The Overslowing Signature: How to Spot It in Your Data

You can probably relate to that feeling: you're not carrying enough speed into the corner, and where the RPMs are very low, and you feel like your exit momentum is just really bad, and you feel like everybody's dropping you.

So that's the typical sign of slowing too much the car down in a corner, starting from the entry and then continuing in the mid-corner.

Why "slow in, fast out" costs you time

So typically there's a lot of bad advice I hear from people in the in the karting community, both from coaches, mechanic, etc, and it's basically referring to the slow-in-fast-out technique. But this is not really what we're talking about today, I mean, this is just an idea of what we're going to talk today, basically overslowing the corners on the entries to the mid-corner.

So the reality is that with the slow-in-fast-out technique, they believe that you're going to gain more time on the exit than what you lose on the entry by slowing the car down more. But it's not really the case, and I'm really, really a big enemy of this slow-in-fast-out technique, because again, I feel it's opposite. If you go in slow into the corner, and let's say you lose two tenths on the entry, then you won't be able to recover everything you've lost on the entry, so on the exit you may gain back 1.5 tenths, but that still puts you at a net loss of five hundredths, okay, of half a tenth.

So the goal is really to not drive like that, but in the other way. And to be honest, what do you think, that F1 drivers like Schumacher, Verstappen, Senna, Hamilton, they developed their skills by going for a slow-in-fast-out technique? It's not possible, I guarantee you that they didn't become those legendary drivers by driving like that. So the focus shouldn't be, oh, I should go slow into the corner, no, it should going fast into the corner, right? And so this overslowing technique, it's just not going to help you out becoming a world-class driver. It may get you to get decent results in club races or at the national level. But believe me, it will be really hard for you to achieve anything substantial in the world stage. So you want to drive the opposite. You shouldn't drive in a slow way on the entries.

Now you're like, oh, Alessio, but what do you even mean in a slow way? I mean, that's very generic, that's very random.

What "fast enough" actually feels like

Of course, true, I agree with you, I mean, it's not specific. But you should feel like you're going so fast on the entrance of the corners that you, for example, going through a heavy braking zone, you need to feel like you have to hold the brakes until the end, almost, because otherwise you're going to go straight. You have to have that sort of feeling. You know, when you go to the roller coaster and you're like lifting up and then, you know, it's like unlifting you, almost like you're going out of the roller coaster, you know? It feels like that, like you're having a moment where you are out of breath. So that has to feel pretty much when you're going into a corner. You should almost feel like out of breath, you should almost feel like, oh, I'm gonna miss it.

If you're going in too easily and you don't have that feeling, you're not pushing the limits, and you're never going to become a world champion. You will probably, as I said, be fine in the lower club races, but it won't put you in the world championship class. So it's really important for you to have that feeling of, wow, I'm carrying so much speed, wow, I'm not gonna make the corner, wow, it feels like a roller coaster, the same, you know, that's really like that, and you need to get that feeling, and you develop that feeling by pushing and practicing carrying a lot of speed in the corners.

The signature in the data: a V where a U belongs

So overslowing is going to look, on the data, as a V-shaped speed line, not the racing line, but a speed trace, for example, is going to be like quite V. So there's going to be an area where it's very low in the mid-corner, and that's not going to work out, especially if you are driving in single-speed karts like 60 Mini, Juniors, Seniors, whether it's Rotax, whether it's X30, whatever, it's not going to work out, because you need to keep up the RPMs, you need to keep up the momentum.

And how do you manage to keep up the RPMs and going from a V-shaped to a U-shape? Well, the way to do that is by opening up the entries as much as possible in terms of line, but also opening up the exits as much as possible, and then obviously getting as close as possible to the apex, or making the apex, ideally, you know, that's the goal. So when you have that proper racing-line arc, with as well a good minimum speed and entry speed, then you're set. I mean, given the kart that you have in that moment, you're going to be definitely doing really good if you're maximizing, as I said, the track usage on the entry, on the exit, and if you're making the apex, and if you're carrying lots of speed that it makes you lift up the inside rear wheel.

The steering-angle tell

Again, when you are going slow through a corner, you'll notice that, because you'll need to use a lot of steering angle. But again, if you need to use a lot of steering angle in a go-kart, where the steer ratio is super, super aggressive, it means you are not carrying enough speed. I mean, the steer ratio of road cars, but even racing cars, it's about 1 to 15, whereas for a kart it's 1 to 1, therefore it's really direct, you know, you won't have to use so much steering angle as you use on a racing car, you have to use very little steering angle, because every little degree of steering is going to literally result in lots of turning from the wheels.

So it's really important that you make sure that you're carrying the speed into the corner, because if you are not carrying the speed into the corner, you will have to use a lot of steering, because remember, the more speed you carry, the more rotation you get, and if you're not carrying enough speed, you won't have rotation, therefore you will have to use a lot of steering wheel. So that's one sign for you to understand whether you are having lots of speed into the corner: if your steering is a lot, then you're probably not carrying enough speed, and in that case the data is going to show a very V-shaped line in the GPS trace.

