How to Take Corners Faster in Sim Racing: A Step-by-Step Method

Look at your own lap times honestly and you will usually find that the deficit is not spread evenly around the circuit. It is concentrated. One or two corners take most of it, and they are the same one or two corners every session — the ones where your braking point moves around, your line changes lap to lap, and you never quite commit to the throttle at the same moment twice.

The instinctive response is to drive that corner harder. That almost never works, because the corner is not difficult due to a lack of effort. It is difficult because something about it is unclear to you — the reference is vague, the visibility is bad, the geometry is unusual, or you have never actually decided what a good version of it looks like.

So this is a method rather than a list of tips. Seven steps, in order, for taking a corner apart and putting it back together. Work through them and you will usually find the problem somewhere in the first four.

Why one corner can cost you a whole lap

A corner you are unsure about does not just lose time inside its own boundaries. It costs you the straight after it, because a bad exit follows you all the way to the next braking zone. It costs you confidence in the corner before it, because you arrive already thinking about the difficult one. And it costs you consistency everywhere, because a corner you cannot repeat forces you to drive the rest of the lap with a margin you would not otherwise need.

That is why fixing one genuinely bad corner is worth far more than shaving a hundredth off five good ones. It is also why more laps rarely fix it — you are repeating the confusion rather than resolving it.

Worth separating this from its opposite, because both are real and they need different work. If the same fault turns up in corner after corner, do not fix the corners — fix the habit appearing in all of them. This page is for the other case: the lap is broadly fine and one specific corner is not.

Step 1: The slow-mo method — line, then exit, then entry

The most useful thing you can do with a corner you are struggling with is stop trying to be fast in it.

The reason is simple. When you attack a corner you do not understand, you make a large mistake somewhere on entry and then spend the rest of the corner reacting to it. You arrive too fast, run wide, drag the car back across the track, and end up cutting in awkwardly. The version of the corner you just drove tells you nothing, because you never actually drove the corner — you drove a recovery from the first error.

So take the speed away first, and add it back in a fixed order.

Phase 2 is the one people skip, and it is the one that pays. Building the exit before the entry means every later change is measured against a known-good outcome instead of a guess.

Step 2: Break the corner into checkpoints

Some corners are hard because they are long, or blind, or both. You cannot see the exit when you commit to the entry, so you are effectively driving from memory — and driving from memory is why the line is different every lap.

The fix is to stop treating it as one decision. Break it into a sequence of positions the car must pass through, and drive from one to the next.

Take a long final corner: instead of processing "big blind right-hander, hope it works", you process a chain — turn in at the third cone, brake at the second, put the right-hand tyres on the painted line, position the car so the white line sits under its centre, trail the brake along the kerb, pick up the throttle where the wall changes angle, and run the right-hand tyres out to the edge. Each of those is a small, checkable thing. None of them requires you to see the whole corner.

Consistency comes from this before it comes from anything else. A corner made of five checkable positions is repeatable; a corner made of one large intention is not.

Step 3: Label the corner type

This one costs nothing and is skipped by almost everybody.

Before you work on a corner, name it. Is it a hairpin? A chicane? A double apex? Is it blind, off-camber, compressed, increasing or decreasing radius? The label matters because it tells you, in advance, what that kind of corner generally punishes and what it generally rewards — and therefore where to look first.

• Hairpin — rewards hard, straight braking and a late apex; punishes an early apex, which ruins a long exit.
• Chicane — rewards precision and kerb usage; punishes hesitation and over-correction between the two directions.
• Double apex — rewards treating it as one corner with two touch points; punishes driving it as two separate turns.
• Decreasing radius — rewards patience and a later apex than it looks like it wants; punishes committing to the throttle on the first half.
• Increasing radius — rewards early commitment; punishes over-slowing for a corner that opens up.
• Compression — where the track dips, vertical load rises briefly and there is more grip than the corner appears to offer. It lets you keep a commitment you have already made rather than licensing a big new input, and where the surplus goes depends on where it sits: in a braking zone it is braking grip, at the apex with the track climbing it lets you get to power earlier, and just before a crest it vanishes exactly where you would have added throttle.
• Off-camber — the opposite problem; punishes carrying entry speed you would get away with on a flat corner.
• Blind — rewards references and a checkpoint chain; punishes driving on feel.

You do not need an encyclopaedia. You need a label, because a label gives you a plan before you have driven a single lap — and a plan is what a difficult corner takes away from you.

Step 4: Build a reference precise enough to repeat

That references need to be exact rather than approximate is covered elsewhere and is not in dispute. The harder question, and the one that actually solves stubborn corners, is what you do when the track has not given you anything exact to use.

Because that is frequently why the corner is difficult. On an easy one there is a board, a marshal post or a crack in the surface sitting right where you need it, and you never notice you are relying on it. On a hard one there is a long kerb whose beginning, middle and end are metres apart, or there is nothing at all.

