Quote:
Originally Posted by snk
Will be a very interesting day with the M3 and a 6MT.
I'll get sore from pointing people by
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haha don't worry about it. When I started out in the MR2, it was also my first time taking a car onto the track with a manual transmission. Start out by doing a majority of your laps in 3rd gear (aside from the main straight, where you can get it up to 4th gear). Then once you're more comfortable with downshifting, you can downshift to 2nd for turn 11 if you wish, and upshift to 4th for certain other areas on the track such as just before turn 5, etc.
All of this is for Laguna of course. One thing to note is that heel-toe at the track is much easier than heel-toe say on the street, since you actually do have to brake harder, and your foot has already traveled significantly more than the street situation. From there, you just have to blip the throttle accordingly. A little trick to help keep the car smooth/balanced is to continue to keep your toes on the brake pedal, even after blipping and engaging the lower gear. That will allow you to smooth out any slight imperfections in case you didn't necessarily throttle-blip perfectly. Sometimes the extra braking time will also allow you to transition or pace yourself better entering the corner (i.e. trail braking). And as you know, anytime you apply the brakes and turn the steering wheel past a certain degree (dependent on speed), the car's rear tends to kick out more. I use this sometimes to purposely point my car in the right direction. Say at turn 2 (Andretti hairpin), if the car isn't turning as much as I want it to due to understeer, I'll apply the above technique and help to reduce the understeer. Then if even that's not enough, you can also stab the throttle a bit to kick out the rear too. Since these cars have enough power, that can also point you in the right direction
I typically adjust using throttle mostly though, as opposed to the brake, because it's more predictable to get out of situations using thrust as opposed to trying to counteract the natural forward-motion of the car while it's already at speed. So even though the brakes can help you turn, I suggest you turn the car using throttle first, and only use the brakes to turn in more emergency-type situations. And of course with everything track related, you must be quick with counter-steering in case car does rotate faster than you want, etc.