The cascade: one mistake becomes four

Now, when you overslow the car down, the single most common mistake that happens right after, which again should act as a wake-up call for you to fix that on the next lap, is that you will go on the gas very early, because you'll feel like you're too slow in the mid-corner, right? So anytime my drivers brake early and they go slow in a corner, they realize, oh, I'm too slow, at least they have that speed-sensing skill, even though they may make a mistake in the first place, they are at least, all right, you know, I'm gonna go on the gas early because I'm too, too slow. It kind of puts a bandage on the problem, let's say, but you'll see that it's not going to compensate properly the mistake, you may go from a three-tenths potential loss to just one-tenth potential loss. But in some case it actually increases the loss, because when you go early on the throttle, because you have, I mean, brake too early and carry not enough speed, then maybe you are too early in the throttle, let's say, you are getting pushed out wide on the exits of the corner, and then you will lose even on the exit too.

So, you know, it's really coming down to getting the entry and mid-corner first, right, and then the exit is almost going to come as a consequence. I always say that everything starts in the entry, the mid and the exits are pretty much a consequence of what you do in the entry. For example, another sign of overslowing on the entry, besides the going on the throttle very early as a result of that, is that you will turn early and you get an early apex, because every time drivers overslow on the entry, they will end up turning in early. I mean, it's 90 percent of the time the case that when a driver brakes early, it will automatically turn early, because just like there's an automatism with our muscle memory, that when we brake, we just wait for a tiny bit and we start to turn. And of course it varies from driver to driver, from track to track, from corner to corner, but the reality is that we always have like a sort of automation, and all have like a sort of sequence, that when we brake, we have a tiny bit of waiting time, and then we turn. So if we brake early, we will end up turning in early, and if we turn in early, we get an early apex, we don't have the right rotation by the mid-corner, we are pointing in the wrong way, we're not pointing in the right way at the mid-corner.

And so we have to do the rotation on the exit when we should instead be almost like straight with the steering wheel. And so not only we will lose on the entry and the mid-corner, but we lose also on the exit because our early-apex technique. So again, that's a very clear sign that you have probably gone in too slow into the corner: when you have to turn in early, well, not have to turn, when you end up turning in early, because you brake early and you go too slow on the entry, then you will also most of the times, as I said, turn in early as an automatism, and then you will pretty much go early on the gas, which it's adding to the, let's say, disaster corner that you're about to do. You couldn't do more mistakes than braking early, turning in early, and on the gas too early before the apex, with, uh, with the wrong angle basically, and pointing in the wrong direction.

So that's really it, you should start getting their entries right, not overslowing, but instead carrying lots of entry speeds. You'll see that everything else is going to fall into place, and it's gonna just come as a consequence. So you just have to persist, it's not gonna be happening on day one, you won't be able to drive like Max Verstappen on day one, or after even 50 days of driving, you know, it's gonna take more, way more than that. You gotta be patient, you know, it's the process, trust the process, enjoy the process, and but just push, remember, you gotta push yourself beyond your your comfort zone.

How to find your limit with nobody to compare against

If you're overslowing and seeing that lines on the data being very low, of course you may be a lesser, but how do I even know if I did the right corner speed, if I have no teammates, if it's just me driving by myself in my local track on a random Wednesday? You know, for sure it's not as straightforward as when you have someone to compare with, or whether you have someone else on track to kind of have an idea what they're doing, if they're carrying more speed or not than you. But there's one way to look at that.

For example, if you do 15 laps in one session, you will for sure carry different speeds into the apex, into the corners. And you should find that the lap that you carry the most speed, and compared to the fastest lap, you will see that most of the times you did a better job in that specific corner in a different lap. So your goal is to match that, or even carry more speed in the next session, let's say, and try to just carry more and more and see where the limit is. You know, you should carry more and more speed and see where the limit is. If you see, for example, that the limit is, in that specific hairpin, I don't know, mid-corner speed like 60 kilometers an hour, all right, the goal is to, uh, you know, get to 61, 62. Of course you won't be able to judge that precisely, but you should be able to push more in the next session, and if you see that it's way too much, because you were not able to make the apex, you're losing on the exit, then you probably found your limit.

It's an art, so you have to feel your way to it

I mean, as I said, like at the end of the day, racing is more of an art than a science. It's, as I said, an art, and as all arts, it's more difficult to kind, kind of like, explain it, and just being able to do it like a robot. You know, of course, now there's all sort of art-generation software, etc, that can with AI replicate art. But the reality is that with racing, you need to kind of feel it.

So you need to go out there and have an idea what you want to do, I mean, you have to have clear goals. Of course, you don't want to drive empty laps, clueless as a sleepwalker that has no idea what's going to do and how to find the lap. You know, you don't want to be like that. But equally, at some point, when you put your helmet on, it's gonna come like automatic, in a way, obviously. It's the result of what you did the days before, the sessions before, whether you're arriving to the track ready, whether you have done enough preparation on that track, and not only on the track but also outside the track, with your fitness and everything, with your visualization, all your exercises in there. So it's gonna come to you in that way.

But again, you need to focus on carrying the entry speed. There's a bunch of signals, as I said: your inside rear wheel has to lift up, your steering has to be very little, means you're carrying a lot of speed, you feel like you're not making the corner, you're like, oh, I'm going to go straight, you need to feel like that same roller-coaster feeling. And in that case you will manage to beat that overslowing monster that many drivers have, and they will develop the feeling of driving on the limit on the entry. And by the way, they're also gonna massively develop their car control, because you only develop car control when you push beyond your limits, not what you drive within your limits.

So that is it. Remember to sign up to PURPL, try your first sessions, let me know how it goes, and remember to keep sending it. Ciao.