So the skill is not "use references". It is manufacturing an exact one where the track has not provided you with any. That takes some creativity, and there are more options than people expect:

• Alignment references. Not an object, but the moment two objects line up from where you sit. A dotted line disappearing behind the A-pillar. An antenna crossing a particular building on the horizon. These are extremely precise, because alignment changes fast as you move.
• Car-state references. The moment the steering wheel comes back to straight after the previous corner. You cannot see it, but you can feel it exactly, and it happens at the same place every lap. Useful where there is genuinely nothing to look at.
• Tyre-contact references. The instant a specific tyre touches a specific painted line — much sharper than "when I'm near the line".
• Surface references. Cracks, patches, rubber lines, joins in the tarmac. Ugly, and often the most exact thing available.
• Secondary references. When your braking point lands mid-kerb where nothing distinguishes one metre from the next, find a second cue on the other side of the track and use them together.

An alignment reference is worth calling out because it is the one that unlocks blind corners. If you cannot see the corner when you must commit, you look for something that changes at exactly the right moment from your seat — and the geometry of your own cockpit is one of the most reliable sources of that.

If your problem is broader than one corner — references vague everywhere, times scattering across the whole lap — that is a different diagnosis, and why your lap times are inconsistent works through it properly.

Step 5: Compare your best attempt to your worst

Before you load somebody else's lap, compare yourself to yourself.

Comparing against your own laps rather than an alien's is standing advice here. The sharper version for a single corner is to compare your best attempt at it against your worst — because in the same session, same car, same tyres, you produced both. Whatever differs between them is entirely you, and it is a change you have already demonstrated you can make.

Record the session, find your best attempt at the corner and your worst, and put them side by side. Look for the first place they diverge, not the biggest gap — the biggest gap is usually a consequence of a small difference earlier.

Compare against a faster driver afterwards, once you know what your own two versions do differently. Going straight to the alien tends to produce a list of things to change with no idea which one matters.

Step 6: Use telemetry to find where the time actually goes

Once you know the corner is costing you, telemetry tells you where inside it. You do not need a full engineering workflow — a tool that compares two laps is enough, and the useful part is the order you look at things.

One thing to be clear about first, because we publish a different order elsewhere. The causal read — brake point, then release shape, then minimum speed, then throttle — is for working out what caused a difference once you know where it is. This order is for finding where it is in the first place. Locate with delta and line; diagnose with the inputs.

1. Delta. Where exactly does the loss accumulate? Entry, mid-corner or the exit run?
2. Line. Compare how far left or right your line runs against the reference. Are you simply driving further? This is the one people skip, and it explains more corners than the pedal traces do.
3. Speed. Entry speed, minimum speed, exit speed. All three, because a higher minimum with a lower exit is a loss, not a gain.
4. Brake. Where it starts, how hard it peaks, how it comes off.
5. Throttle. When full commitment arrives and how long it is held.

Here is a real example of why the line comes before the traces. Two drivers, half a second apart through one section. The slower one runs noticeably wider on exit — which looks like good practice, using all the track. It is not, because the next corner turns the other way. Running wide means arriving badly positioned, so the throttle has to come off completely while the faster driver keeps it pinned. The half second is not lost in the corner you are looking at. It is lost in the one after it, by a decision made in the one before.

You would never find that in a brake trace. You find it by looking at the paths first.

Step 7: Repeat the corner, not the lap

Driving a full lap to practise ten seconds of it is a poor use of an evening, and in iRacing you do not have to. Active Reset saves a snapshot of the car mid-lap and teleports you back to it on a button press, so one corner can be attempted over and over without driving back round — and without a crash costing you five minutes. iRacing describes the snapshot as capturing the state of the car at that instant, including speed, temperatures, fuel, tyre wear and damage.

Open Settings → Keybinds in the sim and find the Advanced Analysis section: there are entries for saving a corner-practice snapshot and for running it, and both need binding before anything happens. Save the snapshot on a straight at racing pace with the car already warmed up, just before your braking reference, so the run-in is realistic.

Three limits worth knowing before you build an evening around it: it is for solo practice only, running a snapshot invalidates the lap you are on, and you cannot create one while sitting in the pit stall. The setup also reverts to whatever it was when you saved, so re-save after any setup change.

That is deliberately brief, because how to build a session around this is its own subject: how to practise sim racing effectively covers the isolation blocks, pass/fail scoring and review that turn repetition into improvement, and the active-reset drill shows what to refine once you plateau on a corner.

Could the setup be making the corner harder?

Sometimes, and it is worth a quick check before you spend three sessions on technique. Brake bias, ABS and traction control settings all change how a car behaves at a specific corner, and a car that feels unstable under braking into one particular hairpin may simply be asking for a different balance rather than a different driver.

The order matters, though. Diagnose first, adjust second. If you change the setup before you understand the problem, you will get a corner that feels different without knowing whether you fixed anything — and you will have added a variable to every future comparison.

If you would rather not build a setup from scratch, a good baseline removes a whole category of doubt — there are reputable setup shops, and we keep an honest write-up of one of them under our deals pages. Just do not expect a setup to fix a corner you have not diagnosed.

