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Chapter 1 - Compound Corners

A Compound Corner is a series of corners, close enough such that the car is always turning and never travelling in a straight line.


FunCup Endurance Championship, Misano 2009
Professional Racing Driver and Coach, Nigel Greensall

"It is a common mistake to treat compound corners as two separate items, whereas they should be tackled as one section, with sacrifices being made in the first corner to gain maximum exit speed. It often seems counter-intuitive not to maximise the speed through the first corner, but the end result is often a faster lap.

There are many examples, but let's take Misano Circuit which is shown on the left, Turns 12 and 13 which consists of a shallow right hand corner followed by a sharper right hand corner.

On first inspection you may naturally assume that you have to clip apexes of both Turns 12 and 13 to get the best lap-time.

However, there are many other ways to take these corners and I have found that the quickest for me is to almost ignore Turn 12 by missing the apex completely, and set yourself up for a nice wide entry into Turn 13, which seems a little odd at first.

To see this line in action, have a look at the image on the left, which shows my preferred line in red, and my team mates line in blue. The red line misses the apex of Turn 12 by almost 2m, but maintains the same apex speed of 105mph as the blue line which clips the apex.

Interestingly, through Turn 12 you are not quite on the limit of grip (a peak of 0.85G), so you can experiment with your lines through here without losing any speed.

This wider line is also slightly shorter, which also gives a small advantage.

The screenshot on the right shows the apex point of Turn 12, where both approaches have the same speed, 105mph. It is after this point where the reason for this wider line becomes clearer...

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