How to Play Rally?
Driving a rally car is, of course, a lot like driving a normal car: steering wheel for left and right, throttle for increasing the speed and brakes for decreasing, clutch for shifting and all that. In this chapter we are going to deal with driving the raft.
Sliding Friction
The mechanism that makes this sport different from other is its playing environment. It uses the sliding friction technology rather than gripping friction. It is not that easy to drive on the messy and gravel filled road compared to plain clean road. For instance, if you will apply brakes over the gravel road, all the weight of the car will get transferred to the front wheels and it may end up bolting all the four wheels.
Turning
On the highway or the racetrack, you indicate where you want to summit the corner and you navigate effortlessly from side-to-side at that point. In rally, we need the car to monitor basically that same path, but we want to do it while sliding with the wheels piercing more or less conventional ahead compared to the car.
We want to slide during a turning for several reasons: first, as in decelerating, the static friction circle is actually very low and we want to use the sidewalls of the exhausts to take some of the adjacent forces of the turning.
Weight Balance
The real secret of playing rally effortlessly is the art of balancing the weight of the car in between the front and back wheels. Applied inputs are much less on a steering input at this time. But on the way of transferring weight of car from one end to another, you may get your car roll over to the other direction that it is not supposed to direct. This can be only achieved through throttle and brake that increases the traction on wheels thereby increasing the weight.
The Pendulum
Some corners are difficult to spin by normal techniques unless you apply some different techniques. Taking a normal drift will not help you in this situation. Therefore using a hand brake is not advisable at this moment. Rather a driver may go for Pendulum or Scandinavian Flick.
Rear Wheel Drive
The techniques that we have discussed till now are applicable if you are driving in a front wheel or all-wheel. Balance techniques also applies for the same. Many riders neglect this fact that while driving in rear wheel, using throttle steering can cause sharp turns.
Hand-brakes
The hand brake on the rear side of the steering is known as destabilizer. But it is not recommended to use this so often because it slides the car without helping it in shifting the weights and the results are unpredictable in the high speed points. Use the hand brake only when you want to go off the road and there are tight corners where you cannot use pendulum technique.
Left Foot Braking
Many reasons can be stated in support of this but the biggest reason is the time that you save while playing this kind of sport. While changing from throttle to brake, you save a fraction of second that is also very significant. This is also very important from weight balance point of view.
Front Wheel Drive
Left-foot braking and hand-brakes are there to understand an interesting aspect of FWD rally cars and why they can be very fast. With FWD, left-foot braking can work like a hand-brake, without the disadvantage of not shifting weight forward.
Jumps
The problem is that every driver wants to drive his car nose down. While taking off, a slightest approach of slowing it down or braking may land your car on nose. If you want to accelerate at the launch time, then attempt the power assisted brake and bring it back on to the regulator mode just before the launch.
All drivers want to land their car’s four wheels in slightly different fraction of time while landing. If you want to regain this time of momentum with your car, then try to compress them all at once so that in addition to achieving the above momentum, you will also get the second bonus jump while your back wheels leave the ground.
Bumps and Dips
The principle of Mogul skier states that you can easily transfer the weight of your car on crest or bumps while turning over a terrain. It is all about turning your car during the moment it naturally unweighs itself because it requires zero effort.
Water Splashes
Keep your car in accelerated mode in order to keep your car’s nose up while jumping but this will demand enough momentum to move your car to the other side. Yet, do not move your car very fast because you will end up filling water into air intakes or coils. Make them little bit waterproof and enter into the splash medium speedily with nose up.
