I’m excited to share a story with you about driving in the rain at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps this past week.
But first, some background. As we do each year, last week a friend and I took a group of drivers to Germany and Belgium — two days driving the Nürburgring Nordschliefe and one day at Spa. That’s two days driving the 156 or so corners of the Green Hell, and a day on the track most Formula One drivers claim to be their favorite.
It rained all three days. That might sound like a terrible experience, and I’ll admit that the look on the faces of the twenty-seven drivers during our briefing prior to driving the Ring aligned with that thought. But after discussing a bit of wet weather technique, and encouraging our guest drivers to embrace the challenge and drive with a learning mindset, the smiles told a different story at the end of the track experience. A common theme amongst everyone as they headed home from Belgium and Germany was, “The rain made the experience even better.”
And that, after developing new friendships, five over-the-top-fantastic dinners, and a combined total of more than 25,000 kilometers (16,000 miles) of laps around two spectacular tracks, was the Schlagsahne on the pâtisserie!
On the final day, at Spa, one of our drivers was struggling with the BMW M4 that he was driving, so (after giving him a different car to drive) the top-notch crew from RSR (the organization that we work with for the supply of cars, instructors, and logistics — the best in the business) asked me to drive a few laps to check it out.
Yes, the car oversteered on the wet track. Actually, that’s an understatement! When I came in after five laps, I suggested they never let a customer drive that car in the rain. Apparently, this is a characteristic of this specific BMW model, as other M4s have felt the same.
We agreed that I’d spend a little time trying to help them tune the setup in a way that would make it less loose and more forgiving, adjusting tire pressures, damper and anti-roll bar settings, and ride height. No matter what we did, it didn’t improve.
And when I said it oversteered, it OVERSTEERED. The instant I’d turn the steering to enter a corner, the rear would step out, quickly.
The first couple of laps, my reactions to the snap oversteer was not something I was proud of. It was catching me by surprise. But with each lap, I sensed the rear tire slip happening sooner and sooner, and within half a dozen laps my face had gone from showing signs of frustration and confusion to a huge smile. (More about how to learn to sense this at the end of this article)
Not unlike some other people, I love a challenge, especially in the rain on a fast, flowing circuit like Spa. And to be fair, when one thinks about Spa, it’s hard not to associate rain with it. I felt at home on the wet Belgian circuit.
Okay, time for the technical, what-can-I-learn-from-this part of the story.
I tried the M4 in the Sport Plus mode, then the Sport mode, and finally the Comfort mode. The amount of oversteer was equal in each. The only difference was how far the car would oversteer before the stability control nannies would smack me in the side of the helmet and take over. I’m not a fan of being smacked in the head, so I focused on sensing just when the stability control would kick in, with the goal of staying a fraction of a degree away from it. But I did want the BMW to slide a little, because that helped me rotate the car so it was pointing straighter when I went back to power to accelerate out of the corners.
In other words, there was a small window between no sliding whatsoever — where the car would feel like it was on rails — and the amount of slide that the sensors and computers didn’t like, to the point where they would intervene.
In Comfort mode, that window was smaller than when I switched to Sport or Sport Plus. That’s the way stability control systems are meant to work: a driver is allowed to slide the car a little more before the electronics say “Enough!” when in the Sport modes; less in the Comfort “default” mode.
My “job” (beyond providing feedback to the mechanics about the changes they were making) was to drive the car within that window: too little slip and I was slow; too much slip and the stability control took over and also made us (me and the M4) slow.
It did not take many laps to get to the point where I could predict fairly reliably when the nannies would kick in, so I would deliberately allow the car to slide to the point just before that, and stay in the window. I sensed the size of that window, and when the electronics would take over…
I’d love to tell you that I nailed it with just the right amount of slip/rotation/yaw/oversteer in every single corner, on every single lap. I didn’t. The fun, cool thing is that the window from too little to too much changed each lap with the varying amount of rain falling. That’s part of what made this so much fun, for if it was the same every lap, I might have gotten bored with it (well, not really bored, but the level of challenge and fun would not have stayed as high).
I have three reasons for sharing this story:
To be clear, every driver can develop their skills to sense and drive within a very small window, that window between no slip and enough slip to activate the stability control. Whether you’re new to performance driving, or an old pro, you can get even better than you already are.
And, it’s one of the — if not the — most fun aspects of driving. I would prove that if you could see the smile on my face even while I write this a few days after I played with the nannies.
Like the article a few weeks ago about finding and driving the limit at Mid-Ohio, this Spa experience turned into an unexpected piece of research and development for the upcoming Total Car Control Masterclass I’m doing in a couple of weeks. I had planned to discuss the issue of using or not using electronic driver aids, and how to learn car control with them, but hadn’t fully sorted it out in my head exactly how to do that… until now. It was hugely fun, but also a great learning experience for me — and hopefully for you.
Thank you, Spa. Thank you, rain. Thank you, M4. Thank you, stability control.