I don't mind admitting that I'm totally obsessed with the upcoming boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor MacGregor. Not just because of the alternately shambolic and horrifying publicity tour or the hilarious stupidity of the mainstream press as its members attempt to comprehend something that is utterly beyond their normal worldview. Somehow this country has managed to create an entire generation of young men that has never so much as had a shoving match with another man, and they are completely undone by all the macho posturing that's happening prior to the fight. It's as foreign to them as the microbial life on the surface of Mars.

All that aside, however, there's something utterly fascinating about the idea of two completely different fighting disciplines meeting under controlled conditions. As a teenager I sparred in a few martial arts and although I'm no Chuck Norris I can tell you that it is easy to become lost in the theory and practice of fighting. Who would win between a Muay Thai fighter and a top-notch Kenpo practitioner? Are all the leg-based takedowns you see in Ultimate Fighting really unstoppable or is it just the best way to work in that system? They say you should never let a wrestler get you on the ground but how much of that is based on the common gentlemen's agreement that you won't bite him or put your thumbs in his eyes?

Come August, we will at least know whether a middle-aged boxer can out-punch a grappler in the prime of his strength. Meanwhile, I had my own punch-up this past weekend at Mid-Ohio–not in the pitlane, thankfully, because I'm running out of places I'm allowed to race, but out on the track. And the central character in this scrap was my 2.4-liter Frankenmotor Neon, a car described by R&T's own Sam Smith as "a cheap boxing glove loaded with lead shot."

My Neon is currently a very odd creature. It's got more torque than the two-liter Neons that run in the Improved Touring classes, but because I'm running it in a different category I'm also burdened with three hundred pounds more weight. The upshot is that it's actually a bit slower than it would have been if I'd left it stock–but it's far more entertaining to drive.

We were just as different as Mayweather and MacGregor.

Nominally speaking, my primary in-class rivals for the final race were a BMW M3 (which finished ahead of me) and a Mustang (which finished behind) but the real story was an out-of-class race I kept having with a Spec Miata that happened to qualify just ahead of me at the beginning of the weekend. We were just as different as Mayweather and MacGregor. He was almost four hundred pounds lighter and capable of easily shading me in all but the fastest two turns at Mid-Ohio thanks to a major advantage in wheelbase, tire-width-to-weight-ratio, and suspension design.

Against those admirable attributes I had just two advantages. The first was that I could motor him by about a car and a half down Mid-Ohio's back straight. The second was... ambient temperature.

You see, there's a sweet science to racing a front-wheel-drive car, particularly one with a Torsen front differential, and it's as different from driving a Miata as MMA is from boxing. In that Miata, or in any traditional RWD race car, you drive every corner according to the general curriculum that has been taught everywhere from Bondurant to (Ross) Bentley. Part of this well-established body of knowledge says that once you've entered the midcorner, the throttle steers the car and the steering wheel slows it.



I'll explain. If you are at the real limit of the tires in a corner, any additional throttle will cause the rear tires to lose grip. They don't have any more traction to handle that additional input. They are already busy. So they will slip but the front tires won't and that will rotate the car's nose towards the inside of the corner. Conversely, if you breathe off the gas for a minute, you will reduce the load on the rear tires and they will grip just a little better. This will cause your nose to point towards the outside of the turn.

DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles

That much is easy to understand. It's harder to get why the steering wheel acts as a brake, but let's try to figure it out. When you are at the limit of the tires in the midcorner, turning the steering more won't turn the car any more. Instead, it will slow the car because you are taking some of your forward motion and converting it into the waste heat generated as the front tires try to steer past their available traction. Eventually, the car will slow to the point that the tires have the extra traction you need and then the front end will "grab," wiggling the car.



