I get asked a lot of questions about racing games. I mean a lot of questions. Whether it is setup tips, game information, or even driving advice, I try to pass on whatever I know to whomever will listen.

With that in mind, The High Groove is returning to Operation Sports after a hiatus that spanned almost ten years. With the number of quality racing titles that are being released to market lately, it’s only fitting that we reintroduce a weekly column devoted to nothing but motorsports.

This installment will be on the topic I seem to cover the most, and it has been magnified by the number of “new racers” that picked up the incredibly fun NASCAR 09 by EA Sports this past week — how to effectively corner in a racing game.

Most of this will be explained as it pertains to oval racing, since I’ve met so many new drivers in the past couple of weeks. However, the fundamentals are the same no matter what kind of corner you’re navigating. The distances required to stop, or how much throttle you can apply, will vary based on the type of vehicle, its weight, and horsepowe. But almost all corners can be approached the same way.

When it comes to simulation-style racing, many fans who are fairly new to the genre have a difficult learning curve to deal with. It’s one thing to play a game like Burnout or Grid, where you can be as reckless as you want with no (or minimal) repercussions. Its another to play sim-oriented games, which are an entirely different animal.

Overshooting your braking or cornering points, also known as “marks,” can make your lap times suffer so much that you feel like you are absolutely flying around the track, but in actuality are losing far too much momentum to be quick. If there’s anything that a novice racer needs to take out of this, it’s that momentum equals speed. If you overbrake, or waste time spinning the tires on the exit of a corner in a four-wheel drift, it feels very cool but you are losing time with each occurance.

The basic rule of thumb any driver tries to achieve is being smooth. Smooth on the wheel, smooth on the brakes, and smooth on the throttle.

A car has weight to it; everybody knows that. However, how that weight transfers from front to back and side to side while cornering is what makes a car behave well or poorly. If you think about taking a corner in your real car, you can feel the G-forces apply to the opposite direction the vehicle is heading.

Hit the gas, and you are thrown back. Turn left, and you are forced to the right inside the cockpit. That is what the weight of the vehicle is doing as well. So lesson number one in setting up for any corner is to brake before you need to turn. It sounds very strange to someone who hasn’t raced a sim-style game before, but by the time you begin to turn, you should generally be off of the brakes completely, and onto the next “stage” of the corner. Again, momentum is key, so if you’re wasting time slowing the car down, that’s part of the tire friction that’s wasted, instead of allowing it to corner at a smoother and higher speed.

Coming to a corner, you’ll want to brake early, and then as you turn laps and learn the course a bit better, gradually delay the brake entry by a couple of feet each time until you find that perfect mark for each corner.

The best technique is to apply a 1:1 ratio of brake application to throttle reduction. If you let out of the throttle to halfway, you are applying brake to half. What this does is keep the weight of the car balanced, not overloading any particular tire while attempting to slow down.

Naturally, the front tires are going to have more force than the rears since the car is slowing down, and weight is transferring to the front automatically. But what you want to do is make sure that you aren’t exceeding the tire friction available for braking because you’re overloading it with weight transfer.

You want to attempt to keep the car as neutral as possible at all times. Your brake application should last just long enough to slow the car down for the corner, but not continue into the corner itself. If you “stab” the pedal, you lose momentum, and it takes you twice as long to get that speed back.

If you continually run the car in way too deep and must use a lot of brake to compensate for it, your lap times will easily be a full second slower than somebody who hits the correct cornering speed every time. Slowing to “just above optimal cornering speed” will be the desired goal.

Cornering is one of the fundamental skills simulation racers must know to be successful.

For example, if you can navigate a corner with very little “sawing” on the wheel (adjusting mid-corner, which you never want to have to do) at 70 mph, then you might slow the car to about 75 mph just prior to corner entry. You don’t want to hear a lot of tire squeal, or you’re too fast and need to lower your corner entry speed. You want to keep the speed just above the optimal cornering speed for the next stage of the corner, which is commonly referred to as “rolling through”.

After you complete the braking process, you want to smoothly turn into the corner, with your feet completely off of the pedals. You don’t want to have to apply throttle or brake at this point, as either one will break your momentum. If you’ve hit your braking mark properly, then you should be just above the cornering speed, and the natural turn motion will scrub the last bit of speed from the vehicle.

This is called “rolling through the corner” simply because that’s exactly what you’re doing…rolling, and not throttling or braking. If you have to stab the brakes, you lose tons of momentum, so it’s best to hit the corner as precisely as possible. If you overbrake prior to entry, you’ll find that it’s possible to easily adjust with a very small amount of throttle, but it will take some experience to avoid over-gassing it and ending up drifting back out from the inside of the corner…requiring you to stab the brakes, making your corner twice as flawed, since you lose momentum not once, but twice.

