Do's and Don'ts of Traction Control - OpenTrack Driver Coaching

Video Transcript:
One of the worst cliches about how to get around a racetrack fast is, turn all your traction control systems off. They're just going to make you slower. But honestly, when you're new to this, they're going to make you faster with them on.

What it helps us do is it helps the car going in its intended path. I'm going to kind of drive aggressively, and kind of like a tool on purpose. Boom. I just threw the wheel into the corner there. I can feel right now, the brakes are grabbing in the rear. I'm not touching the brakes, but this car is applying brake pedal pressure and working these calipers around all four sides of this car and even taking away throttle input to help keep me from spinning and to help guide me through these corners. So the way I look at it is we have this amazing active safety feature, but on a race track, it's allowing us to be Steve McQueen.

When you're new to driving on tracks, you've got to figure out driving line and how to balance the vehicle. And all that stuff takes practice. So leave the systems on. And then as you get more experienced, you can start to lengthen the rope on these things. Maybe go to a sport mode setting and try that for a track day or two. And then eventually move to track mode.

So with these active safety features, we've got to know and understand that they work very well on pavement. But any time you go flying off the track and you're off into the grass, doing some agricultural racing, we call it, any type of stability control programming really isn't helping you if you're that far off course.

There really isn't any reason to turn the stability or traction control systems off in your car until you're really well connected to it, and you've got several track days under your belt, and you know the track, and you know your car.

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OPENTRACK LINKS:

SHOT ON LOCATION AT:
Inde Motorsports Ranch

PRODUCED BY:
Circa79

[ForOrAgainstUs]

Every car review where they put my (future or current) baby on the track talks about TC and how much or whether you can turn it off, but they literally never explain why they'd want to or why someone might not want to. Not only did this finally explain it for me, but also explained why (and when) I should absolutely be leaving it on. Thank you.

[oneonlyxram]

Great simple video again! I remember Kai turning everything off and going into "stuntman mode" then drifting almost every corner!

[aspecreviews]

VDIM is a predictive system that'll actually help you go faster, even as an experienced driver...

[forgottenknowledge]

We learnt how to drive in the 90s when we drove shit boxes. I can drive better without traction control