On the Racetrack, Some Important Lessons for Survival on the Street

Turn 2 is a decreasing-radius right-hander with ample room at the exit. After about eight laps by myself, I felt pretty comfortable. Still, I’ve come out too fast and run off into the gravel. As I mutter something unprofane in deference to my passenger, she urges me to get back on the pavement: “That’s OK. Just keep going.”

Heeding Allison Stewart’s instructions, I point the race-prepared Toyota Celica onto the track and get back up to speed. Putting aside my nerves and embarrassment, I refocus on the task at hand, grateful for Stewart’s calm guidance: “Get in tighter to the cone; slice the apex; now squeeze on the throttle.”

Three laps later, I’ve garnered a few compliments for a nice downshift and taking better lines through the corners, and some pointers on which corners don’t require more than a little braking before entry. I’m smoother, a little faster, but there’s still a lot to think about: looking ahead for the turn-in and apex cones; keeping the engine in the power band; proper shifting technique; remembering to keep my hands on the wheel even through the hairpin--you always steer the car, or risk not knowing where the wheels are pointed if you skid. Most important, staying focused on what I could control.

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The purpose of all this was to give some media folks a taste of the instruction that Toyota arranges each year for participants in the pro-celebrity race that runs the day before the Grand Prix of Long Beach. The invited celebs get four days of training at Willow Springs Raceway with Danny McKeever, who runs his Fast Lane Racing School at the track near Rosamond in Kern County’s Antelope Valley.

McKeever and his staff teach on the Streets of Willow Springs course, a 1.5-mile track with a multitude of turns--from six to a full dozen, depending on setup. It’s better for teaching than the big track because there isn’t enough room to go really fast--unless you’re McKeever or one of his instructors.

My purpose was to learn as much as possible both about being fast on the track and being safer on the street.

This would seem easy, or so I thought. After all, everyone in the class wanted to have as much fun as possible; no need to look back, because we weren’t in traffic. But my worst habit was reacting to a car behind me. We weren’t racing--no passing allowed--and we were supposed to stay spaced apart.

My reaction to being caught should have been to ignore the car behind me, but twice I reverted to my freeway tactic: If the road is clear ahead, hit the gas to gain some room to move. The first time caused a little fishtailing coming out of a 90-degree right-hander, which I caught calmly enough to get through the next turn and onto the front straightaway. I’ll get to Spin 2 later.

Like all good teachers, McKeever & Co. starts with the fundamentals, which fall under the categories of hands, feet and head.

McKeever stresses hands at either 10 and 2 o’clock or 9 and 3 on the wheel. No death grip, because that doesn’t allow the driver to feel the road through the wheel. Second, in contrast to how most of us steer on the street, the track demands a more consistent grip. One hand can be slid to a different position to set up for a sharp corner, but no letting the wheel slip as the car unwinds from the corner or hand-over-hand. Both cut the driver off from a critical source of information about what the tires are doing. The right hand leaves the wheel for shifting, but only for as long as it takes.

Footwork came next. We all know how to mash the throttle, and those of us who drive manual-transmission vehicles have our left foot wired directly to our right hand. But there is one more technique that can contribute to going faster and having optimal car control. So-called toe/heel (actually more like ball of the foot/side of the foot) allows the driver to apply the brakes, quickly downshift before entering a corner and keep the engine speed in the power band. This allows you to go from entry to exit quickly and in control.

McKeever describes the technique: Step on the brake pedal with the ball of your right foot, applying the brakes smoothly to reduce speed enough to pick a lower gear. Clutch in as you continue to brake; the speed of the engine drops from, say, 4,000 revs per minute to near idle. But the transmission is still spinning at 4,000 rpm. If you let the clutch out now, the mismatched engine and trans speeds will fight each other; stress the drive train enough, and the car will shudder or the drive wheels might spin.

So immediately after you depress the clutch and before the engine speed drops too much, roll your right foot over to the throttle. Using the side of your foot while still keeping pressure on the brake, blip the throttle to bring the engine speed up and then release the clutch. Get it right, and you have a nice, smooth change to a lower gear.

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In the slower world of street driving, you can achieve this goal without using your right foot over the brake and accelerator pedals. But you have to plan ahead so that you can brake, shift and go back to braking. The goal is to avoid any engine braking, which will wear out your drive train prematurely. I use this when getting off the freeway, especially on curved exits. Keeping the car balanced and in the proper gear makes it safer and easier to handle emergencies.

