The first time you bring a new vehicle to the track to get sorted, you probably should not line up against the tree with the “just f’ing send it!” mentality, especially if you’ve added a ton of power recently and haven’t given it a shot. Use the crawl-walk-run line of thinking: make sure you know where the traction is and that everything can and will hold together. You don’t want to find out that the brake pedal doesn’t function when you’re trying to bring it down from a buck-fifty at the far end of the track, do you? That’s the crawl phase. The Walk phase is where you gradually make your way into a full-tilt launch. You aren’t going from 0-100%, though. You learn what the machine will do…will it sink onto the tires? Will it raise up and blow the rears off? Does it walk under full throttle in any direction and how hard does it move? Those kinds of things are best to learn at 50% or 75%, not at vMAX speed. Run is self-explanitory: issues are dialed out, you know what the rig will do…NOW is when you square off, stage up and f’ing send it. That’s how you reduce the risk of man and machine becoming one big ball of unified mess in the shutdown area. Want to see that in practice? Watch as this twin-turbo Chevy truck sorts itself out at Fontana…that ends today’s lesson, folks.
