No, it's not... You left-foot brake when you DON'T have to shift gear, and it is for balancing the car, as Jamexing said... When you have to shift gear, heel and toe is the better technique for obvious reasons...
No, it's not... You left-foot brake when you DON'T have to shift gear, and it is for balancing the car, as Jamexing said... When you have to shift gear, heel and toe is the better technique for obvious reasons...
thats not quite true
the thing is a clutch (which is what your left foot is used to) is about as hard to press as a brake pedal ... so if you press the brakes with your left foot without knowing this you will automatically press it as if it was a clutch (assuming that a clutch pedal is as easy to press as the gas pedal) so you think youre starting out lightly but end up doing the exact opposite
The ideal situation would be to use your left foot solely for the brakes and your right foot solely for the accelerator (as Greg Murphy does in V8 Supercars). Aside from the obvious benefits of being able to use the brake and accelerator pedals at the same time to balance the car mid corner and eliminate time spent getting across from one pedal to the other there's another benefit in braking. With a traditional heel and toe technique (i.e. right foot operating the brake pedal with blips of the throttle on gearchange and the left foot operating the clutch), there's a variance in brake pedal pressure as you shift your right foot to blip the throttle. This variance in pedal pressure means you can never get exactly the right pressure you want for the whole stop, which at best means you're losing time and at worst can cause brake locking/spins etc. If you can use your left foot on the brake and the right foot on the accelerator at all times you can modulate each pedal exactly how you wish. Of course, not all gearboxes can be shifted easily and quickly without using the clutch and I'm not even sure if it's possible in LFS (maybe someone can give it a go, I don't have a 3 pedal setup, just a DFP).
The short answer to the question of is left foot braking necessary is no. The longer answer is yes, if you want to maximise your potential. The amount of time you save by not having to move from one pedal to the other may seem small, but multiply it by the tens/hundreds/thousands of times you do it and you're soon looking at a lot of lost time. The increase in car control from corner entry to mid corner can also, with practice, be a big advantage. Spend some time practising and the rewards should soon be evident.
The short answer to the question of is left foot braking necessary is no. The longer answer is yes, if you want to maximise your potential. The amount of time you save by not having to move from one pedal to the other may seem small, but multiply it by the tens/hundreds/thousands of times you do it and you're soon looking at a lot of lost time. The increase in car control from corner entry to mid corner can also, with practice, be a big advantage. Spend some time practising and the rewards should soon be evident.
I don't know, I think that there is no time to use left foot braking as when braking you need to downshift and when you start turning in it is already time to bring up speed again with such low power cars I drive.
If I would drive FWD or AWD then there would be need to control front grip with great accuracy and left foot braking will help, also if you can change gears without a clutch that is usable, but if you need to operate clutch then I don't really find time for it or at least not enough time so that it would be any performance gain.
Maybe if driver has different technic, mine is to kill speed before corner and accelerate trough corner in most places.
Hmm, come to think about it, perhaps there is some tracks where that is more usable and specially in rallying where you don't necessarily change gear at braking.
But even my heel&toe is starting to be bit bad as I have not practised that for long time.
If I would drive FWD or AWD then there would be need to control front grip with great accuracy and left foot braking will help, also if you can change gears without a clutch that is usable, but if you need to operate clutch then I don't really find time for it or at least not enough time so that it would be any performance gain.
Maybe if driver has different technic, mine is to kill speed before corner and accelerate trough corner in most places.
Hmm, come to think about it, perhaps there is some tracks where that is more usable and specially in rallying where you don't necessarily change gear at braking.
But even my heel&toe is starting to be bit bad as I have not practised that for long time.
RFB can be just as good when it's done very well, look at the footwork of a great driver making clutched shifts, the onboard with Walter Rohls Quattro comes to mind, he uses a mixture of heel and toe and left foot braking between shifts.
