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Story by Jack Baruth

It’s one of my favorite driving memories: Years ago, as my BMW 330i hammers down the front straight at Mosport, a shape appears in my rearview mirror. Purple. Frog-eyed. Fast. With a flick and a furious gargle of exhaust, the shape flashes by. Porsche. 964 Turbo. Three. Point. Six. The ultra-rare, last-of-the-line Turbos. We’re nose to tail at the entrance to the first turn. Five-foot flames burst from the Porsche’s twin tips as the driver snags his final downshift. I can see the exaggerated slip of the front wheels followed by the characteristic sag-and-lift that precedes every truly vicious corner entry in a rear-engined street Porsche. And then, the calm, blasé voice of my instructor (and later, fellow competitor) Brian:

“Ignore that, thank you. Ignore the Nine Eleven. He has a different line.”

A different line? What does that mean? How can cars have different lines? Isn’t there just one line, and don’t we call it “The Line” for just that reason? Why is his line different? With no time to debate at the beginning of a famously fast and tricky corner, I followed Brian’s instructions and was rewarded with another reasonably competent lap, but that particular incident burned in my mind for long afterwards. If my Bimmer had a line, and that Porsche had a line… were those the only two lines to be had? Were Nine Elevens the only cars that had different lines? Did mid-engined cars have a different line? What’s the “school line” about which I’d heard so much at Mid-Ohio? Who kept track of all the lines? Could they change? It felt as if I had stepped out over an abyss. As the Zen phrase says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” There were certainly many possibilities in my mind at that point.

Fast-forward to 2008. I’m still a fervent student of driving, and I continue to obtain competent instruction wherever possible, but I’m also an instructor, and I have students of my own who have become instructors themselves. One of them recently came to me with a problem: His student for the day was having difficulty learning “The Line” around the track. What should he do? My advice to him was simple: Forget about “The Line” and focus on driving. So-called “line-learning” is useless, unnecessary, and it’s an easy-to-spot sign of a lousy, lazy instructor. Forget about it and walk away. My advice to you, dear reader, is the same – but since we don’t have our next instruction session coming up minutes from now, we can take some time to understand why “The Line”, as a concept, needs to be rethought at best and, at worst, simply abandoned.

This wouldn’t be an “Avoidable Contact” column if we didn’t take a moment to cover the history of “The Line”, so let’s take that moment. It’s safe to say that racing drivers were aware of the concept of a “racing line” at some point during the gap between the World Wars. Many of the early auto racers were also avid cyclists and they were aware of the advantage to be gained by selecting the proper path through a turn. As asphalt replaced dirt across the Western world and cornering began to be less about managing traction in sprint-car sideways fashion and more about obtaining an advantage on corner exit, surely many racers attempted to determine exactly what the fastest way around a corner might be.

Prior to the successful introduction of Dunlop’s “plate brake”, which we now know as the “disc brake”, it was simply impossible to repeatedly slow a racing car at the limit of the tires. A heavy brake application would cook the brake drums, even if they had super-trick aluminum fins attached for cooling, and result in very ineffective braking for the next lap or two, or perhaps even longer if the linings had been abused previously. As a result, drivers tended to drive the highest possible corner entry speed, which led to what we think of as the “Geometric Line” – the one consisting of a clean, even arc through the turn. That’s the fastest way to do it if you need to coast into turns. It’s a technique derived directly from the velodrome, where brakes simply are not a part of the equipment package. Any racing video footage from the Fifties or before shows a high percentage of Geometric Line driving, often punctuated by lurid slides when drivers miscalculated the likely max possible speed along that line.

With the arrival of effective braking, drivers began to develop the technique of maximizing the speed at the end of each straight for outbraking maneuvers, which would therefore require an early exit from the previous corner for maximum acceleration. From this need came what we often think of as the “Ideal Line”, where the driver slows for the turn early, turns later and harder than he would in the Geometric Line, and exits the turn accelerating slightly faster than he would on the Geometric Line, resulting in a higher end-of-straight speed prior to the next corner. That’s how things are done nowadays, and if every turn were a plain ninety-degree right turn like the ones in the racing textbooks, it would be very easy to understand the Ideal Line.

Real tracks, however, rarely have plain-and-simple ninety-degree right-handers. Each turn is different. They are cambered differently. They have a variety of surfaces. There’s rubber built up in some spots, and oil floating atop others. There are combinations of turns where the driver must sacrifice speed in one spot to gain it elsewhere, as in the “Adenauer Forst” section of the ‘Ring , or “The Esses” at Mid-Ohio. As road-course racing became more and more popular through the Sixties and Seventies, drivers developed, and jealously guarded, their own secret lines, often going so far as to deliberately drive “off their line” when another driver was directly behind them, lest that fellow learn in a moment what they had spent hundreds of laps divining for themselves.

The irony is that one man’s Line is another man’s loser. No two cars have exactly the same cornering ability, exit traction, and weight balance. What is possible for one car may not be possible for another. Rear-engined cars take an extremely late apex to maximize their traction advantage, while front-wheel-drive cars often do the same to minimize traction issues in the last phase of corner exit. An M3, a Boxster, and a 911 will each require a different line to be most effective.

Just as cars differ, so do drivers. Ross Bentley tells us that the greatest drivers are distinguished by their ability to carry midcorner speed. Driving the midcorner at the car’s absolute limit is the deep magic, the place where Senna lived and where talented club racers are occasionally permitted to briefly visit. The midcorner separates men from boys – but if you can’t handle the heat, you can stay out of the kitchen and take a later apex. There are moments in my driving life where I feel absolutely prepared to tiptoe over the limit in the middle of Infineon’s Turn One, and there are moments when I take my own measure, find it wanting, and brake that fraction of a second earlier.

