Board Thread:Off-Topic/@comment-27489835-20160610173212/@comment-27489835-20160610173644

Here's a Q&A with Allan McNish, legendary LMP1 Le Man driver who drove with Audi in its glory years.

http://safeisfast.com/ask_a_pro/73-allan-mcnish#.V1r5t5DXerU

An excerpt:

Hello Allan! My question is: how do you correctly judge when you are fast through a corner/lap or not? Without any help of a digital dash or +/- delta times of course. Sometimes when I find myself in a kart/car and take a corner at the limit, I expect it to be way faster because of the line I take, braking point, power application etc, but it turns out I am not. So how do you correctly judge that, and how can you train this perception ability? - Alex Cascatau

Hi Alex, it’s always difficult to work out when you’re on the limit because it’s subjective and depends on what your experience is. You know this when you go into a qualifying lap and ultimately you end up quicker – you’ve gone into the corner faster and hit the apex quicker and it’s like a voyage into the unknown. For me, it doesn’t start by braking later in these situations; instead it tends to be by carrying more speed through the apex. You can only really get on to the throttle at any given point and where that limit is can be found with the feedback from the car. So when the front or the rear of the kart or the car is sliding, when it isn’t holding to the absolute correct line, that’s when you’re on the limit. When you’re underneath the limit though, whether you’re at 80%, 90% or 97%, it’s a difficult thing to do, but you’ve got to go to 105%, which usually means spinning off before you realise you’ve gone too far. The point there is to understand when you’re close to the limit but without going to 105% in future. A suggestion though: if you’ve got a corner on the circuit where there is a lot of run-off area, and there’s limited risk of doing any damage, that’s where you try it, and not in a high-speed corner where the consequences are that if you spin, you’re going to have a crash. Try somewhere with limited risk and then you’ll build up your experience that way.