[GrandSport]

Originally Posted by CSG Mike

A few outside points to think of @GrandSport. These aren't necessarily directly applicable, but does provide some insight into other scenarios.

Many race cars/series mandate ABS/TC, so the option isn't even presented. It makes sense, given that the vast majority of racers are gentleman drivers.

Motorsport ABS is vastly different from a reactive street car ABS. I'd run motorsport ABS all day, if my objective was purely to go fast.

TC/VSC can get very intrusive if there's a setup error, even if you're driving in a very conservative, responsible manner, something like a very comfortable 25mph around a large cloversleaf, that even a loaded big rig would take at 25.

Street car ABS is reactive. I'm a firm believer that anyone who wants to learn to threshold brake can out-perform CRUSHING their brake pedal and engaging their street ABS every single time. You can out-perform the ABS before lockup, because static friction is greater than kinetic friction, and you can ride that line before lockup, and ABS pulsing. That said, pulling the ABS fuse won't make any car stop faster; it only takes away the safety net. Executing this on track while driving, outside a simple braking exercise, is far more challenging than just doing it purely to practice the skill, but isn't the challenge why we do this in the first place? For the same reason, I'd run motorsport TC all day to go fast, but the challenge is what is fun.

Equating lockup to spinning tires is not perfect, but close enough for the sake of comparison. Everyone universally agrees that spinning (sliding against the surface) tires has less traction than gripping, even if massively sub-par. The worst TC will still likely out-accelerate a car wildly spinning tires. The opposite can (very crudely) be equated. A sliding tire will likely do worse by a LOT than a nowhere-near-threshold stop. Think back to the times someone locks up under panicking, and slides off track at a near comically low speed, when they could have just eased off the pedal and turned instead. Very imperfect analogy, I know.

Well, dont set your car up wrong, lol. And if you do, dont drive it hard. I've never seen a situation where, driving on the road, my TS/SCS kicked in and I thought it was too intrusive. While I have a lot of 86 experience, it's almost 100% with it off on the track, so maybe I'm wrong about the 86s.

Motorsport management of any sort- SC, TC, ABS, engine, etc are all very different than street for sure (though, street is getting pretty good!). But I'd be very interested to see what the theoretical "best" differences are between street ABS and no-abs with a pro 1driver 1) doing braking exercises and 2) time per braking zone or lap or something. I bet it's small. And I bet its negative for pretty much every HPDE driver and even any am racer that isn't consistently podiuming.


I don't have ABS in the Miata and it seemed like I couldn't go 2 full days without flat spots starting. I eventually just decided to taking it easier on the brakes. It wasn't that I constantly locked them up. Quite the opposite. Maybe twice a a day. After the first one or two lock ups, it just gets worse and worse till looking at the brakes locks them up.

Rough math at my local track is I'm doing 80-100 braking zones per 30 min session. That's 400-600 a day. Call it 1000 for two track days. Well, great. If I dont lock them 99.5% of the time, that's still 5 times I locked them up and it's a bad flat spot in development.