Understeer Vs Oversteer: What They Are & What’s Better?

If you’re going through a corner and the cart is not rotating as much as you want, and it’s going wide, that is understeer. Instead, if you’re going through a corner in the same corner, and instead of rotating the cart as you want, it’s over rotating, and it’s pointing you towards the inside of the corner with the rear that is kind of sliding. Well, that’s oversteer. Well, it’s basically pretty much it, you know. We don’t have to over complicate things. I mean, understeer is when there is not enough rotation, and oversteer when versus too much rotation, and you know you can call it in all the ways that you want, you can say, oh, the rear is sliding, or the front is too much when you have oversteer, or you can say, oh, the front is missing, or the rear is pushing, but realistically, the thing you’re referring to is a balance issue, which is either understeer or overseer now. Yes, then it’s obviously important, and which is, by the way, the most difficult part to understand whether the issue is coming from the front or it’s coming from the rear, because maybe you may have a perfectly strong rear, but the front is not strong enough, and so you may have understeer, and if you try and go make the rear loose, you will have, yes, better balance, let’s say, but you will probably have not enough grip in the front and not enough grip in the rear, so yes, overall you’re very free, as we call it in karting. You’re very loose, but you are not very grippy. So, whenever you have used tires and the track is slippery, you may struggle, but whenever you have new tires and the highest eye grip, maybe you’re gonna excel. So, realistically, the second point is, okay, figuring out whether it’s a front issue or a rear issue, but the number one priority is to always understand whether you have understeer or you have oversteer in terms of balance, that is the number thing, and then again we will work on the front end or on the rear end, but I mean that’s the priority all the engineers are looking for, also when you are in formula cars, if you ever get to, I hope for you. I mean, if that’s your goal, but I remember, like, when I was in Formula Three for the first time, I was, you know, getting asked by my engineer to fill up a paper every session that would ask me how much understeer, oversteer head in every corner, entry, need, and exit phase, and basically we had this one to five, I had to choose, so let’s say I could choose three out of five understeer on entry, two out of five understeer on mid corner, and maybe like three out of five overseer on exit. Now it was interesting because it would allow you to be self-aware of what was happening in the car, and I remember that at first I wasn’t very good at that. My teammate, Charles Leclerc, was way better in terms of that, because he had one year more experience, and he’s always been one year older than me, but I mean, I had to learn from him, and he could be a bit more specific than I was, and to be honest, in karting, I wasn’t doing that sort of technique, and now I try to get my kids at baby race to do that, all the sessions, because it helps them to be more self-aware, so I wish that somebody gave me the structure, and let’s say the task to fill up this entry, exit, mid understeer, oversteer sheet, so that it would give you more self-awareness. But I always did this in a more manual way with my mechanic, in a less sophisticated way. I would always tell my mechanic in karting, we were debriefing a recession, and I would be, yes, I mean, I have a bit of entry understeer, and in the exit is okay, in the mid corner is okay, or I would say, oh, in the mid corner I have a bit of oversteer, the entry is okay, the exit is okay. I would be quite vague, which, of course, in engineers with Formula Three and Formula Two, or Formula One, they don’t like this sort of mediocre feedback, they want to have highly specific feedback, if they can improve the car, they need to know your feeling on the car, and they need to know what’s what’s needed to be changed to go faster. So, you need to be very good at giving feedback, and if you are not right now, you got to learn how to – that’s a skill of its own. So, you should really focus yourself on becoming better at giving feedback, and yeah, one of those ways is to take a track map and list entry, mid, exit of every corner from one to five. How much understeer or overseer you have. Remember, when it comes to understeer, you have to remember that there’s gonna be less rotation than you were expecting, and you were hoping to get. That’s most of the times very bad, because you know if you cannot have the rotation, you have to wait to go on the throttle, and if you still try to go on the throttle and carry the same amount of speed as if you had with a neutral balance, it’s basically gonna send you out, it’s gonna push you off, and you will have to bake off on the exit, or you will again probably go in the grass. So it’s very key that if you have understeer, you fix it on the setup side, or you can fix it mostly with the driving. I would say you can’t fix everything with underseer. You can fix the entry to mid corner phase with, uh, with the driving, but the mid exit – well, the exit specifically will be quite hard. The way you can reduce the underseer on entry and kind of fix it and put a patch on it, even though you may not be able to fix it completely, but the way to fix it, at least partially, is to create more rotation by using the brakes a little bit more, a little bit harder, a little bit more aggressive, and trailing them more. So, whenever you trail the brakes, you have to remember that you shift the weight more in the front and a little bit lower as well. So, when you do that, you essentially create more pitch and more rotation. Okay, so if you feel like there’s not enough rotation and you’re, let’s say, at 80% of your braking capacity, you gotta make sure. Get to that 100% braking capacity, and when you get to that 100% again, you