How long you roll through the corner really depends on the type of corner you’re navigating. For long sweepers, it may only be a second or so. For a tight hairpin, you may wait until you are almost exiting the corner. My general rule of thumb is to roll through the corner entry, to just prior to the “apex” (or center) of the corner. At the apex, you want the car to just start dipping inside as you go, requiring you to apply throttle to hold the line. When done properly, you can simply “feel” it. You brake smoothly, the car rolls nicely through the corner entry, and you have a natural reaction to hit the gas at the apex, because if you don’t, you’re going to end up running off of the inside of the track.

"In fact, a truly great corner will have you steering slightly to the right as you fully exit, with the car just naturally settling into place next to the outside wall."

When deciding to add throttle, you must be aware that the pedal is a pedal for a reason. It has a whole range of motion in it and it’s not a digital on/off switch, where you’re either full on, or full off. Learning to use the entire pedal range is what will turn a decent arcade racer into a good simracer.

When you feel that the car is starting to drift down to the inside of the corner, you want to smoothly roll into the throttle. This does not mean stomp your foot to the floor like a gorilla.

Imagine that you have a water balloon under the pedal, and pressing too quickly will cause it to burst. Smooth application of the throttle will allow the water to displace without rupturing, and that’s how you always want to treat the gas pedal.

As you get back into the throttle, the momentum and weight balance of the car will begin to transfer to the right as you pick up speed. That momentum is what carries the car out toward the wall - not any changes in the steering wheel.

In fact, a truly great corner will have you steering slightly to the right as you fully exit, with the car just naturally settling into place next to the outside wall. When you really nail a corner in all three stages; entry, rolling through, and exit, you have very little work to do on the wheel itself. Most of it is covered by your entry speed and how accurately you judge the corner severity (turning the wheel appropriately).

The objective here is to get the car to be pointed as straight as possible as soon as possible because after you do that, you can get into the gas much harder. The more you have to worry about turning or adjusting your car at the exit of a corner, the less throttle you can apply.

"You will be surprised at how competitive some setups can be when you adapt your style to it, rather than the other way around."

A lot of people want to immediately reach for setup corrections when a car doesn’t do what they want it to do, but you will be surprised at how competitive some setups can be when you adapt your style to it, rather than the other way around.

Adaptation needs to be a simracer’s single greatest strength. Your car will change over the course of a run, and if you don’t learn how to adjust with it, you’ll be great for about a third of a run, and then garbage the other two-thirds - and that’s not a very good ratio.

You’ll find that you will commonly need to adjust your corner entry (by braking a bit earlier, slowing down a bit more), but the corner exit is by far the most critical part. Corner exit is where you need to constantly find, for lack of a better term, the car’s “happy place”. A setup will very rarely be perfect on corner exit, especially as you wear the tires out. It will either want to push straight into the wall, or spin out. After you’ve learned how to straighten out the car and smoothly get back into the throttle, you’ll notice that it’s pushing too hard toward the wall. That means that you may need to wait another fraction of a second before applying gas.

The more patient you are during cornering, the quicker you can come off the corner. I can’t repeat that enough. If you get too anxious and get on the gas too early, you’ll end up having to brake after exiting the corner to avoid hitting the wall, which kills momentum like nothing else.

Patience is key when you corner.

Conversely, if the car wants to spin out on corner exit, then you will need to really find that spot where the rear end just barely raises up. You will see a subtle shift in whatever camera you’re racing in, but from the cockpit camera is obviously the best. The car will just barely start to turn inward, and you will start to hear a tire squeal.

At this point, you’ll really be able to play with the throttle. We’re talking varying your throttle application by a couple of percent every fraction of a second. As the car starts to slide, you let out of the throttle a fraction of an inch. When it settles back down, you can re-apply a portion of that throttle back.

With enough practice laps, you will find that you can continue to turn fast lap times with a loose car much better than you can with a tight one. The more laps you put on a loose setup, the more it tightens up. If your car starts tight, then it’s just going to get worse the further you go, and your lap times will suffer. A loose car gives an experienced driver the fastest overall time, but you must learn to really ride the razor’s edge of control vs. speed to use it.

So, as a quick review, here’s what you do:

 

If you’re new to NASCAR (or sim racing in general), learning the proper cornering technique can take away a lot of frustration, and when it “clicks”, your lap times will come down quicker than you can believe.

The worst thing you can do is over-drive the car - hit the brakes too late, hit the gas too early, etc. Doing so means instead of simply losing 3 or 4 mph in a corner instead you just lost 10 mph (or more) on the corner exit.

I had some racers ask me what my speed at the end of a straightaway was recently, as they were all right around 198 or 199. Using this technique and the same exact setup, mine was between 208 and 212. That’s a huge difference when everybody is on a ‘fixed’ setup. If you learn to be smooth on the pedals and get the car straightened out as soon as possible, a whole new world opens up.