[Video] Lando Norris goes karting

Always love some F1 driver content with karting.

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I feel like Landos convo with Suoer Gt must have been much like Tanguys with me. Basically, fix your braking, dude. That is what is holding me back, he says. Seems like Suoer Gt is in same boat. This must be a common problem amongst the “almost good” karters. Will we ever learn? Given that mr GT is substantially ahead of me, development wise, I ain’t holding my breath. What’s funny is both Lando and Tanguy said the same thing: “fix your braking and the rest of the corner will fall in place.”, basically.

I enjoyed their sim conversation as well. Interesting to hear Landos take on VR.

Braking is for sure the element of driving keeping most racers from being better than they currently are. To get even more granular though, it’s the phase between coming off of the brakes and approaching apex that is where the magic really happens.

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I think it was Jackie Stewart who said that it’s not applying the brakes that matters, but how you come off them?

Braking is where I struggle the most I think, IRL and sim

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Yeah. The issue I have is initial hit. In order to have that modulation range that you speak of, in sim, I am running a very long “throw” on the loadcell brake.

The basic gist of which is that it requires a powerful (80%) hit. Once you back off that limit, the behavior is very different, a wider range of options that can be applied over a broader range. But, you still have to be pretty forceful, it’s over a wider distance.

Anyways, drives me nuts. I have always preferred a very firm brake that you can get to the limit quickly with and have a narrower modulations range. But, it is undeniably slower.

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Basically what Evan said. Braking is, in my opinion and from everything I’ve seen from coaching, pretty much making or braking (pun intended) a corner.

First it’s usually not braking hard enough.
Then it’s braking too early/too long.
Then it’s getting off the brakes too quickly, most of the time.

There’s a very fine transition between braking and rolling into the throttle that people don’t always get. If you don’t brake correctly, you’re already missing the entire corner. That’s why the biggest thing for me with the WPK I mentioned in the other post was the brakes and getting used to them. Really once you get braking down proper, the rest of the corner does just fall into place.

This also really bothered me as a coach with some of the drivers, or more specifically parents, I had last year. I would be talking the driver through the entry to the corner (making sure we’re setting up wide and not over-slowing) and the adult would jump in with “You’ve gotta exit the corner all the way to the outside of the track, not stay half a kart off the edge.” Like dude, we’re getting there. There’s no point in focusing on the exit when we haven’t even entered correctly yet.

Sorry, off topic rant. Focusing on the video, I saw it earlier today. Super cool to see Norris jumping into a kart with SuperGT, they both seem super cool people to hang out with at the track. Lando strikes me as surprisingly humble for an F1 driver. Once point that does bother me from SuperGT’s video is the tire scrubbing. Just like, that’s barely putting any heat in any of the tires. But it was super fun to see and I hope we get more of that in the near future. Maybe Lando runs a club race or something with SuperGT just for fun.

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