How To Drive: Left-foot braking

Why?

In a word, balance. Left-foot braking is really just a tool to allow you to place a car more precisely in any given corner, specifically the nose of the car. The more accurately you can place the nose at the very beginning of a corner, the sooner – and harder – you can get on the power to drive through that corner towards its exit. Get the nose where you want it to be on the way into a corner and the exit will almost take care of itself. As will the apex if you can get the car pointing in the right direction early enough.

And right there is basically what left-foot braking is all about: setting a car up well before a corner’s apex so you can accelerate cleanly through it – without over-stressing the tyres on the way in, during, or on the way out of said corner. Simple as that. Sort of.

Contrary to common belief, left-foot braking is not a tool to allow you to send cars into wild armfuls of oversteer through corners – although there’s one specific technique used in rallying (the Scandinavian Flick) that enables you to do precisely this. We’ll come back to this in a bit, but for road driving there’s a far more relevant use of left-foot braking, one that helps you improve a car’s traction from apex to exit, and it works a treat on slippery surfaces, or if traction is in any way an issue.

By trimming the brakes at the exit of a corner while keeping the accelerator open, you can keep the torque flow clean and manage the traction yourself – be that in a front-, rear- or even four-wheel drive car. This is essentially what torque vectoring is all about, except you do it manually by tickling the brakes yourself from apex to exit. Be warned though – if your car’s ECU won’t allow the brake and accelerator to be used at the same time without cutting power, you won’t be able to use this technique; and unfortunately not all do.

I discovered this the hard way when I was asked to give feedback on an early prototype of the Hyundai i30 N. Sitting next to me at the time was a chap called Albert Biermann, boss of the then-unlaunched Hyundai N-Division, and when we came to a corner I knew well, at a test track I knew backwards, I kept the throttle open, brushed the brakes of the development i30 N at the apex and its throttle died, violently, making me look very silly indeed.

So I explained what had happened and asked Biermann if he could somehow tweak this on the production cars – to enable the brakes and accelerator to be used at the same time to maximise traction without engaging the traction control. It’s a technique he himself was well familiar with having spent years running various competition departments at BMW. He looked at me and said: ‘damn, we haven’t thought of that. But now you mention it, of course we can, and of course we will – because it makes perfect sense.’

Hence the reason there’s a left-foot braking mode in the production i30 N and a warning message that appears in the dash – if you can work out how to select it (press the N button for two seconds, then press and hold the ESC button for a further four seconds and – ding – up the message pops, warning you that brake assistance is no longer available, but also meaning that left-foot braking is now possible).

On road or track this technique works particularly well in the wet – because it allows your left foot to become the traction control system without interference from the ECU if the driven wheels start to spin. Be warned though: to begin with it will feel pretty unnatural using your left foot to brush the brakes. But as with all skills, the more miles you put in…

Where and when?

Left-foot braking works on road and track, or on dirt and snow. To perform it you’ll need to swallow hard and disengage all the electronic safety systems on your car. If you can’t bring yourself to do this (or you can’t work out how) then left-foot braking probably isn’t for you.

But once you’ve done this – and so long as your car’s ECU will allow you to brake and use the throttle simultaneously – you can use the brakes with your left foot to maximise a car’s balance and speed at pretty much any point, in any corner, and on any surface. And if you get good at it – and there’s enough space in which to do so – you can use it well before some corners arrive, too.

How?  

Left-foot braking is not an easy technique to master, be under no illusion about that. But if you can do so you’ll be a quicker, safer driver on the road, and on a track you’ll burn through less rubber (and less car, full stop) because it allows you to spread cornering loads more evenly across all four tyres. Done right, left-foot braking keeps a car loaded all the way through a corner, which keeps it better balanced, period.

How so? Think about how much more comfortable a car feels if you take a corner flat out, without having to brake or lift for it. Then think about how much less stable it becomes if you have to lift, brake, then get back on the power to accelerate through. By tickling the brakes but keeping the accelerator open on the way into and through corners you can drive through them without ever removing the load from the chassis. Thus, that car will always stay better balanced into and out of a bend, which will ultimately make it, and you, quicker and safer through any corner – if you do it right.

That, of course, is the tricky bit. To begin with it will feel weirdly unnatural using the brakes with your left foot, but you’d be surprised how quickly your touch will come. Try just brushing the brakes gently on a straight and quiet piece of road to begin with – mainly to get the feel of the brake pedal through your left foot.

Once you’ve got comfortable with this, do the same thing but keep the accelerator open while tickling the brakes, noting how little pressure you need to apply to the brake pedal to start slowing the car down: the braking power of any car will always outweigh its ability to accelerate. As you perfect this, also notice how the car feels ‘tied down’ as it accelerates.

So then try all this again but through a corner. To begin with, just brush the brakes on the way out of the corner while keeping the accelerator either close to or fully wide open. Feel how you can trim the car’s energy via its brakes while still accelerating cleanly through the corner. Get this relatively simple discipline right and you will already be well on your way to working out how and why to left-foot brake.

Next, find a quiet but faster, more open corner, then drive through it conventionally, i.e. drive towards it, brake for it, allow the car to settle, then accelerate through it. Then go through the same corner but brake with your left foot, and brake more gently for it and don’t come off the brakes before you accelerate. Instead, stay on the brakes (gently) but accelerate sooner through the corner and get on the power harder all the way through it.

If you get this bit right, you should feel how much better balanced the car feels at the apex and through to the exit. And if you run a touch wide, trim your line with the brakes but try not to come out of the accelerator, not completely, not unless you feel like you’re about to overcook your entry speed in a big way, in which case slow down and build your entry speed back up again, slowly.

As for the Scandinavian Flick, this one’s a bit more senior to exact, and a lot more difficult to master. Ideally you need to be on dirt or snow to execute it properly. It’s for the pros only, to be honest, but if you’re interested… You do it by braking hard while a car is pointing ever-so-slightly in the opposite direction towards whatever corner you’re flying towards. You then need to hold the car in a controlled four-wheel opposite lock slide so it’s pointing away from the corner momentarily. At the crucial moment, you come off the brakes to ‘release’ the slide, which rotates the car sharply on its axis (hence the term ‘flick’) and the nose ends up nailed to the apex (in theory) without you having to go anywhere near the handbrake, and without you losing as much speed as you would have done by using the handbrake.

Sustaining maximum momentum through all corners, fast and slow, is what this technique is about, and best of luck getting it right on the North Circular. I’m joking. Leave this one to the kings of Kielder Forest and don’t even think about trying it on the public road, although to be fair the fundamental principles – the physics – of the Scandinavian Flick remain exactly the same as all other left-foot braking techniques. It’s still ultimately about placing the nose where it needs to be, but in this instance the process happens to begin 25-100 yards before the corner’s apex.

As with all driving, confidence is a key ingredient to left-foot braking, and confidence only comes with patience and a decent understanding of what’s going on beneath your hands, feet and backside. Don’t get carried away if you start to get it right, or become too angry if you do not. And never try to run before you can walk, otherwise it will, I guarantee, end in tears.

In the end, left-foot braking is about touch and feel, working out where the limits of grip lie then playing with those limits gradually. As with all new techniques, practice makes perfect. On the road, left-foot braking is more about being neat and tidy than it is about pure speed. It’s about being safe and quick, rather than lairy and quick. It’s a good trick to have up your sleeve on a slippery road, but not an essential one.

But on a track it can be a serious weapon to have in your armoury, and on dirt you’ll go nowhere without it. I’ll leave you to work out which words, or word, Pentti Airikkala used to describe rally drivers who couldn’t do it.

Next time: how to steer properly – and how to heel-and-toe.