will get more rotation, and that’s going to help you to rotate the car and point the car exactly where you want it to be, in the mid corner. And when you do a proper rotation on entry to mid, then the exit will almost always come as a consequence, and it will most of times be really good. So, yeah, you got to make sure you use the brakes properly, and in the karting, you can actually use a little bit the body, you can lean out a little bit if you need more rotation. I don’t necessarily recommend to just use your body as a strategy, but if it’s like slippery in the morning and it’s slippery in the first couple of laps, and you can’t really change the setup for those two laps, you can’t make a dynamic setup. I mean, I mean, in Formula One, they can do something with their, with their steering wheel settings, but you can’t really change even there the setup from from from lap to lap or from corner to corner. So, if you ever feel like the first two laps, the truck is slippery, the tires are slippery, everything, you can, you can make sure that you can generate a little bit rotation by again being a bit more aggressive, and again, you just remember, you don’t generate rotation only with the brakes or with the body by leaning out. You also generate rotation by carrying more speed. This is important. Think about it, whenever you are running in an engine, because you have to make sure the engine is run in and it’s a new piston or whatever, it’s a new engine. So, whenever you go slow in a session where you have to run in the engine, you know that you’re carrying very little speed in the corners, right, and you feel like the car is understeer, the balance is understeer because you’re not carrying the speed, and because you’re going very low speed and not on the limit, you are not generating the rotation, and with that same setup, then when you start to push, you start to generate rotation, you start to get oversteer, so remember, if you are not carrying the optimal speed right now, you gotta remember that you will always have rotation. If instead you start to carry more speed in the corners, you will have more rotation. Okay, you’ll have way more rotation, and maybe even turn into oversteer. Like, if you can give the same car setup to two drivers, one that is aggressive and one that is very smooth and always driving under the limit, etc. And that driver who’s very aggressive will report that he has oversteer, and the driver who has a very smooth driving style, he will report that he has understeer. So the way you drive massively affects the balance of the cart and the car. So you gotta remember, in cars it’s less, you still feel the effect of the driving style, but in karting is a bit more. I would say, even though in cars there’s way more weight transfer, there’s like more dynamic ride-eyed change, because you know when you break the front pitches forward, the rear lifts up, even though you may have the anti-dive and anti-squads, you know, but it’s still going to be felt massively in cards too. So, yes, long story short, the driver makes a massive difference in terms of balance. Really, not gonna lie, I’ve seen it happening on myself and on all the other drivers I’ve been working with at Bay Brace. It’s, it’s just crazy how much difference the balance makes in, in terms of driving. And so, if you have understeer, remember the only way you can do when you’re driving, you can’t really change the setup when you’re driving, right? So, what you can do is to brake a little bit harder, maybe use a little bit of your body by leaning out a bit and carrying a bit more speed into the corners, by doing so, you’ll generate a lot of rotation, probably enough to make you survive that session and still get really good lap times, and then when you’re finished with the session, and you’re again gonna be to your mechanic, listen, I have understeer four out of five on the entry, three out of five in the mid corner, and two out of five on the exit, so he knows exactly where to work on, or you can even give him some setup tips, because maybe he knows, he knows both of you knows very well how to set up the card, like it was my case in karting, I wouldn’t be okay. Now we need to change the axle, like a different rear, or we need to give way more caster. Okay, so we would be doing those kind of things, and I’m pretty sure if you learn how to do those two, you will not only get a better setup, but also when you drive, you can feel more and better what you’re supposed to do, to you know, counterbalance, let’s say that negative balance, which could be understeer or oversteer, you know. I remember this thing is important that you remember, it’s an important reminder. You will always have either understeer or oversteer when you’re pushing the limits and you’re above the limits. Remember, it’s okay to have one out of five oversteer or one out of five understeer. If you have four out of five overseer or four out of five underseer, that’s not okay. But every time you push the limits, especially when you end up making mistakes and you go beyond the limits, every time you do those mistakes and you push beyond the limits, you will always have some sort of balance, imperfection, and it’s just normal, you know. It’s never going to be on rails. Okay, and obviously it depends on the sleep angle. I mean, karting has a pretty wide slip angle compared to cars, single seaters, and so it’s way easier to be on that slide. Momentum, you will always be sliding to be fast. Also, Max Verstappen said the same in a podcast when he was in Brazil, where he was saying that, you know, karting, you have to almost, always be on the edge of sliding, and because the sleep angle of the tire is completely different to the one of single seater, in single seaters, you’re not sliding as much as you are, you are really pretty much driving on rails, and so that’s a big distinction between karting and single seaters, but again, you have to be aware of that, you will never. Have a neutral balance whenever you are pushing the