How To Drive: With downforce and slicks

You’ll feel a slick tyre ‘coming in’ via the steering wheel and through your backside, and when it reaches that magical state of being ‘up’ you’ll also become aware of a heightened precision through all the car’s controls. It’s a delicious feeling, one you’ll remember vividly the first time you experience it, and you’ll sense it with every movement of the steering wheel, and every micron of extra pressure you exert upon the brake pedal. The car will simply feel more alive beneath you, and just grippier – faster – everywhere.

As a result, your mind will naturally start to process the information it receives back from the tyres at a faster, more intense level, just to keep up. But it’ll do this organically, almost without you being aware of it happening. That’s when you’ll climb out of a car having gone two or maybe three seconds quicker without feeling like you’ve pushed all that hard, and it will all be down to those slick tyres working properly.

Can you slide a car on slicks? Absolutely, but if you keep doing so for corner after corner, you’ll overheat and ruin them pretty quickly. The best area in which to operate is just beneath the point at which they begin to slide. Ideally you want to drive a car on slicks as if it’s on rails. That’s how you’ll get the most life out of them, for the most number of laps.

And although you’ll only ever find one true sweet spot out of a brand new set of slicks – usually the first time you bring them in, although sometimes a pre-heat cycle can work best, again depending on the compound – this doesn’t mean you can’t reuse them. You might not attain that unique moment of euphoria more than once, but treat a set of slicks well and they’ll do you just fine for meeting after meeting.

So then, downforce: what does it feel like, how do you get the most out of a car that has it, and what happens when it goes west?

Downforce is weird because to truly unlock its box of chocolates you need to allay most of your natural fears, reprocess your mind and trick it into believing the science will work: that the grip will be there if you push hard enough to find it; that you won’t just turn in and fall off because you’re going miles too fast.

To begin with, the most likely reason you’ll fall off in a car with downforce is if you’re not going fast enough in it – because with serious downforce (say in a car capable of generating a tonne of the stuff at 100mph) you need to drive faster to make it work. And if you don’t, you won’t generate sufficient speed across the aero surfaces to create the downforce in the first place – or get the required heat into the tyres – at which point you’ll start to slide around all over the place and ignominy looms. Push harder, however, and as if by magic the downforce builds, grip levels increase dramatically, and you can feel it all start to make sense in the most beautiful of ways beneath your backside, through your hands, and most of all inside your noggin. The harder you drive, the easier it gets – that is magic of downforce, the thing most discovering it for the first time struggle to accept. But it’s true. To a point.

When the penny drops, it’s a fantastic sensation. And realisation. The first time you go through what you thought was a 100mph corner at 120mph in a car with major downforce, something previously dormant between your ears awakens, and from that moment onwards the belief crystallises. It’s a bit like being told to shut your eyes and jump into the abyss, someone having promised they’ll catch you, no matter what. So you jump, and they catch you, at which point your trust in them becomes total.

The feedback you get from behind the wheel of a high downforce car isn’t that different from a car without downforce to be honest; you can still sense the grip being generated beneath your hands and backside, at the wheel rim and via the tyres, even when that grip starts to fade if and when a downforce car begins to slide. The difference is, it all happens at a much higher level, at far higher speeds, with way smaller movements on the wheel and throttle being required to adjust the car’s trajectory when it’s loaded in a high-speed corner. You can feel your whole body become heavier (as effectively it is under sustained g-force) as you’re pushed right down into the seat at high speeds. The steering also becomes meatier in weight, and sharper in its response.

Braking, however, is a completely different ballgame. From high speeds you simply hit the pedal (usually with your left foot if it’s a single-seater) absolutely as hard as you can – and I really do mean with as much physical force as you can summon – at which point the car will feel like it’s gone into reverse hyperspace. The grip that enables you to take corners at warp speed works the same in all dimensions, not just laterally, and under brakes it probably works best of all. To a point where it’s always the braking power of a high-downforce car that fries your brain the most.

And maybe the trickiest bit about braking in a high-downforce car comes not from high speeds, when you simply mash the pedal, but instead as your speed drops: because here you need to remember that downforce does not merely increase with speed, but does so at the square of speed, and the same happens in reverse, your little aero helper departing the scene with the same astonishing rapidity at which it arrived. As this happens, you need to reduce the pressure you apply to the brake pedal, otherwise you’ll lock the front tyres, flat spot your slicks and look like the rank amateur you probably are.

