Great tips on rally driving

Nowadays everyone wants to be a speed racer. Whether is comes out of being a true car lover, or just for the sake of testing your limits to attain that adrenaline rush, street racing, drag racing and performance rallying are something most people having a car aspire or are inspired to do. But one cannot simply drive like Sebastien Loeb or Petter Solberg without having at least a basic technical knowledge of how it all works.

And this is what this article, which I have compiled after a great deal of research and personal experience, educates you on...from the techniques behind all those drags and drifts to the underlying principle of how spark plugs and the infamous NOS kits work!

Contrary to popular opinion, modern rear-wheel-drive cars are much more user-friendly in this regard, as they are set up to understeer, and the more powerful ones even have on- board computer systems which can automatically brake the car or override the driver's throttle inputs. This is because understeer is generally much safer for novice drivers, whereas oversteer is much more difficult to correct when one's not prepared for it. The natural reaction of most drivers in case of loss of control is to try to slow down - either by lifting their foot off the gas pedal or even by braking. Both of these will help bring an understeering vehicle under control but can have disastrous effects in the case of oversteer. This is because braking causes weight transfer towards the front of the car, thus reducing rear traction even further. The right oversteer correction is to gently steer into the slide, then take the power away as needed.

Indeed, cutting the power mid-corner can induce oversteer even in a front wheel drive vehicle. This is known as ‘lift-off oversteer’. "Trail braking," or continuing to apply brake pressure after turning into a curve, can induce oversteer by transfering weight off of the rear tires, regardless of whether the car is front, rear or all-wheel drive. Note that in a front-wheel-drive vehicle, it is often better to simply accelerate hard to correct a slide.