The Psychological Trap of Entering a Corner Too Fast
When I watch YouTube videos where professional drivers explain circuit driving, I often hear comments along the lines of, “Amateurs and beginners tend to lose a lot of time simply by entering corners too fast.”
I thought, “Surely I must have made this mistake too,” and wanted to put this one in my “My Mistakes” series. But when I thought about it, my practice style is actually to go “too fast” → “too slow,” repeating the process while gradually improving my precision. So unfortunately, this doesn’t quite fit.
I mean, if you enter a corner too fast, why not just try going slower next time? But apparently, a lot of people don’t do that. Instead, they keep entering corners too fast over and over again. That’s why you often hear people emphasizing, “Don’t enter corners too fast!”
Basically, I think it’s a psychological issue. “I want to nail the ideal corner at 100% and go fast! I want to set a good lap time!” If that feeling becomes too strong—stronger than “I want to practice a lot and get better!”—then simply slowing down to improve your skills can disappear from the list of options.
Well, I can understand that. But in reality, entering a corner too fast can cost you quite a lot of time. More importantly, it’s basically the kind of mistake you can’t recover from once you’ve made it. So when I was trying to put together a proper lap time, I would approach each corner thinking, “I really want to avoid entering too fast if I can.”
Aim for 95%, Not 100%
Specifically, I would approach a corner with the mindset of, “I’m aiming for around 95% or maybe 98% of what I can do. I’m definitely not going over 100%!”
There’s no way you can corner at 100% perfectly through every corner anyway. If you can simply repeat your cornering with as much consistency as possible, you’ll get a lap time that reflects your actual ability. You make mistakes when you try to do more than you’re capable of.
It’s Hard to Even Tell If a Corner Was a Success or a Failure
Besides, judging whether a corner was actually a “success” or a “failure” is difficult in the first place. There are so many different sensations you have to process just to get through a single corner on a circuit:
- Your sense of position and whether you’re on the right line
- Your sense of speed
- Your sense of how much the body is rolling
- Your sense of how much the pitching motion settles back down
- Your sense of how the yaw develops
- The forces you feel through the steering wheel
- The forces you feel through the seat
- The feel of the brake pedal as you release the brakes
- All kinds of sounds
And when you charge into a corner going, “Whoa!” and trying way too hard, pretty much everything except your sense of the racing line and speed gets pushed out of your head. Then you can’t even tell what was good or bad anymore. And even if you know you clearly made a mistake, you still don’t know why you made it, or what you should have done instead.
Why “Driving a Little Slower” Matters
That’s why I think “driving a little slower” is so important. It might be one of the secrets to improving as a beginner.
Of course, getting used to overspeed situations and spins is also really important, especially so you don’t panic when they happen. But once you enter a corner too fast, there’s basically no way to recover. And if you try too hard to recover, you can develop some bad habits that become very difficult to get rid of.
So when you’re a beginner, if you think, “Oh, I’m going in too fast,” I think it’s better for your development to just let that corner go and move on. We should practice by clearly separating the things we should push ourselves on from the things we shouldn’t.
So, How Do You Avoid Entering a Corner Too Fast?
“Drive a little slower.” That’s it. It’s extremely simple and obvious, but apparently a lot of people have a psychological hurdle when it comes to doing it.
Do you let that mental resistance stop you, and keep doing the same thing without getting any better? Or do you get comfortable with going a little slower, improve the precision of your inputs, then gradually increase the speed from there, and keep improving through that positive cycle?
Keep enough brainpower free to really feel what the car is doing, let all those sensations sink into your body, and build your skills one step at a time.