Go Faster!

The fastest way through a curve on a racetrack is along the racing line. Instead of heading for Indianapolis, Mike Schilli trains his reflexes with a desktop application written in Go, just to be on the safe side.

- Mike Schilli

A few years ago, I got to test the physical limits of my Honda Fit during a safety training session. A short time later, I discovered I was interested in car racing. It's also a more popular hobby than you might think among Silicon Valley employees, who let their tuned private cars off the leash on racetracks like Laguna Seca in California - maybe because of the strict speed limit that typically applies on freeways in the US.

While studying the topic, I was surprised to learn that it's by no means just a matter of keeping your foot on the gas. If you want to break track records, you have to take the turns exactly in line with physical formulas and always find the ideal line in order to knock those vital seconds off your time in each lap. The physical principles of racing are explained in the reference work Going Faster by Carl Lopez [1]. The book describes exactly how quickly you can enter a turn without the car starting to skid and tells you the angle and time at which the driver needs to turn the steering wheel to lose as little time as possible while cornering.

Learning How to Race