Finding a way around an equally-matched opponent at Sonoma Raceway is always a challenge. Not only is the course quite tight—much tighter than Gran Turismo would have you think—but it offers little runoff area, and in a few sections, the speeds are really impressive; a crash in Turn 1 is always going to be ugly. Therefore, a driver needs to bide their time and think before making a pass.

When the moment presents itself, the driver needs some gumption to make the overtake stick, but getting there requires some clever positioning and a little bit of luck. In this particular video, Simraceway’s lead instructor Nico Rondet makes a few passes on another talented racer in Simraceway’s Formula 3 school cars, which have 300 horsepower from a Mitsubishi 4G63, slicks, a carbon chassis, a sequential gearbox, and lots of aero.

Where overtakes tend to happen are either at the end of the straightaway approaching Turn 7, or in the hairpin, Turn 11, which precedes the front straight. Rondet’s first pass at 1:30 is textbook drafting and outbraking. As he notes, “A good pass always requires 3 elements: a better exit of the previous corner, a little bit of drafting, and an outbraking maneuver. Without the 3 elements, sometimes passes can be done, but not as cleanly.”

This one was about as clean as they get—Rondet shows his class by braking just late enough to squeeze by, but not so late as to run wide and open the door for an over-under pass. In the broad Turn 7, rolling some good speed into the corner is critical to stay ahead and get a good run through the subsequent esses.

Rondet takes the same approach at 2:44, but this time in a much more confined space, and only made the attempt because his opponent shifted fairly early or slowly; he wasn’t really in a passing position until the very last moment. “You can see that although I do have a better run out of 9B, I’m not gaining enough untill the middle of Turn 10,” notes Rondet. “The draft, the fact that I’m using more radius to free the car through Turn 10, and his slow shift all contribute to me outbraking him.”

It was a last-ditch effort, and these are the kinds of passes that sometimes lead to contact as the leading driver might assume the corner is no longer up for grabs and will turn in on their intended line. “It is important to also highlight that in both of these cases, the other drivers did not defend,” recalls Rondet, “so the compromise to my line on entry was minimal. They knew that they could not fight, so they chose to make it easier so that we both lost the minimum time—good racecraft on their part.” It might look like the aggressive driver simply barges by their opponent, but more often than not, a good pass requires two drivers to make it work.