Stuttgart951

For the life of me, I cannot remember the speaker, but my favorite is this:

"Oversteer is when your passenger is scared. Understeer is when you are scared."


Sticky; You have already mentioned throttle modulation but Juha is accurate in his assessment on multiple levels. I am unfamiliar with the public roads in NZ but, here in the States, pushing the car to its limits would be silly. The only place you can truly approach them is on a track - to say nothing of the safety factor.

Even a single day spent getting a feel for how to rotate the car with the throttle and brake will provide you with far more seat-of-the-pants data than a year's worth of "enthusiastic" Sunday drives.

To that end, you may actually find excessive understeer to be a welcome safety net while you experiment with the weight transfer, as the car's propensity to rapidly swap ends; at least in comparison to a Quattro, need not be explained.

You're going to have a lot of fun.

Bill Verburg

forgot to add that the stiffer bushes all around also go a long way to eliminating u/s

Bill Verburg

You can juggle tire pressure too and they certainly do affect o/u, I run my track tires 34-36 Hot and when I say Hot I mean Hot, you'd be very hard pressed to get that king of heat into them in most places, the tread oozes around stones not over them

Resident Sicko

OP: I felt the same way coming from a Comptech prepared Supercharged S2000...but then I learned to press the right foot and most of the time the understeer goes away and in it's place a stupid grin appears on my face.

MJBird993

I'll jump in here and suggest that since the Audis tend to understeer quite badly, the 993 is actually an improvement over those.

Another thought is that the previous owner might have modified the suspension a bit to dial-out some of the factory understeer.

Driving schools are always a good idea!

David in Chicago

Just one guy's recommendation:

Several years ago, multi-time TransAm champion Paul Gentilozzi wrote an article for Autoweek entitled, "Ready For The Rocking Chair?" I regard this article as the stone-tablet-from-above regarding driving 911s fast and I recommend you find it.

The points made in this thread about car setup are all important - the change to M030, including M030 anti-roll bars, transformed my car and killed its understeer - but it all starts with the driver and this article, at least for me, really opened up my eyes.

Regards to all.

bruce7

See post #63 here: https://rennlist.com/forums/racing-a...guy-out-5.html

-bruce

doberdog

Braking is the most important thing with a 911. You need to load up the brakes to get the weight onto the front wheels. If you lift the brakes too early, then the weight comes off the front wheels and you understeer. You need to learn how to brake and lift gradually as you turn (trail braking) then roll onto the throttle. Once you learn this, understeer is less of a problem. Without putting weight on the front wheels, you will feel understeer.

stickypatch

Trail braking is what I do when I turn-in when driving any car hard - and it's probably the result of never having had instruction on a track. Because as I understand it now, the classic accepted driving style is to brake to the turn-in point, come off the brakes, turn in and coast to the apex, then at the apex get on the throttle for the exit.

I've always braked, then started to turn in while still coming off the brakes and while the weight is loaded forward.

XavierLaFlamme

Thanks for this. I am going to find it.
--Michael

NC TRACKRAT

Not all turns are approached in the same manner. Different types of turns require different inputs. As doberdog alludes, transition from brake to accelerator should be as smooth and seamless as possible to make maximum utilization of the grip on the front tires without upsetting the car while the weight transfers to the rear as you unwind. Depending on the layout of the turn (and what follows), you may be accelerating before, at or after the apex, hence: Early Apex, Apex, Late Apex turns. When you're doing everything right but the car just doesn't want to rotate like you want it to, that's understeer. When it rotates too much, that's oversteer.