PULLING UP THE BIG BOY TROUSERS

If you tuned in last month, you might recall I’d started getting the hang of going around corners and stopping without a parachute in my little four-cylinder Toyota circuit car, and figured I was about ready to make the move to the end goal. Tip number one if you’re thinking about going circuit racing: definitely start in something small and slow, and in a class where you’re in a big field of identical cars — it will massively accelerate the process of learning your basic race-craft.

Anyway, back to my next step. I could race a lightweight, front-drive, 150-horsepower road car on road tyres, so why couldn’t I race a heavyweight, rear-drive, 600-horsepower race car on slicks? Let me count the ways …

Going from the Toyota to the Commodore really is almost like starting again. There’s the advantage of knowing the tracks I raced on in the Toyota — or, at least, thinking I know the tracks — but nothing else is the same. The obvious difference is going from 150 horsepower to 600 — four times the power — but to be honest, that’s the easiest part. Drag racing and a lifetime of fast road cars made that part of the transition straightforward enough.

Making the transition from front-drive to reardrive, however, is a world of learning. I eventually understood — although actually doing it never really became easy or instinctive — that what you need to do with a front-drive car that’s all kinds of ugly sideways at high speed is pretty much the opposite of what you need to do in a rear-drive car. You need to do exactly the opposite of what every instinct, born from a misspent youth in rear-drive cars, is trying to tell you. Your brain is screaming “No! Lift! Lift you idiot!” but you remember what you’ve been told so many times, you grit your teeth, and you keep the throttle nailed to the floor — expecting the worst but hoping for the best. After two or three seasons in the Toyota, I learnt that no matter how wild the out-of-control slide was — because you misjudged your entry speed into a fast corner — you just keep the throttle pinned. Pinned as hard as you can pin it. I’m sure it’s not true but it seemed to me that it didn’t matter how fast I was going and how acutely sideways the car was, if I stayed hard on the gas it always ended well. I sure developed a huge respect for the handling capabilities of those amazing little cars. So now, after finally getting my head around the task of how to get myself out of trouble in a front-drive car, I have to apologize to my instincts and ask them to please come back and keep me safe now that I’m back in my comfort zone in a rear-drive car. So, tip number two if you want to go racing, I guess, would have to be: start out in the configuration of car you ultimately aspire to race. If you want to race a Mustang or a Camaro one day, learn to race in a small rear-drive car, like a Nissan Sylvia or an E30 BMW.

Then there’s the tyres. Going from slippery-slideysquealey road tyres that possess seemingly endless forgiveness, and give you all kinds of warnings that you’re nearing the limit of adhesion, to snapyou’re-gone slicks is a whole new challenge. I’ve learnt that slicks are fine, fine, wow these things grip, still fine, and then … suddenly, you’re gone in an instant. When you gas up a car on slicks out of a corner a fraction early and they lose grip, the back steps out so much more quickly than a car on road tyres. And of course, because slicks are so much more grippy, you’re going so much faster when they do let go. More disconcerting, however, is that when you instinctively correct the initial slide, the back of the car snaps to out-of-control in the opposite direction with what seems like even more immediacy than the first slide. That stuff really gets your attention, especially in a high-speed corner. This is the beginning of a whole new learning curve that I suspect won’t be quickly or easily mastered. Even braking falls in the ‘start again’ category. In the Toyota, with the tight restrictions on what you can — or mostly can’t — modify in the class I raced in, I spent four seasons learning to brake ever so gently, modulating the pedal pressure in the very precise and difficult process of applying enough pedal effort to the factory-boosted braking system in order to achieve the best possible braking efficiency, but not so much that I cause yet another flat-spotted tyre as a result of brake lock-up. Not enough pedal pressure, you get out-braked. Too much pedal pressure, you’ve locked a tyre, missed your braking point, you’re off on the grass, and the four cars you’ve just spent five laps picking off have just gotten past you again.

After four seasons of practising the art of braking efficiently, and methodically working my way through more than a dozen makes and compounds of racing brake pads, I eventually found a pad that seemed to work for me, enabling me to achieve maximum braking efficiency, with minimal lock-up, and which provided reasonable durability — there were a couple of brands of front brake pads which I couldn’t get to last through one day’s racing. So, there was yet another contrast on day one of racing my Commodore. I complained to the other guys that the brakes in the Commodore were shit, to be told, “No they’re not — you’ve got a proper race pedal box now, with no booster, and you have to absolutely stand on the pedal if you want them to work well”. And without the booster, so I’m told, I’m unlikely to lock the tyres, at least while the tyres are evenly loaded. So, like I said, it’s back to the start of the learning curve all over again, even with something one would consider to be relatively simple, like braking. Pulling a parachute lever was so easy!

Like so many things that people do, when looking at it from the outside it all looks relatively achievable — until you actually give it a go. The more circuit racing I do, the more I’m in awe of those who do it well. Over the last few years I’ve developed a huge amount of respect for anyone who is out there doing it — even those at the back of the pack — because until you’ve had a decent crack at circuit racing, you just can’t get an appreciation for the level of mental and physical effort and skill that’s required to hustle a race car around a racetrack, even towards the back of the pack.

In season one I thought “yeah, I can do this”. In season two I thought “actually, I’m really shit at this”. After two more seasons of working really hard at getting my head around the many and varied complexities of driving a car around a racetrack as quickly as it’s capable of, I thought “well, maybe I can do this OK one day, if I live long enough”. Now, after race meeting number one with my big boy trousers on, I’ve transported myself back in time, squarely to where I was in season two. So far, all I know about circuit racing a V8 muscle car is how much I don’t know!