Slicks in the Wet - Force Your Tyres into a Positive Feedback Loop
When track conditions are erratic, the wild drivers thrive
When you are sitting on the dummy grid, fully slick-shod with your perfect set-up dialled in after days of solid work and excellence behind the wheel - are you devastated when you see a few drops of rain hit your visor?
Or do you laugh to yourself and think:
‘I’ll be down the road after a lap if this carries on…’
That means can you totally let go of all the intense hard work that got you near the front of the grid during a lovely dry weekend, and switch into lunatic mode because it started to rain out of nowhere, and they are sending everyone out on slicks?
99 percent of drivers lose the plot, very understandably too!
The aim here is to have you feel very good when you are rolling out of the grid for the final on Sunday when its dry, because you are mint… But if the weather Gods throw a spanner in the works, then you go from feeling good to buzzing that you are about to display absolute prowess and dominance, while everyone else goes careful driving on their tippy-toes.
From a minimum inputs accuracy freak (dry) , to an all-in sliding lunatic (sudden downpour)
Almost everything in fast kart driving is about minimal inputs, refinement and microscopic zooming deeper and deeper into the abyss of ‘there’s always an improvement, no matter how small’.
So you will certainly become conditioned to that. A good example of tiny steering inputs conditioning in kart drivers, is when really fast kart drivers have a run in a car and someone has to tell them ‘mate, you can turn the steering wheel a bit more now!’.
Kart drivers don’t like to turn the wheel, correctly, they feel existential pain for every extra millimetre. That pain makes them fast, and perfect... Even in the wet, when it’s a proper wet day and the wet-set up is dialled in, eventually steering inputs become calm and minimal.
BUT - in the summer when the track is hot and rubbered in, and the heavens open just as you leave the grid
Now the lunatic rules! Beautiful efficiency becomes detrimental, and brutal wildness takes over - sometimes by seconds a lap.
Even if you know it is going to chuck it down, nobody knows what the hell the track is going to deliver or what the right set up is because a hot track can dry in a few minutes if the rain stops, or maybe not!
Being correct about anything goes out the window. Slicks are wrong when it gets too wet, wets are wrong when it dries again. Wets get shredded, slicks stay cold. Nothing works!
This is the wild west and it’s when the adventurer driver excels. The only asset in these conditions is raw skill combined with the joyful will to use it, all of it, and then some.
Even with a high quality grid, almost always one driver buggers off down the road, if they survive, which they may not because they are on the edge. But when they go off, they usually have enough of a lead to win anyway!
So, how is destroying everyone done when sudden random rainfalls hit, and how can you practice it?
