The February issue of Racecar Engineering has two very good articles on the Friction Circle. One of the articles has relevance to driver training, and specifically how it is taught. The article discusses the effects of “self aligning torque” on the driving task. The article mentions that when the vehicle is on the edge of its performance envelope, a driver has two conflicting signals. The first signal is the steering wheel getting light, which is that it requires less effort to increase steering input. The lightness of the steering is because the adhesion the tire makes with the road is getting smaller and getting smaller in a hurry. The second input is the load the driver feels at the back of the seat, which at the edge of the performance envelope is high. So at a critical point
the driver feels that the steering wheel has very little force being applied ( getting light) and at the same time the driver feels a great deal of force being applied to the back of the seat, the article goes on to say that this creates a conflict with the driver. A good driver has to be able to separate the two conflicting signals, and a good instructor needs to understand the implications this characteristic has on the exercise/scenario being taught.
The article is written by Danny Nowlan from ChassisSim