limits like crazy, and so you will always have either a little bit oversteer or either a little bit understeer. It’s matter of you to understand what you prefer. Would you prefer to be more on the oversteer side or on the understeer side? Me personally, and as well as the most successful racing drivers of all times, like Schumacher, Verstappen, as well as Senna, now I’m not saying I’m one of those, but in karting I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, not only as a driver but also as a team manager. So, I feel that I know a thing or two, and what I’ve seen is that if I have to choose one between the other, I would always pick oversteer to understeer, because oversteer you can control it easier than understeer, and to be honest, you can carry more minimum speed in a corner if you have one out of five oversteerer than you have one out of five understeer. It’s always like that. It’s not only in the dry but it’s also in the wet conditions a lot. So, give me oversteer every day of my life. Don’t give me understeer, because when I have understeer, I need to drive more dirty. I need to rotate the car in a natural way, which doesn’t feel natural to me, like, again, like over pushing the entry, like, too much, using my body, and being quite scrubby also on the steering wheel, whereas when I have quite a bit of oversteer, it helps me, because I can carry a lot of speed in the corners, while being super smooth with the steering, and yeah, just being quite smooth with my inputs, and I can be nice and stable in terms of body transfer, I can be even leaning in rather than leaning out, and that’s gonna even help me out in terms of rear. So, yeah, I just feel that it comes down to experience and what one prefers. But every time you have oversteer, you can control it more, and you will always end up having more minimum to exit speed than if you had understeer. And in karting, I think this is easy to control when you are in cars. It’s more difficult because you know you’re driving at 320 kilometers an hour if you drive an F or an f2 and essentially you’re going close to the walls like trucks like Baku or Macau in f, and you know whenever you’re going at that speed, if you have oversteer is a little bit unpredictable, is a little bit scary. So that’s why driving an oversteer car, in that case, is it’s a bit scary, and that’s why you need to have a lot of confidence in yourself, and that’s why you need to develop that oversteer perception and car control skills when you are in car team, because if you do that late, it’s not gonna work, and you will not gonna be used to it. That’s why drivers like Alex Alban has famously said that it’s so hard to drive the same car as Max Estephan, because, because he’s just so pointy on the front, his car is super high rotating, and it’s like super sensible, so when you’re touching the steering wheel with one extra degree of steering angle, the car is gonna be so slip, like so unpredictable, and it’s so easy to crash, so that’s why you need to be such a legendary driver, in terms of, yeah, car control master, and that’s why Max has happened, has historically destroyed his teammates, because he would have an aggressive driving style with a lot of rotation that his teammates couldn’t match, and then Red Bull, of course, would prefer to develop the car Max wanted, because you know he’s always been the one bringing the championships and the wins, and then the other driver basically had to adapt and get whatever he could, but obviously you know the reality is that it’s not just Max saying this, or you know, trying to, you know, use this oversteer car, it’s just that the oversteer car is a faster car all the time. Obviously, you don’t want to have a lotus oversteer, but if you have to choose again between a little bit of overseas, a little bit of understeer, but to have a little bit oversteer, but of course it doesn’t have to be slidy or loose, that it gives you zero grip. It should be grippy, but with high rotation. That’s the way I like to develop cards as well. So that’s very important. Remember, when you have oversteer, the only way you can control it is by being smoother with your inputs. That’s the way you can do in karting. So you, you have to be more controlled on the brakes. The first hitting input, it has to be very smooth. Also, you shouldn’t lean out at all, because if you lean out and you have overseer, you just make it worse. You have to actually lean in instead. And, yeah, just overall, you got to make sure you are very smooth with your inputs, and doing so, you’re going to be fast. That’s why, in karting, the drivers who are the fastest are the ones where the smoothest. And it’s just historically been the best thing, and it’s also been the same for me, and I can totally relate. So, I hope this master guide of understeer versus oversteer is helping you out, and will help you out in the future. Make sure you remember that whenever you’re pushing the limits, you’re always going to experience either a little bit of understeer or a little oversteer, especially in karting, where the slip angle is so wide that it’s, you’re basically going to be always sliding, okay? Either on the fronts or on the rear, you’re always going to be sliding and on the edge of sliding, so that’s the only way to be fast, by the way. So you’re always going to have a little bit of understeer, oversteer. If it’s a little bit and it’s almost on rails, that’s fine, but if you are too much, then it’s not fine, and you have to fix it either with your driving in that specific session or with the setup. That’s why setup tuning is key, and that’s why drivers need to know this. I teach all of this in my six months training program, where I have six months, 25 drivers every six months joining me in live Zoom meetings, as well as having access to 600 plus exclusively prerecorded lessons, where you can find huge amounts of value and find a lot of laptop. Besides that, remember to hit. Me up on Instagram at Alessio Lorandi. I’ll see you next time. Ciao.