That's how it works in a Miata, anyway. The Neon is a little different. All of the action happens up front. Steering, braking, and power. It's front-wheel drive, after all. The back tires are just along for the ride. In fact, we set them up to have less traction than the front tires–usually through spring rate, camber, and tire pressure. In a perfect world, as soon as a FWD race car turns in towards the apex of a corner the rear wheels should slide out in a sort of predictable oversteer. That's not desirable in a street car because it would get people killed but the fact remains that rear tires in FWD vehicles are kind of useless freeloaders. A while ago, somebody at General Motors had the courage to make a special version of the Pontiac Grand Prix with wider front tires, something they called "reverse stagger." The marketplace didn't like it but it was right, man; right as rain.

Because the Neon has a limited-slip differential up front, it benefits from a corner technique that is completely different from the traditional methods. You toss the car into the corner, letting the back end slide. And then when the back end has slid out enough to get the noise pointed at the exit–that's the scary part, particularly in traffic–you stand on the throttle. The outside front wheel, which is already loaded to max, will obviously spin. But then the differential will transfer the power to the inside front tire, which usually has a little bit more grip to give. And the car will magically straighten out and pull you out of the turn.

So, to reiterate: Stomping the gas in the middle of a turn will get you into trouble behind the wheel of a Miata, a Corvette, or a pickup truck. Don't do it. But in my Neon, that's how you get out of trouble. You have to wait until the back of the car is almost gone out of control, then you step on the gas.

I was trying to finesse my way through the midcorner, and the Neon wasn't having it.

If you're normally a rear-wheel drive racer, then switching to cars like my Neon is like being an MMA fighter forced to compete under boxing rules. The things you usually do won't work and all your instincts are going to work against you. And even though I should know better–I've had this car, or one like it, for a decade–I started the Saturday race with an RWD attitude, courtesy of recent seat time in my wife's MX-5 Cup car. I was trying to finesse my way through the midcorner, and the Neon wasn't having it.

Worse yet, that Miata was running up my bumper so much that he accidentally hit me twice in the first four laps of the race. I'd snatched his place at the start of the race and he was determined to get it back. But although he was making me look silly in the midcorner, I was salvaging some track position at the exits. We ran nose-to-tail like this for the whole race. I went home nursing a set of cracked ribs made worse by those hits and also nursing some doubts about my ability to drive my own car properly.

Come Sunday, though, the temperature soared and changed the way the track behaved. Mid-O's famous Turn One was now legitimately grippy and super fast. And I'd been thinking about my incompetent cornering choices all night. This time I pitched into those fast turns with my inside rear wheel floating like a butterfly over the pavement–then I punched the throttle and let the torque sting like a bee on the way out.

A couple of times I legitimately overcooked my corner entry and things looked pretty bad–but remember, the steering wheel is a brake in those situations. I waggled the wheel and let the differential work. Raised some dirt on the exit of Turn Eleven, but dropped the lap times.

Six laps into the final race, I looked in the rearview mirror to see that my Miata friend was just a green dot in the distance. On lap eight I set the fastest time the little Neon has ever posted around Mid-Ohio's "Pro" (no chicane) configuration. The M3 ahead of me was gliding to an easy first place but I wasn't going to get too self-pitying about that. I was enjoying the subtle interplay between differential, tires, track, and torque.

Here's the thing about club racing: if you want spectators, you have to bring them yourself. I brought my son. He was happy to see me get away from the bumper-banging Mazda, and I was pleased that if I was too old to learn new tricks I could at least remember the old ones. We talked a bit about the racing mindset. No sense talking about FWD techniques. His kart has the engine in the proper place and the drive going to the correct wheels. I hope that he never finds himself racing something as prosaic and plain as an old Plymouth. I want him to have more than I've had. But I also want him to remember that you can't succeed at anything until you've put some thought into how the system works. We will see if Conor MacGregor has put enough thought into the traditional-boxing system a few weeks from now. At the very worst, however, he's going to come away a wealthy man. That's another lesson for my son: success comes to the thoughtful, but it also comes to the brave.

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