Hands and feet are doing pretty much what they always do when we drive: control the car. On the track, there’s more going on more quickly, but the underlying tenet, McKeever says, is tire management. Regardless of what you drive, he says, you are managing the four patches where the rubber meets the road. It’s easy to lose sight of this in today’s world of turbocharging, leather interiors, 19-speaker audio systems, climate control and wood dashboards, but driving is tire management.

When you step on the gas, the drive wheels get more load and the contact patches get bigger. When you step on the brakes, the weight transfers up front and those tires’ contact patches get bigger. In a corner, the outside tires get the load and increased tire-patch size. Conversely, the unloaded wheels’ contact patches get smaller. Result: Traction is biased to where the load is. Cruising in a straight line puts an equal load on all four tires--unless your trunk is full of bricks.

All the things we’re doing with our hands and feet control the contact patches; knowing what each action does to those patches allows us better control of the vehicle, be it a Geo Metro or a Ford Excursion.

Now, add to this the ever-changing equation in the driver’s head. The tasks here are to look ahead to the entry and apex points of each corner and decide when and how much to brake, when to downshift and how much throttle to use at any given moment. There’s not a lot of time to evaluate how well a corner was taken on this track, as the next one is seconds away. For a novice, that’s barely enough time to get hands and feet doing what is needed. All the while, my brain is trying to evaluate the feedback from the car. Hands, feet and body are getting signals; the trick is figuring out what they say.

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More laps before lunch. The classroom and in-car instruction are evolving into more natural reactions. I’m not sure I’m going much faster, but my confidence about car control has increased.

After lunch, three of us head to the dry-skid pad.

“You can’t make mistakes on the skid pad,” McKeever says.

That’s because this is the place where finessing your way out of a skid is learned. Don’t catch the skid? No problem. Just keep practicing. Be smooth. Just because you don’t get instant results from your steering or braking doesn’t mean you should add more. That’s tricky, given that once you’ve lost traction, at least two wheels aren’t reacting right away to what you’re asking of them. The tendency for most drivers, including me, is to add more braking or steering or to subtract throttle. When all wheels catch again, the excessive input makes itself known with a nasty, quick spin. On the street, this is what we hear on traffic radio as a car facing the wrong way in the No. 1 lane of whatever freeway we’ve just entered.

McKeever sits in the passenger seat and offers instructions for a few laps before letting us run a few on our own.

Inducing understeer and oversteer offers us the chance to learn proper correction technique. Understeer, where the car doesn’t turn as much as you’ve turned the wheel, is corrected by gently easing off the throttle. Get off too fast, and the weight transfer can cause some cars to swap ends. Every car is different, so caution is the word. If the understeer condition is extreme, some braking might be required. Again, smooth and easy; lock the wheels and you won’t be able to steer.

First lap, I push the accelerator until the car starts to wander. Gently off the gas, and it returns to the desired line. Next lap, pushing even harder, but this time I’m off the throttle too fast and the back end swings out a bit as the car goes from understeer to oversteer. Lap 3, even harder on the throttle, off the gas gently and on the brakes. Too much braking starts to bring the back end around; I steer into the skid and let off the brakes. Unfortunately, I turned the wheel too far. Instead of the car straightening out, the back end snaps around in the opposite direction of the first skid.

Still, the dry-skid pad is a great place to learn, and I would have gladly spent half the day there getting the technique down.

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Just how much I needed that fine-tuning I would discover during the last set of laps. For this session, McKeever opened up more of the course. This changed Turn 9 from a sharp left-right combination to a left with a slight hairpin. I’d been around this configuration two or three times, but when a fellow student appeared in my rearview mirror, it was distracting enough that I went in too fast and too late. About to go wide off the track, I eased off the throttle, added some brake and steered to correct. All to no avail, as the back end came loose, and around I went. After the trailing car went around me, I got back on and took four more laps without a hitch, telling myself the entire time to ignore the mirror.

Back in the classroom I mentioned my spin-out to Stewart, who is McKeever’s daughter and an accomplished racer. She was nice enough to recount having done the same thing at Laguna Seca in front of a big-name driver.

That made me feel a little better and, despite my mistakes, the day was even more fun than I had expected. The track offers a chance to drive in ways we can’t and shouldn’t on the street: edge to edge and up to the car’s and driver’s limits. But there are lessons for the street in car control and important seeing techniques.

Now, if I can only ignore that car behind me. . . .

* Fast Lane Racing School, (888) 948-4888 or on the Web at https://www.raceschool.com.

Write to Dr. Gear Head at Highway 1, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: gearhead@latimes.com.