Quote:
Originally Posted by acj75
One of the first lessons I learned in my AT is to never "drop the hammer coming out of a turn." Anyone with a modicum of track experience will generally roll into the throttle coming out of turns. Every instructor I've had has preached this, AT or not.  |
One of the lessons I always try to teach, is forget everything you've learned up to this point and ADAPT. You'll quickly find that the fastest way around a track is to get on the throttle as soon as possible and get to FULL THROTTLE as quickly as your traction allows. Any instructor that continue to preach "don't drop the hammer" to an advanced student is probably afraid said student does not have the required skills. The "don't drop the hammer" speech is what I give to C and D students. A & B students, I'm asking "why aren't you at full throttle yet?"
Once you advance past a certain basic skill level, you need to learn to figure out what feedback is right and what is wrong. The guy I was talking about has close to 100 track days under his belt at the time and I trust him implicitly when sharing a track...That should say something about what he knows and don't know. The fact is, when he had reached full throttle as he exited a turn, the automatic transmission dropped down one gear on him and caused him to spin out of control.
Again. If you're not in full control of your vehicle at all times, you're not in control, period. If you have to feather the throttle longer because you're afraid of the car downshifting on you unexpectedly, you're not going to be able to extract that last 1/10th of a second out of said corner.
Put the transmission in manual mode and control what gear you're in, don't let the car do the guesswork for you.