Managing downforce is one of the hardest skills to master because it also changes the way you need to think about cornering lines. Indeed in a high-downforce car you can pretty much forget the lines chalked up on the board in the briefing room.

Instead, and in lower speed corners especially, the only thing to focus on is getting the nose into the apex as fast as you can. To do this you maybe need to sacrifice some ground speed at the apex itself, because the key is to get the car pointing as straight as possible, as soon as possible, for you to be able to deploy full bananas as early as possible without lighting up the driven wheels on the way out of the corner. It’s known as driving on the V – whereby you brake in as straight a line as you can, rotate the car sharply on the brakes at the pointy bit of the V, then exit in as straight a line as you can to maximise traction at the exit. In three. Deliberate. Phases.

It’s not as pretty as a conventional late apex in, gradual arc out technique, but in a high-downforce car – in which you want to spend as little time as possible outside the aero window – it’s really the only technique in town. And the most skill is required at the point where you turn into the corner; getting the nose where it needs to be on the way into the corner without overstressing the rear tyres at any point. It’s one of the defining elements of driving high-downforce cars, and it’s a skill that tends to separate the cans from the cannots.

As is the ‘dead zone’ that exists in medium- and low-speed corners – again where aerodynamic grip begins to fade and mechanical grip becomes more dominant. Perhaps even more so than under brakes, the ability to carry speed through this dead zone, thereby making the most of what aero may lie there, is what distinguishes the true greats perhaps more than any other skill in contemporary top-flight motorsport, because it’s the area in which touch and feel take over from pure blind faith in the science.

Maybe that’s being a little too simplistic, but it’s still a key factor because there are so many more variables at play within the dead zone: there are simply more things that can be got wrong when you can’t rely fully on aerodynamic grip, and mostly it’s to do with knackering the tyres when downforce is in short supply. The greats of modern F1 such as Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso are quite brilliant in this respect. The guys at the other end of the grid less so, simple as that.

But what happens when all this glorious downforce which is making it so easy to drive so stupendously fast, suddenly disappears? Are you unleashed into the shrubs never to be employed again, or can it actually be caught?

For starters, the good news is that downforce doesn’t suddenly ‘go’ anywhere. Instead it changes, usually because a car’s trajectory has shifted due to a specific event (because of a slide or taking too much kerb). Whatever the cause, the car becomes less stable momentarily, at which point you do need to be extremely fast-but-gentle with your inputs to catch it. In terms of the physics, however, you do pretty much the same things you do to catch a conventional car: counter steer if the tail goes light or back away from the accelerator if the nose runs wide. Easy-peasy in theory. The difference is, you need to execute these actions much faster and be many times more precise with your inputs if you’re to stand a chance of catching a car that’s lost downforce at very high speeds. But the point is you can catch them if you’re sharp enough, as Verstappen & Co frequently demonstrate.

Never more so than in the wet, which is where high downforce cars become most interesting of all because here the dead zone gets bigger and the potential for mistakes grows exponentially. The distance between aerodynamic and mechanical grip gets far wider in the wet and if you slip out of the aero sweet spot, you can look very silly indeed, slip sliding away at pathetic speeds while the folks generating enough speed to maintain the downforce scream off into the distance.

Touch and feel are of course everything in the wet in any car, but especially in those with big downforce – and the depth of mind reprogramming required needs to reach another level too. Sometimes you just need to commit and hang on tight, maybe while holding your breath. As a result the gap between the greats and the merely good becomes easier to spot. Remember Ayrton Senna in the wet at Donington, Monaco and Estoril and you’ll see what I mean. Occasionally it’s so wide you can drive a bus through it, sideways, and inevitably the drivers who do it best tend to look entirely chilled in the moment while the ones who struggle look plain terrified.

I’ve witnessed it first hand on several occasions towards the lower ends of professional motorsport and it’s a spooky thing to behold, how seemingly unfazed by it all the true masters are. And the naughtier the conditions, the faster they tend to go compared with the rest of us. T’was ever thus in motorsport. At least since downforce started to play a significant part in it.

Next time; how to get the best out of FWD, RWD & 4WD cars.