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If Your Cornering Looks Like This, You Are Doing It Wrong: Here's How You Fix It

We have all done it at one point, and the movie industry has its bit of blame here. You are driving along, you hit a corner with too much courage, and then you hear tires screeching. In movies and cartoons, when you hear that sound, it means that they are going fast. In real life, that screech means you are doing something wrong. Yes, it is mostly you, not the car.
Vehicles understeering on the Nurburgring 21 photos
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Auto Addiction
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To be fair, there are vehicles out there that are more prone to understeering than others, and there is a good reason for that design choice. Yes, the engineering teams behind them usually aim for a neutral feeling most of the time, with understeering as the first consequence of overdoing it in a corner.

This is done because you can prevent understeering with greater ease than you can with oversteering, and it is easier for a regular person to control a car doing it than it is with oversteering.

First, let us cover the topic of understeering – what is understeering, and how do you identify it? Well, understeering means the situation where a vehicle is cornering on a significantly wider path than its driver intended, and it may be accompanied by tire screeching, as well as a vibration felt through the steering wheel and even a lighter feeling of the steering. As a rule, you do not want to feel any of those while cornering.

Second, understeering is mostly something that happens because of the driver, not the car, but it can be caused by an unadjusted suspension geometry, as well as worn tires, old tires, bald tires, and so on. In the case of the latter, the vehicle will make tire screeching noises even in a mild U-turn or in gently approached corners. If it only manifests with a bit of an increase in speed, the driver is at fault.

Vehicles understeering on the Nurburgring
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Auto Addiction
Third, you can stop understeering from happening, but you must first realize it is taking place. Only then can you be prepared to act against your instincts, which is the trickiest bit with understeering. There are two things that people do wrong when the vehicle that they are driving is understeering, usually in this order, and they are just making it worse: more input and touching the brakes.

Some people try to do it the other way 'round, and hit the brakes first, then try to steer more, and this is also wrong, mind you, and both mistakes can lead to a crash. Why?

Because the vehicle will either regain traction with the front wheels pointing where you do not want them to, or the dynamic of the situation will move the vehicle to a snap oversteer from which most drivers cannot correct. Especially if their wheels are near full lock toward the turn, and they need to be pointing the other way 'round to have a chance at correcting oversteer.

Understeer is dangerous because it will make the vehicle uncontrollably drift toward the exterior of a corner, but not in a manner that is called drifting, but in the way that a ship drifts because the waves are too strong. In short, you do not want that to happen, but it may happen regardless.

Vehicles understeering on the Nurburgring
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Auto Addiction
The most frequent cause of understeering is too much speed for a given corner, which will take the tire beyond its grip threshold. The latter is the point where the tire is slipping just a bit but still grips the road exactly right to make the turn. Going just a bit past that point, either in speed, input, or both, will make the tire lose grip, and there goes your corner!

The other cause of understeering is too hard braking, including when turning in, which overloads the tires, and makes the vehicle unable to turn. The idea is to always remember that a tire can do one thing at a time: brake, steer, accelerate, or corner. Whenever your input demands two of each action, and preferably at the maximum capacity of that tire, it will not work.

It does not work even with the best possible tires in the world, as there is a limit to how much you can do with a tire at a point, and you must think of it like a circle, and you just turn a knob to select what to do. Keeping the knob between braking and steering or accelerating and steering will lead to understeer.

Yes, trying to be greedy and going too early on power during a corner, before the apex, will lead to understeering, and you will go wide even if you might have done a decent job when you started out the corner.

Vehicles understeering on the Nurburgring
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Auto Addiction
There you go, accelerating (hard—but not necessarily) while cornering is another cause of understeering. Even a mild acceleration might throw off the balance of the car, so wait until you pass the apex and accelerate progressively as you wind the steering wheel back towards the center.

It is physics, and it does not involve getting bigger or smaller tires, changing the track, fitting bigger wheels, different suspensions, bushings, and so on. Sure, all those elements will change how a vehicle corners and handles, but if you drive it "wrong" to express it this way, it will never "drive right."

To prevent understeering, you must pay close attention to your input. If the speed is right for the corner, but understeering appears from time to time, it may mean that you were too aggressive with the steering, which means just turning in too much at a time or too swiftly. Doing either will upset the balance of the car, especially when done brutally.

Another possibility is that you rushed or were too brutal in the transition between braking and turning. Try to be as smooth as possible, and do not jerk the vehicle into a corner—even a Scandinavian flick is done with a certain smoothness. Doing it hard and fast, as you might have seen in a movie, will upset the tire's circle of grip, as explained above, and it will not be able to both corner and slow down.

Vehicles understeering on the Nurburgring
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by Auto Addiction
If smoothness has not fixed the problem described above, which usually appears at turn-in, you are not being smooth enough. Reduce your steering input and even try approaching it slower until you figure out how to feel a tire's grip threshold.

If the understeering behavior appears at the apex of a corner, you must try trail braking into that corner and maintain a bit of pressure up until the apex, including it into a gentle – and we underline gentle here trail braking phase.

If the understeer began after you have accelerated out of the apex, or what you thought was the apex, lift off the go-faster pedal just a bit, which will bring a bit more weight on the front axle, compress the suspension exactly right and help reduce or eliminate understeer.

In the case of corner exit understeer, it means only one thing in a normal vehicle – you are being greedy with the gas pedal. If the vehicle cannot complete the corner safely just as it was finishing it and you are on the power, but it is going wide, it means that you have too much acceleration input for your tires' grip threshold.

Apex line explained by Team O'Neill Rally School instructor
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by TeamOneilRally
Before you watch the video below, which is a compilation of understeering events on the same corner of the Nürburgring, you can think of a piece of string tied to your gas, brake, and steering.

If you begin steering, the “string” will start to limit how much you can brake or accelerate, and vice versa. The described string is the circle of grip for a tire. Now, feel free to watch the video below and see where each driver made a mistake.

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Editor's note: For illustration purposes, the photo gallery shows several screengrabs from various YouTube videos.

About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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