November 16, 2022
Dominating Turn 17 At Sebring International Raceway
Hey everyone! Welcome to Blayze. Today, we'll be breaking down turn 17 at Sebring International Raceway, one of the most difficult corners in all of Motorsports. Placing the car over the bumps can be very difficult, there's really very specific places to place the car. We're going to be giving you the tips on how to take this corner like a professional racecar driver.
So, let's do a full speed run through of turn 17 first. So, we're braking just past the four board and have our hands straight past the wall, going beyond it, coming back to the right, initial throttle around here, getting back to full throttle right about midway under the bridge. Use all the road on exit.
So let's go again and I'll slow it down, we'll show you the very important factors on a quick turn 17. So the number one thing, we'll see in this video, we're breaking past the four board. That really depends on what type of car you're in. Some of you will be braking right around the four cone marker. If you're in a higher down force car, you'll be breaking down towards the wall.
Focus less on the breaking marker and more on everything else in this video. You'll see we're turning in just past that three cone, and we want to be able to have our hands straight at the right angle, going past the wall right here.
Right about now, this is the angle you want. You want your hand straight and follow those black lines, go much further out mid-corner. So right around here, you want to save your last downshift until you ae way past the wall. The reason why we do that is that it helps you roll more speed to this point. You don't want to over slow at the beginning of 17. You have a ton of room here, so really roll speed so you use about mid-road before coming back to the right.
Right now is kind of when we're thinking about getting back to throttle. You see that green box with the line? We want to avoid that line, right side tires on the left side of that, because inside of it, where those red lines would be, that's where the biggest bumps in turn 17 are, so don't be really close to the wall as we approach the bridge.
You're looking for that yellow line to have your right side tires on the left of it. So that's where we're talking about right now. We're avoiding that inside, where the red box is, we're about a car width off, that means we're about midway under the bridge, two car widths to a car width and a half off the inside, right under the bridge is where we're trying to commit to full throttle.
Right now, commit to full throttle. This is really important. Get your eyes up at this part of the corner. You want to be using all of the road at corner exit, race out there. Don't try to apex the grass after the bridge. If you're apexing the grass, you're not rolling enough speed, you're not using enough track. So you can see how far away from that grass we are, using all of the road.
You'll see in front of us, the wall kind of curves back to the inside, you want to be able to have your hands straight for a little while before you get to that. If you're getting out to the exit wall, where it comes back to the inside you're not using the track out early enough.
So that's been an in-depth coaching session for turn 17 at Sebring International Raceway. You can see we're trying to indicate how we trail brake with this colored ball on the screen. Green's full speed, yellow is our trail break, and red represents our hard braking. That's turn 17 and our coaching tips. We'll see you around the track at Sebring!
So we hope you found value, we hope you're going to be able to avoid those bumps, get to throttle under the bridge, and get a good exit out of there. If you have any questions or if you want us to break down a different corner, leave a comment below. We'll be looking and watching, and we'll make sure we answer those questions. We'll get a new video out next week on your favorite corner.
About the coach
I've spent 20 years of my life in this sport that we all love so much. During that time I was fortunate enough to have a 10 year professional career where I won the Rolex at Daytona 24 hour, the Sebring 12 Hour (twice), and became an official driver for Audi. After retiring from professional racing I became a co-founder at Blayze. My goal with building this platform is to make it more affordable, accessible, and convenient to learn personally from the best coaches in the world!
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