The Hyperlogos

When a driver makes a turn in a race, the ideal situation is that they should do their final deceleration into the turn, and do their acceleration out of the turn. There are two primary problems with this ideal. The first is that letting up on the throttle causes the front end to rise, and pressing on the gas causes it to rise some more - causing a double-transition that results in two somewhat unpredictable decreases in the amount of front-end traction. The other is that this often necessitates a downshift, which itself can cause issues with loss of traction.

Braking into and accelerating out of a turn permits the maximum speed by making the best possible use of traction. When you use (for example) 50% of a tire's total available traction for deceleration, you can only use up to 50% of its available traction for steering. Exceeding this number results in a skid (loss of traction.) Thus, we decelerate into a turn, make the sharpest part of the turn as we decrease acceleration, and then accelerate harder and harder as we leave the turn and straighten out the wheel. But if we don't do anything tricky, the car lurches at that point as we let up on the brake and press on the gas. Doing this as slowly as possible isn't necessarily the fastest way through the corner.

The solution to this is to start accelerating before you stop braking. If we don't have to shift, we can do this by driving with two feet, our left on the brake and our right on the throttle. As we let up with our left foot near the apex of the turn, we begin to press down with our left in order to accelerate through the turn. This results in the smoothest possible transfer from braking to acceleration.

Unfortunately, that's not all we have to do. We typically will also have to disengage the clutch and shift. Since the clutch is actuated by the farthest left pedal on your average car, we're going to need our left foot for that. Since we don't have three feet, unless we get creative we won't be able to brake and accelerate at the same time.

As a result, we either rotate our foot around so that we can press the gas with our toe and the brake with our heel, or we tilt our foot sideways so that we can hit the brake with the left edge of the foot, and the throttle with the right. Whether or not you can use this latter technique depends on the layout and travel of the pedals. Whether or not you can use either technique depends largely on how cramped your car is. The way I'm stuffed into any car I've ever driven I have room to do neither. (I'm 6'7" or 2 meters tall and have feet about 33cm long - a US size 16.)

Another technique for achieving this goal is through Rev Matching. Instead of clutching, the driver stops accelerating by letting up on the throttle and shifts into neutral. He then "blips" the throttle (taps it quickly) in order to raise the RPMs - this is most effective on vehicles with lightened flywheels but works on any car - only the length of the blip changes. At the proper RPM, the shift lever is pressed into gear. Provided the gear you are shifting into has a synchromesh, this will typically let you shift without clutching. However, it is not considered to be as reliable as heel-toe shifting, which is a little more forgiving.