Racing line
term in motorsports
In motorsport, the racing line, or simply "the line," is the optimal path around a race course. In most cases, the line makes use of the entire width of the track to lengthen the radius of a turn: entering at the outside edge, touching the "apex"—a point on the inside edge—then exiting the turn by returning outside.
Description
Driving the racing line is a primary technique for minimizing the overall course time. As the optimal path around a race course, the racing line can often be glimpsed on the asphalt in the form of tire skid marks. A. J. Baime described its formation in the early laps of a race at Le Mans:As the pack stretched out in single file—carving the black stripe into the pavement that was the racing line—the real competition began.
Variations
In general, the optimal line into a corner of a race course is an arc of continuously changing radius. The line starts at the outside of the road and decreases in radius as the car decelerates towards a point on the inside (often involving trail braking). After clipping this point, the line increases in radius as the car accelerates, ending at the outside of the road. The clipping point is called the apex.
Several variations on this basic format exist, usually described by the relative location of the apex (i.e.
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This entry incorporates text from “Racing line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.