It works, kind of. On downshifts you have to blip enough and either time the throttle blip exactly when you shift OR you can put the shifter on the gear and then blip the throttle = superfast downshift. Both ways aren't very realistic. On upshifts the situation is a bit similar. You have to wait for the transmission to completely unload before the shift works (takes really long especially on road cars) and you can also use the shifter first, then get off the throttle method.
In conclusion: It works like in real life, except you can't force the gears in place like you should. You can also abuse the system. I don't even know if it's possible to make it totally realistic either, because we don't have FFB shifters.
Rubens used to brake with his right foot when he was at Ferrari, and he was on occasion quicker than Schumacher. Don't ask me how.
Eh?... How do you plan on clutching while braking? Hence the technique heal-toe...
If your right foot was always on the accelerator and left used for brake/clutch you would be the slowest racer on the circuit
That being the operative word. Given both had setups that fit them and both picked the opimum line for a given situation, the left foot braking master usually dominates.
As some have already mentioned here, real brakes are pressure sensitive and this only reinforces what I said about the level finesse required to LFB PROPERLY.
Just look at Rubens right NOW. Languishing with a 2nd rate team and lost in the middle of nowhere on the drivers championship scoreboard. Even if he is still in Ferrari I doubt he would have outdone Massa and Kimi.
I don't want to get into an argument about how equally provided for Schumacher and Barrichello were at Ferrari, but I think it was pretty clear from all the controversy through that period that they were rarely - if ever - on level terms within the team.
I hear Rubens is left-foot braking these days. And the Honda is a bit of a dog - it has to be, given how regularly it's being beaten by last year's car.
either our calves are very different or theres something wrong with me but for the way my muscles work a pressure sensitive pedal is much much easier to control than a position sensitive one
Personally I'm happier with pressure sensitive brakes like RL cars then position sensitive ones too, which is why I have a much easier time with pushing real cars to their limits consistently and safely. Though honestly, if brakeline flex is severely reduced with stainless steel brakelines, then pressure will be more linearly correlated with pedal position anyway.
But what many seem to face here is the fact that they are more used to driving with an artificial steering, gearshift and pedal mechanism in computer programs then RL cars. This is where one discovers that computer sims and RL are a mile away. For instance, there is no reset button...
BTW, F-1 is more a joke than anything else these days. Customer cars? (Super Aguri and Honda cars are basically carbon copies) F-1 is supposed to be a lab for cutting edge tech and racing, not some rich man's indulgence in an obscenely expensive hobby with no intention to perform.
Left foot braking necessary? Depends entirely on what you deem necessary. If being faster than 103% of the WR is enough for you, then by all means it is not essential to use LFB. If you want to break WRs? Maybe. Though you need a lot of talent and understanding of LFS physics to achieve that anyway; using LFB isn't a magic thing that will make you miraculously faster, just like using a WR setup will not mean you'll drive WR times instantly, or at all.
shouldnt it be exactly the other way around that by reducing flex the pedal movements should be reduced to the point that you have a pressure point at which you modulate the braking solely by pedal pressure with almost no movement in the pedal at all ?
agreed although thats not the point of this thread
Well, line expansion actually messes the position vs. pressure correlation relationship quite a lot, since the actual pedal position vs. pressure correlation becomes progressive, i.e. very soft initially but the last small portion of travel requires huge effort (pressure). SS lines improve feel by removing this progressive behavior so the pressure exerted is more closely linked to position initially, since the pistons are held off the disc via linear springs anyway. When the pistons start to clamp on the disc with significant force, it is still more linear since the disc material is still roughly linear elastic material anyway. So in effect it's like a soft spring followed by a much stiffer spring. This neglects a lot of stuff such as viscous damping forces from the brake fluid, etc, but it's the general picture.
And yes, LFB works best for those who have a deep understanding of the effects of load shifting/brake bias/etc on vehicle behavior. Mastering it is simply a matter of having this understanding on an intuitive and instinctive level.
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Left foot braking, really necessary?
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