Complete newbie questions
Discussion
Preparing to be laughed out of here but I have a couple of questions which are probably below novice level.
How do you know what gear to be in? I assumed it’s the gear offering the most power and flexibility. However, on videos, I often see people downshift before overtaking. This would suggest they were “cruising” (if I may call it that) in a high gear before executing the overtake. Presumably this isn’t done to conserve fuel…is it to prevent heat build-up or some other such reason?
How does one work out what the racing line is? As I understand; if you were walking it would simply be the shortest route around the track, but in a car it is sometimes worth lengthening this route by taking a corner “wider” in order to get the power down or for some other reason. How does one work out when this should be done? Should a decent driver know the racing line on their first lap of a new-to-them track or is it something learnt over many laps?
Finally, any track day suggestions for a complete novice. I have done a few, with instructors, but they just told me I was driving well, I assume afraid to offend customers by telling them to improve. I am not particularly interested in what I would be driving, as learning to drive. I have read decent things about the official Porsche track days at Silverstone, also come across CAT driver training, pricey but looks good. Any other suggestions?
Thanks!
How do you know what gear to be in? I assumed it’s the gear offering the most power and flexibility. However, on videos, I often see people downshift before overtaking. This would suggest they were “cruising” (if I may call it that) in a high gear before executing the overtake. Presumably this isn’t done to conserve fuel…is it to prevent heat build-up or some other such reason?
How does one work out what the racing line is? As I understand; if you were walking it would simply be the shortest route around the track, but in a car it is sometimes worth lengthening this route by taking a corner “wider” in order to get the power down or for some other reason. How does one work out when this should be done? Should a decent driver know the racing line on their first lap of a new-to-them track or is it something learnt over many laps?
Finally, any track day suggestions for a complete novice. I have done a few, with instructors, but they just told me I was driving well, I assume afraid to offend customers by telling them to improve. I am not particularly interested in what I would be driving, as learning to drive. I have read decent things about the official Porsche track days at Silverstone, also come across CAT driver training, pricey but looks good. Any other suggestions?
Thanks!
Thanks, all, for the replies. I’ll give the material suggested a good look & get back into YouTube.
Much appreciated.
E-bmw - after reading the forum more I believe I confused “track day” and “experience day”… I guess what I did were more experience-type events that happened to be on a track. The best ones were a classic day as despite them being classics the instructors wanted you to push the cars. Also the first level of the Lotus license at Hethel was good.
That said it seems for the price of one of the events I have been doing I can book a “proper” track day + instructor time so I might look into doing that.
Much appreciated.
E-bmw - after reading the forum more I believe I confused “track day” and “experience day”… I guess what I did were more experience-type events that happened to be on a track. The best ones were a classic day as despite them being classics the instructors wanted you to push the cars. Also the first level of the Lotus license at Hethel was good.
That said it seems for the price of one of the events I have been doing I can book a “proper” track day + instructor time so I might look into doing that.
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