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Article of the Week: How To Avoid "Crabbing" On Track
Crabbing is where we begin braking along the outside of the race track, but as we continue along the braking zone we start to slowly move away from the outside of the track.
We aren't turning in yet, the car is sort of just slowly drifting towards the middle of the track so that when we arrive at our turn-in point, we are now turning in from closer to the middle of the race track.
This reduces the radius of the corner, and the tighter the radius, the slower we have to go to make the corner. So, it’s a very big problem!
There are two core reasons that lead to a driver starting to "crab":
- A lack of proper visual reference points
- The driver's vision is too far forward
Our focus is directly tied to our eyes, so when you don't have all 5 visual reference points in a corner you will tend to struggle with consistency, car placement, speed, and more. We have a great article on all 5 reference points for every corner here.
But, this week I want to dive more into the second point.
Can you actually have your eyes too far forward on track? Yes!
We always hear about, "eyes up" and I do think low eyes is consistently one of the most common issues for racers. But, there is a subset of racers that take "eyes up" too far and actually look too far forward.
Our vision on track comes down to two core areas. Where we look, and the timing of when we look at that spot.
Visual timing is the term we use to explain how long to look at a point and when we want to shift our vision. On the track, we have to keep our eyes long enough on a reference point to help us get the vehicle pointed towards that reference before we pick our eyes up for the next reference point.
The reason most racers tend to do "crab" is because as soon as they start braking they look up and fixate on the apex. Their eyes are up right!? Well, where we look is where we go, so without realizing it they slowly start crabbing their way to the middle of the track.
Yes, we want our "eyes up" but that means we are looking where we want to go until we are for sure hitting our target and have the vehicle position where we need it. Only once we achieve both of those points do we pick our eyes up to the next reference point.
Have a question you want the coaching team at Blayze to answer? Just drop us an email with your question at [email protected]!
Article of the Week: The Safest Way To Find The Limit
View this week's article of the week here.
Reading time: Less than 2 minutes.