| INITIAL D BATTLE: DRIVING TECHNIQUES |
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ACCELERATING Accelerating makes the car move more quickly, so the best thing is to keep your foot pressed down on the accelerator as much as possible. In an automatic car the best thing to do is to just put your foot to the floor and go. In a manual car you will have to maximise your revs at each gear change and accelerate through the gears. The difficult thing is to get away from the start line quickly. If you rev the engine and engage the clutch too quickly the wheels will spin. When this happens, the car will not move forward smoothly, but if you don't get any wheelspin at all it may be a sign that your revs are not high enough and you will not get a fast start. The trick is to keep the revs resonably high and to half-engage the clutch rather than letting it out all at once. You should also keep the revs steady until the clutch is engaged - don't keep revving the engine up. BRAKING The most difficult and sensitive driving technique is braking. If you cannot reduce speed quickly, you will be unable to get a fast time. In order to make the best use of your brakes, you need to put your foot down hard. When the wheels lock it means that you have braked too hard. Your aim is to brake as hard as you possibly can without locking the wheels. FF (Front engine, front drive) FF cars have the engine loaded in the front and front wheel drive. FF cars are more spacious because there is no need for the mechanical parts transferring the power from the engine to the rear wheels. However, in FF cars the weight is all at the front so when turning left and right and when accelerating or decelerating the focus is always on the front wheels. You should also be careful of understeering because much of the weight of the vehicle is on the front wheels, and if you drive for long periods whilst under-steering the front tyres get hot and therefore begin to lose their grip. The best way to avoid this is to accelerate and steer as smoothly as you can. The good points of FF cars are that they do not spin easily and they run well even on wet roads. FR (Front engine, rear drive) FR cars are rear wheel driven with the engine at the front. The steering is handled by the front wheels and the power comes from the rear wheels so the front and rear weight balance is close to 50/50. FR cars are easy to handle and to control. They are also the best cars in which to handle drifting. Both the front and rear wheels have their own particular role, so neither one nor the other will get hot. ENTERING THE CORNER In order to take the corner as fast as possible you need to brake hard in order to shift the balance of weight of the car from the back to the front so that more of the weight of the vehicle is displaced over the front tyres. In other words, you should brake into a corner. If you brake hard and release the brake before turning the steering wheel, the weight you transferred to the front tyres will therefore decrease. If your car starts spinning as you begin to turn the corner, this means that either you have too much weight transferred to the front wheels or you are travelling too fast to take the corner. If you find that you have too much weight transferred to the front of the car you should begin to ease off the brake a little earlier, and if you are driving too fast you should try braking a little earlier. ACCELERATING OUT OF CORNERS The faster you begin to accelerate out of a corner determines how quickly you can take the corner. When cornering you are putting your car into a position in which it is most likely to spin. The car will spin if there is too much weight at the front of the car as it begins to turn the corner. Therefore, you should try to stabilise the car and accelerate before it begins to spin. The best way to do this is to increase the gripping power of the rear wheels. You need to transfer weight to the rear of the car by acelerating. In order words, you should accelerate out of a spin to stabilise your car. Basically, you should accelerate slightly to make use of weight shifting and to stabilise the car, then accelerate hard out of the corner when you have the car under control. This is the key to fast cornering. UNDER-STEERING & OVERSTEERING Under-steering is when you cannot get the car to turn in the direction you wish to go however much you turn the steering wheel that way, whilst over-steering is when your car turns more than you want it to (in other words, almost spinning). The best state is to be in is between the two, neither over-steering nor under-steering. Basically, if you can maintain this state, you will find that it is the fastest way to take corners. DRIFT DRIFT is a dynamic, ostentatious technique where your tyres slip on the road surface. Drift relies on sensitive control of both the accelerator and the steering wheel to keep the wheels slipping on the road surface and to balance the car between over-steering and spinning. BRAKING DRIFT Using the hand-brake to exceed the grip limits for the rev tyres is quite a drastic measure, and some drivers prefer another method known as shift lock. In shift lock, you shift down a gear (say from 3rd to 2nd) without slowing first, releasing the clutch suddenly rather than feeding it in gradually to match the engine revs, and this has the effect of locking the wheels. Using braking drift without the hand-brake or shift lock is far more difficult. The way to start the tyres slipping is to employ weight shifting as you enter the corner by braking, but you will need to go into the corner reasonably fast and shift the weight properly in order to get the tyres to slip in the first place. INERTIA DRIFT - THE ULTIMATE IN EXCITEMENT In inertia drift your car travels too fast for the tyres to grip on the corners, and you have to control it as it slides sideways. You need to maintain your speed on the corners, controlling the drift by counter-steering and accelerating hard to move forward. Inertia drift is the ultimate in driving, the fastest, and the most beautiful to watch. It is an exciting combination of ostentation and speed. |