What's the point of it? Trail braking helps you rotate the car into a corner by controlling the transfer of weight onto the front tyres, giving them more stick, and thus compensating for any understeering tendency the car would otherwise have.

After much grinning, laughing and tyre scrubbing its back to the technical stuff.. 

11.00am     -               Coffee break 

• Oversteer / Understeer and Slip Angles

Andrew takes the controls to explain what this all means…. 

With the car on full lock, driving forward slowly turns the car in a tight circle….(yeah we all know that)

Increasing speed, understeer kicks in as the front tyres exceed their grip.  Turning the wheels slightly straighter eliminates the understeer and then you can accelerate again…..Practice time…..Effective use of understeer in cornering….. 

Exercises – increase and decrease the size of the circle or size of the corner by altering your amount of understeer, keeping the steering wheel in a single position 180° from straight.  Results in drifting into and out of corners….. Applying more throttle when in a corner creates understeer and with practice increases the exit speed of the car and engine…. 

            Some info here - http://autozine.kyul.net/technical_school/tech_index.htm 

·        General Car Control 

Spin avoidance, skid control and basic control techniques… 

12.00pm     -               Lunch Break 

·        "The Circuit" 

Now we all want to be racing drivers and here is our first chance….. 

            With the mind buzzing from the mornings learning’s and banter over lunch, its time to put the teaching into practice…

       

The Course

Andrew took the controls, took each driver round the circuit made from cones, showing the lines, entry and exit….

The circuit would test us on basic driving and acceleration, coupled with the techniques we had learnt during the day.

High speed cornering, entry and exit – Trail braking – Drifting the car through the ‘esses’ and tight hair pin turns….