Put the seven steps together

Step	What it answers
1. Slow-mo method	What does a correct version of this corner even look like?
2. Checkpoints	Can I repeat it when I cannot see all of it?
3. Label the type	What does this kind of corner punish and reward?
4. Precise references	Am I starting from the same place every lap?
5. Best vs worst	What do I already do differently when it works?
6. Telemetry	Where inside the corner is the time going?
7. Repeat the corner	How do I get enough attempts to actually change it?

If the problem turns out to be fundamentals rather than this specific corner — track usage, turn-in timing, throttle commitment — go back a level and drill them in isolation. These five drills cover exactly that, and they are quicker to fix than they look. If the corner will not rotate no matter what line you take, that is usually a weight transfer timing problem rather than a cornering one.

Your worst corner is where the most time is

The advice I got early on that I still think about: do not resent the corner that ruins your lap. That corner is pointing at a weakness in how you read the track, and it is showing you exactly where the largest single chunk of available time is sitting. Every other corner is offering you hundredths. That one is offering you tenths.

What makes it hard is that after all seven steps, you can still end up knowing you lose three tenths in turn six without knowing why. Telemetry is very good at showing you that the throttle came late, and no good at all at telling you whether the cause was the braking, the line, the vision, the rotation or a decision you made in the corner before.

That gap is what the GitGud Racing Academy exists to close: you send a lap, a coach goes through it corner by corner and names the cause rather than the symptom, and you get one specific thing to drill before the next one.

Start with step one tonight, though. Pick your worst corner, take all the speed out of it, and find out what a correct version feels like.

Sim racing cornering FAQ

How do I take corners faster in sim racing?

For a specific corner that is not working, take the speed out of it first and add it back in a fixed order: drive the correct line slowly, then keep the slow entry and push the exit hard, and only then push the entry. Most drivers do it backwards, attacking the entry first and then spending the session rescuing an exit that was already compromised. Build a chain of checkpoints if the corner is long or blind, make sure your braking reference is exact rather than approximate, and check the racing line before the pedal traces.

Which part of a corner am I losing time in — entry, mid or exit?

Look at where the delta accumulates rather than where the corner feels worst, because those are often different places. A loss that appears on the exit run is frequently created on entry, and a loss on entry sometimes comes from a decision in the corner before. The quickest way to separate them is to compare two of your own laps and find the first point where they diverge rather than the biggest gap — the biggest gap is usually a consequence of a smaller difference earlier.

What can I use as a braking marker when there are no distance boards?

Manufacture one. Alignment cues are the most precise option available: the moment a painted line disappears behind your A-pillar, or an antenna crosses a particular building on the horizon, changes fast as you move and is therefore very repeatable. Car-state cues work where there is nothing to look at — the instant the wheel comes back to straight after the previous corner happens in the same place every lap and you can feel it exactly. Surface features such as cracks, patches and tarmac joins are ugly and often the most exact thing on offer.

What is Active Reset in iRacing, and how do I use it to practise one corner?

Active Reset saves a snapshot of the car mid-lap and teleports you back to it on a button press, so you can attempt one corner over and over instead of driving a full lap for every repetition. Open Settings then Keybinds in the sim and find the Advanced Analysis section, where there are entries for saving a corner-practice snapshot and for running it; both need binding first. Save the snapshot on a straight at racing pace with the car warmed up, just before your braking reference. Three limits: it is for solo practice only, running a snapshot invalidates the lap you are on, and you cannot create one in the pit stall.

How do I learn blind corners in sim racing?

Stop treating the corner as one decision. Build a chain of four to six checkpoints — specific positions the car must pass through, each tied to something physical like a painted line, a kerb edge or a change in the wall — and drive from one to the next rather than trying to picture the whole corner. Because none of the checkpoints requires you to see the exit, the corner becomes repeatable even though it stays blind. Alignment cues matter more here than anywhere else, since they work when the corner itself is not visible.

Should I use an early apex or a late apex?

It depends on the corner type, which is why naming the corner before working on it is worth the ten seconds it costs. A hairpin generally wants hard straight braking and a late apex, because a long exit follows and an early apex ruins it. A decreasing-radius corner wants a later apex than it appears to, because the track tightens on you. An increasing-radius corner rewards earlier commitment. A double apex is one corner with two touch points rather than two separate turns, and treating it as two is the common error.

If a corner is slow, should I fix the entry or the exit first?

The exit, but not by driving the exit harder. Keep the entry deliberately conservative and work on the exit until it is genuinely good, then push the entry and check whether that exit survives. Building in that order means every later change is measured against a known-good outcome instead of a guess, and it stops you compounding two problems at once. This is the ordering rather than the mechanism — for how the two are physically linked, our trail-braking guides cover the transition from entry to exit properly.

Should I look at the racing line or the brake trace first?

The line, and it is the step most people skip. Comparing paths tells you whether you are simply driving further, which explains more slow corners than the pedal traces do — and a wider exit that looks like good track usage can be a loss if it leaves you badly positioned for whatever comes next. Use the delta and the line to work out where the time is going, then read the inputs to work out what caused it. Two different jobs, two different orders.