Here’s What Happens When You Don’t Follow the Racing Line

Last week, we wrote a story about the racing line and why it’s so important if you’re going to drive fast. Then we wrote about the difference between rear-engine, mid-engine, and front-engine vehicles a few days later. Today, we are greeted with a video that combines these two subjects in a manner that we can all learn from. It’s a clip of what happens when you don’t know how to drive your supercar.

Let’s review the tapes

The Ultima GTR comes around the corner about 2 seconds into the video, and at first everything looks normal. Then, you see the Ultima start to lose control. The car swerves to its right and drives up onto the curb. The driver then steers hard to the left, nearly misses a pedestrian, and comes to a halt after running into a small vehicle. Luckily, the only casualties in this collision are a few bumpers, lights, and rims on the Ultima.

Why it happened

Here’s our theory of what happened: the Ultima GTR is an extremely powerful mid-engine rear-wheel drive (RWD) car. Since it’s RWD, all its power goes straight to the back wheels. As we learned in our other post, RWD vehicles are prone to oversteer (for those who don’t know, oversteer simply means turning more sharply than was intended). Typically oversteer occurs when rear tires lose traction because of road conditions, or because the RPMs are too high.

In this case, the Ultima GTR driver rounded the corner and accelerated too hard before straightening out the wheels. With the wheels still turned right, the car lost traction and sent the back end out to the left, pointing the car wheels further to the right. That resulted in them running off the road and crashing their beautiful supercar.

The moral of this story

If you’re going to drive fast, learn how to do it right. Check out some of our posts to get you started, and maybe even take a look at these videos from Motor Trend’s The Racing Line. They won’t steer you wrong.

And most importantly, drive safe out there. Driving becomes more dangerous the faster you go, so take it seriously, learn the proper techniques, and always respect the machine.