Quote:
Originally Posted by The HACK
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.
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+1. I have to agree with The HACK. As soon as you KNOW you do not have to come off throttle is when you hammer it. As for gear decisions, in M mode you have the most control. Even though F1 cars use paddle shifters those guys are hardly letting the car decide what gear to be in. They decide everything not the car. As for smoothness and rolling into the throttle this is a safe way to make it around the track and as Jackie Stewart says "if you see a dog you dont just jump up behind it you talk your way to it to let the dog know you are there. The same holds for driving fast." However, there is never any mention of not being in control of the gearing by him. Check out this episode of Top Gear for some morsels of wisdom where he teaches one of the hosts to cut 20 sec off his lap time.
Summary of the episode by Jackie Stewart
1) smooth is fast,
2) you need to be in the right gear before corner
3) and you need to get on throttle as soon as possible and hammer it when you know you do not have to let got of the throttle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=n5rpFXdWtK4