"It's better to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow." I don't know about you, but if I never heard anybody say that hackneyed, stupid old phrase again it would be totally fine with me. I associate it with old dudes in Miatas who are bench-racing between intermediate-group trackday sessions, quasi-hipsters in boxer-engined Toyotas who are trying to explain away why they didn't wave your M3-driving student by for six corners in a row, and pretty much everybody who has never experienced the incandescent joy of throwing something like a Ferrari 458 Speciale through a long, gentle turn in a four-wheel slide.
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In fact, I'm so sick of "slow cars fast," and the passive-aggressive, player-hater mentality that typically accompanies it, that I've come up with a snippy little response that I deliver at every opportunity: "Sure, but it's better to drive a fast car fast than it is to spend your life chugging along in a slow car." You're a fool if you think that some of the big-bore drivers out there aren't pushing just as hard, and just as skillfully, as the most talented Spec Miata racer in your local SCCA region. Not everybody with a "Jake" emblem on his Z06 is an utter moron, you know. Some of them can really wheel.
But there's a kernel of truth in almost every cliché out there, and in this case it's something along the lines of: It's almost impossible to become a truly great driver if you start your trackday career in something that can spin the tires at freeway speed. And there's a solid math-and-science reason why this is so. Allow me to explain.
There are a lot of different skills that make up the toolbox of a top-shelf track rat or club racer, but perhaps the two most important ones are entry speed estimation and midcorner control. Nearly everything else, from "The Line" to tire-conservation strategy, in endurance races, can be learned by rote or by repetition, but those two require a certain amount of genetic talent and a lot of experience in appropriate hardware for the task.
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Entry speed estimation is just what it sounds like. Three drivers are approaching the same corner. The first driver thinks he can turn-in at sixty-five miles per hour. He's wrong; that's too fast. So he spins off and winds up in the gravel or the wall. The second driver thinks he can turn-in at sixty-three miles per hour. He's also wrong; that's too slow. So he watches the rest of the pack drop him through the turn and down the straight that follows.
Only the Goldilocks driver has the ability to correctly estimate the entry speed at sixty-four miles per hour. So he doesn't spin off and he doesn't get left behind. Instead, he comes out of the turn safe and sound, at the maximum possible speed, and he goes on to win the race.
Now, if it were just as simple as remembering a certain speedometer readout for every turn, we'd all be Fernando Alonso. But that maximum possible speed changes all the time. When it rains, then the track is cool, when it's hot, when it rained the night before, when there's oil on the track from the previous run group. When your tires are cold, when they're too hot, when the compound has been heat-cycled too many times, when you have a leaky shock. You get the idea. It's more art than science and it's what separates the IMSA pro from the black-group Porsche Club guy who does six trackdays a year.
Some of it you're born with; my son is already very good at maintaining the right entry speed with just ten or so trackdays under his seven-year-old belt. But it's really a skill that you learn by entering ten thousand corners and seeing when you guessed right and when you guessed wrong and by how much. You start by making big mistakes and then you graduate to making small mistakes and pretty soon you're only making mistakes compared to Wolf Henzler or Max Verstappen.
The problem is this: if you start with a car that arrives at a corner in a big hurry, you won't be able to exercise fine-grained control over your corner entry speed. Let's say you're heading towards China Beach at Mid-Ohio. In a stock Miata, you'll arrive at 105mph; in a Boxster, 135; in a Z06, 160; in a LaFerrari, maybe 180. Now let's say that you need to practice choosing the right speed between 46mph and 49mph to hit the apex of that downhill right-hander. Do you think you'll be more precise if you're starting from 105, or from 180?
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