I’m no racecar driver, but I used to assume that the straighter you can go around a racetrack, the faster your time will be. Like with many things, however, I was wrong. It’s not so much about plowing through corners as it is carrying speed from one to the next, right at the edge of grip as your tires chirp and sing along. There’s a window where your tires are absolutely maxed out in terms of traction, just before they let loose. All of this relates to slip angle, an incredibly important concept to understand if you’re serious about driving fast. It’s also what our latest YouTube video is about.
To be clear, I’m not in the video. My boss Kyle is. And, also to be clear, he’s not the driving expert. Nik Romano is. That fella is fast, no matter what car he’s driving, and he’s the guy to listen to if you’re trying to beat the neighborhood Corvette owner around the track in your GR 86.
Simply defined, slip angle is the difference between the direction your tire is pointing and the direction it’s traveling. Kyle and Nik went to Apple Valley Speedway for the track-driving portion of this explainer to show it in practice. Nik can be seen hucking the Scion FR-S demo vehicle in and out of corners, not quite straight but not quite drifting, either. What he’s doing is maximizing the contact patch as the tire deforms and holding it at that limit before traction is lost. It’s pretty neat.
What’s even neater is how they demonstrated this by driving a Porsche 718 Spyder RS onto a glass floor. The kind folks at Porsche Santa Clarita and Galpin Automotive gave us the all-clear to film the experiment from their Wonderground, a basement-level museum with a partial glass ceiling. By looking up at the car’s tires from below, our Very Professional Explainers showed how the contact patch changes with direction underneath the car. Unless I’m just missing something, there’s really no other way to visualize this in the physical world.
There’s a lot more to it than what I just explained, including quite a bit of math. (Did you know some racing slicks can achieve 7 or 8 degrees of optimal slip angle, while rally tires max out above 30 degrees? Now you do.) Watch the video at the top of this blog if you want the full scoop. It’s well worth the watch.
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From running point on new car launch coverage to editing long-form features and reviews, Caleb does some of everything at The Drive. And he really, really loves trucks.
