This post was written by Ross Bentley, one of my favorite coaches. Here goes, verbatim:
"Imagine you’re a car. Just for fun, let’s say you’re Cruz Ramirez, the anthropomorphic race car from the movie, Cars 3.
Now, imagine you — Cruz, the car — heading down a long straightaway, approaching a slow-ish corner, one that needs a fair amount of braking and downshifting.
You feel the energy of your engine powering you forward, your rear end slightly squatted down, with your driver pushing fully on your throttle pedal.
Then, suddenly, as your driver lifts off your throttle and quickly applies the brakes, it’s as if your eyeballs are being forced out of their sockets, and your nose is being thrust towards the track surface. With each downshift, your power source is revved, and then it tapers off as you slow, slow, slow.
The energy is flowing through all parts of you: from forward thrust to nose-down deceleration; from your engine powering you forward to one revving and assisting your brakes in slowing down; and the energy from the clamping force of your brake pads on the disks turning into heat energy.
You’re about the distance of the length of your body from that point where your driver turns your steering wheel into the corner and you attempt to switch directions from forward movement to a curved path through the upcoming turn, when...
Your driver releases pressure from your brake pedal. You raise your nose. You reduce your deceleration rate.
“What’s going on?! What am I to do?” you ask yourself. You feel aimless, like you no longer have a purpose in life. You feel lifeless, lethargic, like you have no energy to do anything.
And that’s when your driver suddenly asks you to change direction and go over there!
“Huh? You deprive me of my energy, and then ask me to do something? Sorry, but I can’t react that quickly. Okay, give me a sec, I’ll get around to it.”
And that’s when you begin to change direction — a second or two after your driver requests it. If only they hadn’t taken that feeling, that joy of having energy in your muscles, your bones, your chassis, you would have gladly and instantly changed direction for them. But it was that moment when they didn’t ask anything of you — or nearly anything of you — just prior to turning your steering wheel that almost lulled you to sleep.
“See, I love being engaged with my driver, being asked to accelerate, brake and turn. But I hate the feeling of near-nothing in between.
“I have one request of you, dear driver: Put and keep energy in me, by smoothly transitioning from one control input to another — even a bit of overlap is okay sometimes — so there’s energy in me. Don’t waste my time — or your time — by having me do nearly nothing.
“The thing I hate most is when you arrive at a corner and release my brakes a fraction of a second too soon so that I feel as if you don’t know what you want me to do. Like you don’t know what you want to do! It’s very difficult for me to help you if you’re expecting me to do something after you’ve practically told me you don’t want anything from me.
“Begin braking late enough so you arrive at the turn-in point with a little more brake pressure on so I feel as if I have some energy in me — so I’m front-loaded — when you ask me to change direction. Then, I’ll be more than happy to respond to your requests.
“Energize me, please.”
Make sure your car has energy in it when you turn in.
Okay, welcome back to the real world (or was that the real world?).
Let’s say that you realize that you’ve over-slowed for a specific corner, so on the next lap you decide to ease off the brakes a bit earlier, so you roll a bit more speed into the turn. You begin braking where you have in the past, but as you get to and around the turn-in point, you take your foot off the brake pedal a little quicker than you have on the previous laps (shown in the blue data trace illustration below). Yes, you’re now carrying more speed into the corner, so your minimum speed is higher, but what’s the challenge you’re likely facing? Yes, getting the car to turn, or rotate, enough so that you can begin applying the throttle as early as you have in the past. Because you’ve unloaded the front tires, your car doesn’t turn as much, it delays when you begin to accelerate, and you’re actually slower through that section of track.
Conclusion: “That didn’t work. My car won’t allow me to carry more entry speed.”
It wasn’t the increase in speed that caused you to be slower through this section of track, though. It was the lack of “energy” in the car when you turned in to the corner. By easing off the brakes quicker/sooner, the front tires were unloaded (less “energy” in them), and your car didn’t change direction the way you wanted. It’s human nature to think that you should go back to what you did in the past because it worked — kinda."
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