I grew up driving Camaro’s with BFG tires and 4 speed transmissions, and I drove them with bags of sand in the rear all winter to “keep the rear planted”, so I know all about kicking the rear of a car out.

The thing is those cars had bad engineering, but they also had much lower power and much lower limits. Today’s cars have huge power, lightning fast shifts, high performance tires that will “break loose” instead of sliding, and many more ratios so the peak power is available for longer. And the list goes on.

They actually need intervention. Few people without many, many hours of instruction and track time have any experience with power like todays cars can unleash. I have spent enough time on track to know we have hit a tipping point where the cars are just too far advanced from the drivers. The burnout videos of people crashing as they leave a car meet show what happens when the average driver hits the go fast pedal without any real understanding of the physics that are about to be unleashed.

I do agree that any car, in the wrong hands can slide out, and that when the pendulum gets swung too much the other way, the cars might be fast, but they are kind of robotic to drive. The Jaguar R AWD is actually a little better than my V12 Vantage was. That car had the Corsa tires and would spin the tires at will, right up too 3rd gear if you really wanted it too.

On the other end of the pendulum you had my track car, a Lotus 211. It weighed 1680 lbs with me and some fuel. It had a dry sumped motor out back and a sequential transmission. The car put down 290hp at the rear wheels on Hoosier A7 tires. Now that car was a beast if you were stupid. I would not like to see that power in the hands of a person who wasn’t ready for it.

*** Edited to fix a typo.

Those dry slumps can be tricky!
Right handed flavistans can be even worse.

The early Porsche’s had a trailing arm suspension setup that I believe was the culprit for them. But I do think the F-Type setup is also prone to oversteer, great for Chris Harris videos and showing off, but too much slip to actually be fast. It’s likely why the track times for the car are behind its peers. An ideal track car needs a nice progressive and predictable “slip”. That way you can rely on and exploit it.

The F-Type appears to be setup to be entertaining on the roads, not a track day hero. To be honest that’s fine by me, civilian speeds are so low compared to a track day. It’s hard to serve both masters.

Here’s a good primer on the topic: https://driver61.com/uni/oversteer/

I copied over two areas that have to do with the specific post:

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LIFTING OFF THE THROTTLE

‘Lift-off oversteer’ spins and crashes are the most common incidents I see on track days and with amateur racers. Following is the order of what usually happens in this case:

1. The driver enters the corner
2. They bring the car to the apex and begin to get back on the throttle
3. Their vision isn’t far enough ahead, and they begin to run wider than the ideal line
4. When they’re almost at the exit, the driver realises they’re too wide and running out of track
5. The driver lifts off the accelerator and turns sharper to keep the car on the track
6. Due to the increase steering lock and weight transfer the car spins towards the inside wall

Lift off oversteer isn’t a very pleasant type of oversteer, it can often feel quite snappy and it usually happens because a driver is not looking far enough ahead.

Correction:

Good vision and smooth driving are key here – nail these fundamentals and unwanted lift off oversteer will be a thing of the past.

However, sometimes we can use lift-off oversteer to our advantage if we want to manipulate the car to turn or rotate, which we’ll go into later in this article.

ACCELERATING TOO HARD (IN A RWD)

It’s possible to lose traction at the rear of the car by being too violent with your right foot. If a driver is too hard with the accelerator, more so while cornering than in a straight line, the tyres may become overloaded and begin to slide.

As I described in our grip article, there is only so much grip a tyre can give – if you ask too much of it the rubber will inevitably break traction.

Correction:

A smooth throttle input here is critical – especially the initial application to a balanced throttle, the part where the driver is re-engaging the engine. In this phase, it’s crucial to be very smooth. If you feel a ‘jault’ in your backside when you get back on the throttle, you’ve done it too harshly.