Go-carts carryover to cars
To further illustrate my previous point on how to straighten out serpentine roads, lets look at go-cart racing.
Go-cart racing is great fun, however expensive.
For $20 for 10 minutes, this is a sparing hobby, at least on a journalist salary.
Saturday I visited Heart Attack Racing at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds I clocked a personal best of 26.9 seconds around the track.
Being my first time on the course, and about a second and half behind the track record I consider myself lucky.
Racing against a good friend and our wives, whom we passed carefully, we slid around corners and pinned the throttle on the exit racing into the apex with shrieking tires and barking exhausts.
Joined by a stranger on our second heat, we welcomed him to the track as our wives, less enthused than us, sat the heat out.
I lapped the guy on the third to last lap after which he harpooned me on the entry to a hairpin ending the track's fastest section, probably around the 35 mph mark.
The stranger was black-flagged for dangerous contact.
After our all-too short time expired, the stranger accused myself, my good friend and the very friendly and courteous owner of having faster cars.
The owner told the man all the cars were the same.
Incredulous, the stranger insisted my car had to be faster because he couldn't catch me.
The owner told him again all the cars were 9-horse carts with the same set up. He said he could set lap records on any one of his carts. The difference was that the fastest drivers break before the turn, accelerate through it and take shorter lines.
Before racing, the owner sat us down showed us a map of the course, with the tightest lines explaining the slick, dusty sections against the walls that eat up time, more on that in a sec. Several times he stressed the fact that fastest times are churned when a driver breaks before the turn and accelerates through it, especially with a go-cart that has no front brakes and drives the rear tires with equal power, or with "posi-traction" as he put it.
Breaking mid-turn will cause the rear end to lose traction and cause a driver to spin and crash into the wall. Less dramatically, it causes a driver to get to the throttle later than his competitors.
When all the carts are so close in performance, the slightest advantage amounts to enough to win when stretched out across 10 minutes.
The sooner a driver can stab the throttle and leave it there when exiting a turn, the faster he'll get to the next one where the drag race begins again.
A certain amount of slippage is acceptable, and probably preferable to race drivers who learn to steer a car with the rear tires as much as with the front which the steering wheel is connected to.
Braking and throttle inputs in concert with correct steering input yields tighter turns and closer lines.
Taking a corner as close as possible to the apex, or center of the turn is the fastest line because it is also the shortest.
A little slip allows the motor to rev up without bogging down, but too much tire spin sucks time out of a lap.
So to wrap it up, staying on the throttle hard until the last possible second, braking before the turn and getting to the throttle the soonest without being afraid of a little sliding is the fastest way to get around the track.
Most motorcyclists know this routine from carving up canyons.
Another thing bikers know is that dust and debris collects on the sides of roads and on the centerline, where cars warm tires don't pick it up or send it off the road.
Knowing what keeps racecar drivers safe at crazy speeds can certainly keep everyday motorists safe at posted speed limits around town.
But remember your car is not a go-cart.