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Intro

Which training?

The elementary handling course by Porsche was instructive, but I needed something with more personal attention and more actual track time. Also, I didn't feel any need to do more braking exercises, skid corrections, slaloms and the like. They're most certainly useful and fun, but not what I needed.

Another thing I don't need right now is a racing license. It may be cool to be able to say that you have one, but it's bloody expensive getting it. Entering races is even more expensive.

So, what did I need? I needed

• Lots of one-on-one instructing time
• Lots of on-track time
• To learn more about handling
• To learn even more about handling

• What are my typical mistakes?
• What should I do instead?
• What exactly makes a 964 go sideways?
• How do you deal with a sideways 964?

After a bit of discussion on what I wanted and how he could cater for that, we arrived at a 2-hour training in my 964 in Liège. Track time would be continuous, and Stéphane would be concentrating his attention on me only. A nice bonus was that he used to own a 964 C2 himself, and still has a set of 16" wheels which could be used during the training to avoid killing my own rear tyres.

Setting up the car

In Liège the first thing on the agenda was to swap my tyres for Stéphane's. His were actually in better shape than mine when we started.

It also gave me a chance to see what my car looked like with the original Design 90 wheels.

To start off, Stéphane took the car round for a few laps to get a feel for how it handled. Even for an experienced driver like him it takes a few turns to get into the groove. There are water hoses around the track that keep the entire training area wet. You're not supposed to touch them, but a spinning car isn't all that easy to control, so it does happen once in a while, as you can see in the video.

The chief instructor, Philippe, then took the wheel to sample the car. From the first turn on we went sideways, and stayed sideways for nearly the entire lap. Philippe too spun out once, and we stopped to adjust the tyre pressures. The car was on 16" Design 90 wheels, and the pressures were adjusted to 2.2 bar in front and 2.8 bar in the rear. Another test lap followed with Stéphane behind the wheel. With the raised pressure in the rear tyres the car was much easier to control.

The comments you hear during these laps are interesting, ranging from "Your car understeers like a pig, like all 911's" to "Your car is very sensitive" and "Ah, a good car" (in a very satisfied tone of voice). Then there's "It's not an easy car" and "I love this car. If you ever sell it, let me know" :-) I'd already figured out that the 964 wasn't all that easy to drive near the limit, which is exactly why I'd booked this training.

With the car set up properly the real training began with Stéphane explaining what to do (start off easy) and what not to do (run over pipes, and if you do, release the brake while going over them). Of course there was a little theory about sliding. You try to create the slide by weight transfer, and you use the throttle to maintain the slide.

It's all a matter of timing and developing a feeling for what the car is doing. The procedure is as follows:

• approach the turn while braking;
• while braking turn in and come off the brakes;
• steer in quickly with a relatively small steering angle; the only aim of the steering input is to upset the car;
• once you feel the car react, you then go back on the throttle.

On the very slippery plate it's easier: the car goes sideways when you blip the throttle. As I found out, it's quite easy to give too big a blip :-P

The facility looks pretty basic, but is very well suited to the objective of sliding cars around. The "track" consists of a large concrete slab. The concrete has been impregnated to make it more slippy. There are no high ridges or other obstacles. The track consists of 2 turns of about 225 degrees, linked by a diagonal straight bit and a longer straight along the edge of the concrete.

Then it was my turn: start slow, without trying to slide the car, to get a feel for the grip. When walking around it felt quite slippery, but the 964 on ancient tyres still managed to find a surprising amount of grip. Still, it didn't take long to get the first twitches. There's no doubt you could go sideways on the second lap if you wanted to, but it's more my style to try to find the limit from the non-slippy side.

The pace gradually quickened, and at the skid plate I got some nice slides going. In the meantime I'd gotten a handle on which lines to take on this rather featureless track. There are lines to indicate the "track", but they're difficult to see late on a November afternoon. The water pipes offer much better reference points.

Then followed some more laps at a slightly higher pace, and then some more lurid sliding at the skid plate. After getting to know the lines to take, the speed was increased with the aim of getting some slides going, without trying to maintain the slide.

It took some time to get rid of my "kill-the-skid-NOW" reflexes: the whole point of drifting is not to kill the slide immediately. This was even harder when trying to combine to skids in opposite directions. My natural reaction is to try to avoid one skid leading to another, bigger, skid in the other direction. As pointed out by Gijs van Lennep in Zandvoort, the objective is to steer relatively gently into the skid, and when the car has reached the maximum skid angle to unwind the steering wheel as fast as you can to avoid the counterskid. This approach is a bit counterproductive if you want to use the rotation created during the recovery of the first skid to help the initial rotation of a second skid in the other direction. Obviously timing is everything here: unwind too quickly and you won't have a counterskid. Unwind too slowly and the counterskid will be so violent that you're pointing backwards before you know it. After a few attempts I decided on sticking to the basics first :)

I found that looking where you want to go definitely helps. In my case not so much in the "if you look at an obstacle you will run into it" sense, but more in the "if you look where you want to end up you'll free up much-needed processing power upstairs". I'm perfectly capable of looking at an obstacle while going sideways and driving round it, but i noticed that once I used proper viewing techniques I was much more relaxed and things started to come together: smaller and more frequent throttle and steering adjustments, and hence better drifts.

The fading light ended the fun all too soon. A short summary of the main points I learned:

• Viewing technique really is very important
• To induce a slide in a controlled manner, the timing of unsettling the car is crucial. A bit too early yields understeer; a bit too late and you'll just accelerate
• I tend to use too much steering
• The difference between "not enough", "just right" and "too much" throttle is tiny...