Yes, practicing driving on alternate lines is a good thing. Doing so trying to leave room for a car is helpful as well. One thing you will find when you race is that the better racers are not taking the late apex lines people are taught and you see so often in DE and Time Trail events. So practice those lines as well. Also, the better racers will be making extensive use of trail braking. Again, not something commonly taught at DE events. You want to pass people that trail brake, you better learn how to do it well.

But, until you have the context of what it is like to actually race, this practice will not be nearly as useful as it will be once you have some race experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyM-egecTlw

Masterclass.

Great stuff!

go easy on me #3
 

hope scotty's okay with this, posting video if yir name's not chad....:D with much consternation I present the following... this is from laguna last weekend. if you wanna learn how to pass,, go racing and watch yir video. ive identified approx. 20 spots I could have done more, 15 of which may have resulted in contact.. most passes in a spec class are due to a mistake if two comparable driver's are racing IMHO. forcing a mistake can be made into a pass, the trick is recognizing the mistake, while taking advantage of it w/o you being part of his/her mistake (prc does have a female spec racer now, props to Karen, #36). when two racers make a mistake, it's called contact, I cant afford none that.

enjoy, I did!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZwkVgEYLCY&index=1&list=UUiSupoXrCyfy3hP4 _FmoU5Q

Spend time racing indoor go karts. You will both get passed and pass quite regularly. Initially there will be contact, but over time you will learn how and where to position the kart to make clean passes - and where, how to get faster drivers through without killing your own lap. IMO, this is the cheapest and safest way to get beginning experience with race craft and passing.

Also, here is a video from a couple of weeks back that shows several passes. We had an issue in qualifying and needed to start behind several slower, but higher HP cars:

1:35 - Do this. Be more aware of the situation than your competitor and be prepared to take advnatge
3:05 - Don't do this. I was frustrated with the blocks/chops and this was dumb
4:50 - Do this. Learn where the competitor is slow and take advantage the next lap
5:50 - Probably don't do this (pass at 6:30) - this racer has a very bad habit of blocking lower HP cars that are not in his class so you need to be aggressive
14:40 - Do this. Pressure the competitor until he/she makes a mistake
16:55 - Do this (pass at 17:50). Pressure the competitor to let him/her know you are there and then use where you know you are stronger to make the pass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X04QhzsUDIc

Cheers,

Track days are not even close to racing. Too many folks think they're the same thing though.

Richard Newton
Porsche Tech Stuff

Thanks for posting, your candid annotation is very informative.

You did a great job catching and passing obviously more powerful cars.

Now *this* is a good idea.

I did a 2 day race school but I want more practice.

Folks will have differing opinions but I have found Chumpcars to be a good learning venue.

We've got a low hp momentum car. (944 na)
When I started, I would ride someone's bumper looking for an opportunity to pass, and never really being able to.
Later we learned to hang back and make a run through the corners if someone left the door open.
Against higher HP cars I learned to pin them with traffic.
You also have ample opportunity to be passed :-)
Since these are endurance races, making or missing a pass is not that important.

Mike

Lots of good advice here. I don't have any inputs but noticed this about mx. I hope you were joking! Sure we make multiple contacts but this??...no way is it legal and expected!

You are in AZ. Spend some money up front [instead of repairing your car -or worse- by trying to figure it out on track] and go to Bondurant. If you feel it is too expensive, I understand..but what you are going to do IS expensive. A good SCCA Region is also great. I was lucky to learn decades ago at San Francisco SCCA. In those days many of the Bondurant instructors volunteered and taught SCCA for free. It was a first class education.

Remember, this is not some driving exercise. In genuine racing you are FIGHTING with other guys and gals who are doing to be doing everything they can to insure that you do NOT pass them. It can be the most fun you ever have in your life but it is not easy and very few of the people on track with you are going to be cooperative [even people in slower cars and lower classes will sometimes try to make you miserable].

BTW, the go kart idea is pretty good. A lot of the better formula racers do this as stay in shape training. I personally think it is a bit too specific to learn as opposed to learning how to use what you already have.

Mr. Newton already said it. Your experience so far is very different than being on track with a bunch of people who will be f i g h t i n g you as hard as they can. Don't be that little guppy in the ocean with the sharks.

and have fun

J

Stop doing DE & spend the money on your W2W aspirations. DE is a good thing to get you started in the realm of track driving. But too much of it is not a good thing. A few reasons why IMHO

1. It develops a habit of kindness. I don't mean that to say you should be cutthroat in racing. But you gotta be aggressive and being kind is somewhat counter to that. Example of unnecessary kindness you can see in racing is pointing by out-of-class cars that have caught you. They caught you, they're big boys, so let them find a way around. You just keep driving your own race and stay predictable. I was guilty of this myself in my first year of racing.

2. DE teaches you the "optimum" line (opinions vary) and that does nothing to develop your racecraft. You have to find a way around your competitor and a good competitor ain't gonna cut you hardly any slack. So you better figure out a different way around most corners and, along the lines of #1, sometimes you simply need to force your competitor into a mistake to benefit yourself. I said force, not wait, your competitor into a mistake. Waiting is wasting time and EVERY second counts in a race. It took me a while to believe that every little second counts in a race. Oh boy it does.

