Steering Basics

One hundred pesos gone to Initial D again. Katrina played once in her Integra; I did four times in my Evo4.

My Evo4 right now has 225,000 points, still far from the 1,000,000-point mark. Guess it'll be boring just yakking about Initial D...

Just for fun, let's talk about one aspect of driving: steering. If you allow yourself to be part of the John Reynoso Driving School (it's free, don't worry...), I'll teach you all I know for now. I'm still planning to go to race driving school.

Let's recall our Physics lessons, shall we?

One of Newton's Laws states that a body will remain in motion on a straight line unless acted upon by an outside force. In out case, imagine the body of the car as the object travelling the straight line and the tires as the outside force.

The tires have the capacity of changing the motion of the car due to the friction it has with the ground; thus, the tires are capable of producing an outside force. So how do tires move the car, you ask? It pushes the ground backward so that the tire moves forward. It's synonymous to pushing your feet back to move forward when walking. The better the friction, the more force there is transmitted.

Now comes the steering wheel. It is connected to a rod which directs where the tire would face. Since the tire can only push back to move forward, the tire therefore grips the road and moves towards where it is pointing. This, in effect, causes the car to turn left or right, or wherever you turn the wheel.

Now you've learned the mechanical basics of steering. Give yourself a smile and a tap on the shoulder.

I'll talk about slip angles and drifting some other time. I need to sleep and fix the car six hours from now.