From the March 2017 issue
No one has ever understeered their way to driving glory. In addition to being the enemy of driving pleasure, understeer, if potent enough, has the magical ability to reshape the front end of your car. It?s bad.
Pendulum turns and left-foot braking, practices common in the world of low-grip driving, also happen to be understeer?s greatest foes. This test measures the effectiveness of those techniques. The goal, in this case, is to destabilize the chassis and point the drive wheels in the desired direction, allowing earlier throttle application and faster exit speed than is achievable using conventional road-racing techniques. Or so goes the theory.

Taken from our VBOX data, the different lines in this illustration represent the actual paths created using each technique. Despite the Scandinavian flick, the left-foot-braking run (red) uses less road and is faster. The conventional line (blue) is slower partly because understeer causes it to miss the apex. Tim O?Neil, winner of five U.S. and North American rally championships and founder of the Team O?Neil Rally School, says there are multiple benefits of left-foot braking. High on his list: correcting understeer, inducing oversteer, and aiding ­timing in changing the direction of a slide. The great philosopher Sammy Hagar might have immortalized the notion of using one foot on the brake and one on the gas, but O?Neil helped perfect it.

Despite these benefits, carmakers and lawmakers alike take a d...