that because everyone makes mistakes). The truth is, though, that as long as we think about it like that, we are not even really in the game, because the great drivers would never intentionally have found themselves in a position where they needed to recover from unwanted oversteer or unwanted understeer. This was an epiphany for me: The great drivers "act" before the trouble develops rather than trying to ride the razor edge of the limit and "react" when you accidentally slip over.

I wish I had learned this before my wreck. I am nearly positive I would not have wrecked if I had been thinking about driving in this manner. When I wrecked, the hairs on the back of my neck went up the very moment I knew there potentially could be a problem, which was before I reached the apex and started to drift. My reaction, and it was a reaction, was to tune in intensely to what my car was doing. While my car was sliding neutrally, I did nothing . . . intentionally. Afterall, I was in a neutral drift. As soon as I felt the rear of the car start to come around, I opened the wheel aggressively. The Problem was that, as I did not know at the time, it was already too late to save the car when I started opening the wheel, despite the fact that the car rotated very, very slowly. I have never felt something so sickening as banging against the steering lock as I continued to rotate every so slowly into the wall at 89 mph.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have opened the wheel well before the car started to rotate. I would have acted to prevent my car from developing unwanted oversteer rather than waiting to "react" once I "felt" the car start to rotate. Now, the problem likely would not have developed at all unless I made a mistake, which is always possible.

Here is a clip of me making an error after learning an expensive, humiliating and dangerous lesson. I still made a mistake, but I was able to stay on the track by predicting the consequences of my mistake rather than waiting to react to the behavior of my car.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...18686626720996

P.S. I do not view this as a great save. Rather, I saved this video so that I could remember my errors for trailbraking, and I chose to share it so other could learn from my errors (and see that most of us enter T1 far slower than is possible).

TD in DC

This is all consistent with what I am trying to explain about what I learned from Tim O'Neal. BTW, who cares about "insiders" and "outsiders." Often intelligent contribution is inversely proportional to post count (and yes, I understand fully the irony of my statement).

TD in DC

LOL }{ is the king of crappy tires. I don't think he knows anything else!