Do you trail brake?

Can someone point me to a link or accurately describe how and when one would do this? Is it specific to a certain drivetrain, like front engine w/front wheel drive or front engine w/rear wheel drive or ???

 

I use trail braking in my viper on the track. It has a little understeer and this helps a lot. Haven't had the ferrari on the track yet but if it needs it it is a good technique.

 

Yes, I trail brake... though with the 360 you had to be very gentle with it... with weight full front, you often lose some downforce in the back, which can cause the back end to get pretty loose. The CS has been somewhat less sensitive to that allowing a bit more aggressive trail braking.

But both cars are very well balanced and respond very well to trailbraking.

 

You can trail brake in any car. Whether its better to trail brake or not is somewhat dependent upon the car and somewhat on the drivers' preferred style.

What is trail braking? Its where you blend your braking into a corner into the turning. Driving 101 says to get your braking done in a straight line, before you reach the turn-in point. Why? Because if you're using all the available friction of the front tires to slow the car, then there's none left for turning the car. So, get the braking done, then release the brakes and turn in.

Driving 102 points out that as you release the brake, you have some left-over friction capacity to start turning the car. So, while you release the brakes you can start turning in. An important advantage of doing that is that it keeps the weight of the car shifted forward, on the front tires, making the friction capacity higher. In some cases, you might actually be able to turn-in HARDER by virtue of the fact that a little bit of braking keeps a lot more weight up front.

This effect will tend to be more dramatic with a mid-engine car... because you can shift much more weight from back to front as you go from full acceleration to full braking. A front-engine car that already has 80% of the weight on the front may just get really loose by shifting more weight forward.

OTOH, mid-engine cars tend to rotate much easier... trail-braking can result in a loose rear-end. Some drivers really dislike a loose car (it can bite you), and thus, prefer to let the weight shift back a bit more before turning in. Other drivers like it loose.

FWD vs RWD won't matter too much here... when you're braking, the brakes largely dominate the engine. FWD vs RWD comes into effect when you start to accelerate out of the corner.