DE also teaches you almost nothing about backing up your corners (altering your line for a better approach), overslowing for a corner (moving your corner up to get by someone under braking) and changing your marks entirely when your speed has been altered.

Here's a good example I often use of an A-HA moment I had. Watch the blue POS in front of camera car (me) blow the corner.

ABCC South Thunder Sprint 070911 in NASA GTS Midwest 2011 Videos on Vimeo (start at 7:40 and watch the blown corner at 8:02)

But at the following corner I make up for it by changing my entry. You can't really tell that I do that if you don't know the track or haven't closely watched each lap. But believe me, I got on the brakes later than I normally would because I knew from the last corner screw up that I would not be carrying as much speed into the next turn and therefore did not need to brake where I normally would. The light bulb that came on when I did that hit me like a slap upside the head. I'm not kidding when I say that.

And as you can see the camera car thinks he had me on account of my screw up. When I changed my approach to that turn, he actually lost time on me. Eventually he caught me in another lap because in general i'm mediocre at best...... :p But the point i'm getting at is these are the skills you will develop as you begin actual racing.

To pass most effectively you're often going to need to execute your fair share of outside passes. That's a hard thing to get comfy with because the inside is nice & cozy. Outside passes are often butt-clenching because you don't have that "cushion" of extra track to work with like the inside & often times the track is a bit dirty out there. The advantage to the outside pass is when you execute it well, you pin your competitor down to the inside of the track, not allowing him to track out & he loses speed.

in the video I linked I make a couple attempts to go wide in the hairpin #2 after the front straight in an effort to make something happen early. yill see I suck back in to the inside line following the leader as to NOT get pinched out by the guy trying not to be behind me any longer.

regarding the inside pin.. I get that accomplished in the video with the black 46 car right at the start. it was by no means a measured pass, spec cars bunched up at the start of a race.. id like to think I kept him inside in four by design, but let's not kid ourselves.. that was a case of right place, right time opportunity that fell into this blind squirrel's lap... lap pun intended... the clip does show how much more speed I was able to carry into the run from 4 from the outside line allowing me to tuck him away behind me in the mid pack line before 5....;)


faster cars, same race different class stuff. I try to get them by as quickly as I can with a point by announcing where I want them to go by. not when I want them to go by, but just before where it becomes obvious to them this works best for us both. "respecting the race" of other's is often preached, but rarely practiced....

like I suggested, go racing and watch your video. lemons racing could develop some bad habits in regards to transitioning to racing without a foil cap n matching "outfits", but it it might be what you have with a limited budget...

Heck with the passing -- his footwork is phenomenal.....

3 or 4 downshifts without blinking..... Sweet.

Could watch and listen to that all day...

I've almost got one heal toe down -- just need to string them together.....

Mike

Get a Spec car of some sort, especially in a class where there are some experienced mentors willing to go over video with you. Then race a lot!

On of the biggest revelations I've had racing is that passing is often not about being faster than the other guy, it's about controlling the situation to make him slower than you through one spot in the track. This can be done using track position (i.e controlling the inside line, and delaying his turn in to a less than optimal place), using other cars/traffic, or "skinning" your competitor as you go by to maximize your draft. On the flip side, there is an art to not getting passed as well. All of these things are fluid, and situational, and take a lot of experience to recognize, and execute well. This is what Chris is getting at about the difference between racing and DE. DE is about being faster than the other guy. Racing is about strategically making your competitor slower than you. It's a very different thing.

A couple of other racing pearls.

Don't chase every open hole. Follow the faster driver in front of you in heavy traffic (i.e. opening laps) instead of the hole. The hole often vanishes, or parks you behind a slower competitor just ahead. I see a lot of green racers constantly running off line behind another car, when they are not in a position to make a pass, just chasing daylight. Don't compromise your line, unless it makes your competitor pay more.

If you know you are faster out of a certain corner, back off a little coming into that corner to allow you to build a run on corner exit without having to back off to avoid rear ending your competitor. Going slower than you can to set up a pass feels weird, but is critical. The timing and amount of room takes a long time to learn well, and a cagey competitor may over slow a bit to make the timing even more tricky, but that dynamic makes for very cool racing.

Thanks Eric.

You make several excellent observations.

I am beginning to realize the naivety of my original question and am enjoying the learning of a new skill ie racing.

Some other passes and passes attempted and not completed from last weeks racing at Road America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VVGyl7Cgw4

The red cayman (also a GT3 car) got past me the day before and I could never overcome the hp advantage. In this race I was not going to let it happen again (well as you see it did but I got it back).

We all drive 'momentum' cars. That's painfully obvious to me in this race with the cup cars slowing me in the high speed turns (or any turn for that matter) and then walking away on the straights (sort of what it's like when I race Miatas or other lower HP cars). It's not fun to have them motor past.