As a result of all these factors, the line I might take in my Neon race car on my best day is visibly different from the one I’d take on a tired final lap in a borrowed Audi R8. There is no universal Line. Repeat it after me. No Universal. Line. Period. If you take one thing away from today’s column, take that, and let’s move on.

As we’ve discussed in previous columns, our modern era has seen an explosion of trackdays, open lapping days, driving schools, time trial/time attack events, and other racetrack programs aimed at the non-racer. As the programs have standardized, so has the routine. Across the country and the world, trackday drivers are taught to follow a basic “Line” at each track. This line is not the fast line, it’s not the one which is optimized for them or their cars. It’s merely the line which offers the lowest chance of a major mishap. That means the latest apex possible, the slowest midcorner speed, the straightest exit. It ensures that drivers will tend to leave the track nose-first with their wheels straight, which is safest. It reduces the chances that a driver’s ham-handedness in the midcorner will end up tossing him into a barrier. It ensures that everybody’s nose is pointed straight before they unleash the ridiculous power of today’s Corvette Z06es and Ferrari F430s. It’s not fast, it’s not aggressive, it’s not racey, it requires not the slightest touch of that deep magic – but it keeps insurance rates low and sends people back to their cubicles with un-bent fenders and un-dented pride.

So that’s what the instructors teach, and they teach it with a vengeance. Most of what we call “driving instruction” is really simply a guided tour of The Safest Line. “Brake. Now turn. Now wind out. Now accelerate. Good.” The exercise is repeated at a slightly higher speed every time, until somebody runs out of nerve or tire. It doesn’t require a lot out of the student, and it requires even less of the instructor. He can relax in the right seat, dole out instructions until the student approximately internalizes the appropriate brake-turn-gas points, and think about the awesome set of HRE wheels he’s going to put on his previous-generation GT3. It’s eerily similar to those old paint-by-number books. No art is produced, but no lines are crossed, and the finished product looks passably like an accomplishment.

This is all well and good – until you decide you want to touch the real limits of your car and yourself, at which point you will hear the words of Sergeant Elias in “Platoon” – “Then the worm has definitely turned for you, man.” This is the point when many novice drivers total their cars. For their entire trackday career, they’ve been hammered with precise instructions, but they can’t feel where the car grips, they can’t reach into the center of gravity through the pedals and wheel, manipulating it with a surgeon’s delicacy, they can’t fix problems when they occur, they can’t really drive. For that, we need to develop the racer’s toolkit: traction sensing, balance sensing, slow hands, fast feet, breadth of vision, traffic sensing, bravery, guts, cool head, all of that. There are only a few ways to get that toolkit, and some of them involve paying in blood, metaphorical or literal. Be aware. Mistakes made at the real limit always come with a price.

After several years spent observing and participating in “driver education”, I have come to believe that teaching “The Line” to drivers is worthless. It keeps morons out of the Armco, but I believe that most students deserve more. I don’t do the Line-By-Numbers. Instead, I’ve come up with an alternative method. I try to teach traction sensing and line determination. I run the student through The Safest Line a few times at the beginning of the session, just to make sure that we’re all sane, safe, and ready to learn, and then I begin to show the student how to deviate from that line. We discuss and learn methods of sensing traction through the wheel, we try getting on the throttle early (and late) to see what happens, I have them try a “bad” exit line so they can see the advantages of a true late apex. We talk about another one of Ross Bentley’s sayings: The driver who keeps the wheel straight most often will win the race. We aren’t racing, but all other good things – speed, control, consistency – flow from that idea. I explain to the student how to find and try different lines around the same corner, and I evaluate the progress made on these topics.

Nine out of ten students, given this instruction, will find The Safest Line and settle down into it of their own accord. The end result is the same as the traditional “drive-by-numbers” instruction, except for one thing: we’ve given the student the tools with which to determine The Safest Line at other tracks, as well – and, whisper it, on the street, should he be so inclined. Having generated The Safest Line from their own experience, rather than being browbeaten into it, the student is also less likely to deviate into a dangerous situation if he happens to make a mistake on corner entry. It’s a teaching system that works very well for ninety percent of trackday drivers.

Then we have the tenth student – and this student’s going to be a racer, because he wants to try different stuff and see what the car does. Wheel-to-wheel racing requires that a driver be able to knock out the fastest possible lap for qualifying and out-of-traffic driving, but it also requires that he be able to sense traffic and generate his own spontaneous best-possible Lines on the fly. Real racing is full of conditions which prevent you from driving the Ideal Line, whether it’s debris, traffic, oil, problems with your own car, or defensive/aggressive maneuvering. Time-trial drivers often fail to understand that their primary, overriding goal – namely, setting the fastest possible lap – is simply the bottom of the toolkit for a racer. You can set a fast lap? Good. We expect that. Now do it in traffic, while managing your tires, defending your position, setting up the next pass, checking your car’s health, dealing with damage or wear, plotting strategy, and working with your crew on the radio. Now you’re racing.

As a driving student, you have a right to expect more from your instructor than a simple guided tour of The Safest Line. Don’t be afraid to ask for explanation. Why don’t we turn in here? Why are we giving up this turn for that one? What’s the gain – or harm – in an early apex at a certain turn? How can I learn to sense traction? How can I learn to handle the car when things go sideways at the limit? What if it rains? Don’t just sit there behind the wheel and be a passive consumer. Get the reasons you need, or get somebody else who will give them to you. It’s your right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to wrap this column up without referring to the show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Oh. Damn.