I was actually talking specifically OF his 05/06 Renaults...mahesh248 wrote:I don't think he drives like that any more, the 05/06 Renault was tailor made for Alonso's under steering style .raymondu999 wrote:I always thought Alonso used the understeer to "counter" his steering - if he didn't have that understeer the car would spin out from the aggressiveness of his input
Have to be careful about how I phrase this. It's not the understeer in and of itself that's the benefit, it's having less load transfer on the rear axle (assuming you're RWD and have quite a bit of output power) than on the front. Understeer does typically come with that directional change.raymondu999 wrote:JT - if you have understeer; wouldn't that just mean you go on the power later? I don't get why understeer allows you easier power out.
Jersey Tom wrote:I'd say you aren't interpreting the comment as the author intended. Slightly better description comes later...
Few things you have to think about. First, it's ridiculous to just describe a car as just "neutral" or "understeer" or "oversteer." Balance and feel are a function of speed, longitudinal acceleration, lateral acceleration, and even vertical acceleration. You could be understeer on the brakes, neutral in pure steering, and oversteer on throttle. Or even in pure cornering you could be neutral, even understeer in slow easy maneuvers and oversteer in quick transitions. Beyond that, what drivers call "understeer" or "oversteer" is open to interpretation.“A lot of the performance limit of a car is set by stability; if your driver can't hang on to it, you have to introduce understeer in that zone. If you have a driver better able to deal with oversteer in zones that induce it, you'll have a less understeery car elsewhere and therefore more total grip over the whole lap. The great drivers – Ayrton Senna, Nigel Mansell, Michael Schumacher – all had that ability. Like-for-like, compared with other drivers, they wanted more front end.”
Second, a truly "neutral" car to many drivers probably won't feel "neutral." I could write a paper on this but in short, the driver's job is to poke and prod at finding the limit. On a RWD car a good bit of this is feeling corner exit out with the throttle... and on a "neutral" RWD car with a lot of power it will be VERY easy to provoke it into stepping the rear out or spinning. "Neutral" can very much feel like an "oversteer" car, and to get a "neutral" feel you will probably need to dial in some amount of understeer.
For that reason, drivers who can cope with a car that's very finely balanced and easy to piss off, will have engineers get the car closer to a theoretical max. A virtual driver, as the article implies, can be tuned to be ridiculously good at such things, moreso than any human.
Then you have certain cases where you need heaps of understeer to go fast just because it's the only way of getting power down on exit.
He adapts his style to suit the car, that is why he is so quick. He drives the car how it should be driven.mahesh248 wrote: I don't think he drives like that any more, the 05/06 Renault was tailor made for Alonso's under steering style .
