Cutting corners during qualifications

Braking for corners, and taking the corners, are where the skill is involved. Anyone can press their throttle foot to the floor and go quickly down the straights. How corners are taken is what separates the champion from the no-hoper.
Putting together the ultimate qualifying lap is an incredible balancing act for a driver. He must use his judgment and “feel” to find the latest possible braking point for each corner, the highest possible entry speed, and the earliest possible application of full throttle. Setting the car up during the practices is all about helping him achieve this. Different drivers have different styles and techniques and they need to set up the car in a way that best suits their individual requirements. Think of a corner as having three separate phases – entry (the approach to the corner), apex (the corner’s sharpest angle), and exit (the end of the corner). At this level of racing all the drivers will be on the correct line and travelling at about the same speed as they go into and through a corner. Finding an advantage is all about the tiniest of margins, and some drivers find theirs from their entry into a corner, others from their exit.
One tends to compromise the other – that is, going fast into a corner negatively impacts how quickly you can make it out the corner, and vice versa –so finding the ultimate trade-off is the key. A driver who can take more entry speed into a corner – who can get the car on the very limit right from the moment he begins braking – and then not be more than proportionally penalised on the exit, will be quick. But he needs to be able to do this on every corner for a decent qualifying lap.
Some drivers can deal with certain handling characteristics better than others. A car that oversteers (at the limit, the rear end breaks away first) can make some drivers very tentative. But while the opposite characteristic of understeer (where the front end loses grip before the rear) brings more stability and allows such drivers more confidence to push to the limit, it is usually slower. A driver relaxed with a measure of oversteer can usually get the car turned into the corner more efficiently than one who relies on the stability of understeer.