As a new fan of the sport, watching these races for the first time, there's one thing I couldn't help but notice.

F1 drivers are all over the road.

To make a left turn, they go all the way to the right of the track, then swing back left.

Through 90 degree corners, hairpins, turns that lead into other turns, and if I learned anything in geometry, it's that the quickest path between two points is a straight line.

But what do you do when you can't take the straight line path?

For race car drivers, where they turn is one part of a larger strategy based on physics, practice, and a lot of skill.

F1 racers drive laps through different circuits around the world at ridiculous speeds.

The highest speed they get up to is something like 215 miles per hour.

That's Brad Philpott.

I've been racing since I was 8 years old and I've been teaching people how to drive on track for the last 15 years.

I think the one area a Formula One car is better than pretty much all other cars is cornering speed.

This is important because unlike other big motorsports like NASCAR, which require drivers to travel in mostly a symmetrical oval, F1 circuits contain every kind of corner you can think of, and racers want to get through those corners fast.

The racing line is purely and simply the fastest way through a corner, or a set of corners.

If you had unlimited grip and the car wasn't just going to roll over, you would always hug the inside.

You would always go the shortest possible distance, but the fact is that the more your steering wheel is turned, the less speed your tires can cope with.

Hugging the inside track means you'd have to slow down pretty severely to avoid losing grip and slying out.

Hugging the outside edge might theoretically let you go faster, but you would be going a lot further, like massively further, depending on the width of the track.

And as you can see from these F1 simulator shots Brad showed me, you'd also have zero margin for error because if you had a fraction of understeer or oversteer, you're immediately on the grass and in the barriers.

The ideal racing line for a turn like this is a combination of both approaches.

The driver can hug the outside of the track on the way in, then turn in to clip the apex, or the center of the inside track, and end up back on the outside edge without losing too much speed.

By starting out as far wide as you possibly can and then getting to the inside in that smooth flowing arc, you're literally minimizing the angle that your car is having to take, which means you can carry more speed.

So far we've been using this fake 90 degree turn example because it's simple to explain.

But in real life, corners aren't that straightforward.

The closest real world example is Stowe on Silverstone in the UK, but...

Stowe isn't really like that normal typical 90 degree corner.

It is a bit longer.

You reach the apex of Stowe and you're there for a little while, at least a few tenths of a second if not a second or so.

So you still feel like you're kind of hugging the inside for a while, but you are definitely taking pretty much that typical line we spoke about.

You can see that in this clip from the 2022 Grand Prix.

Carlos Sainz leads the pack and takes this nearly textbook ideal racing line.

But most corners are a little more complicated.

A corner does not exist in isolation.

So the racing line you take for a particular corner is almost always a compromise.

Take this set of corners from that same Silverstone circuit.

Brooklands is the super tight one and it goes straight into Luffield.

You're at the end of a very long fast straight.

You then end up in a sweeping left-hander where it gets tighter all the way around and it's then followed by a really long right-hander.

So judging by what we've been discussing so far, you'd probably say that you need to compromise your exit a little bit in the left-hander so you wouldn't go all the way wide.

However, in this example, you do almost the counterintuitive thing based on what we've already been learning.

Luffield, which is the second corner, the right-hander, is a very, very long right-hander.

Well over 180 degrees.

It nullifies most of the benefit you would get from going wide and then cutting back towards it.

It's not an apex that you kiss, like in our 90-degree right-hander example.

You meet the inside and you have to stay there.

By trying to compromise the initial left-hander, you're actually just wasting time.

You're wasting distance.

And this is why this is such a complicated thing and it doesn't have an easy answer.

You can see all drivers having a slightly different approach to this particular set of corners in this clip from the 2022 Grand Prix.

While the leading car tries to use the most ideal path, hugging the curves, the following cars are more spread out.

And did you catch that?

These two cars almost collided, and to avoid it, this driver went off the track, screwing up his racing line entirely.

Once you have to contend with other drivers, racing lines become a lot more complex.

What you have to do is compromise based on the track that's available to you.

So you're still going to be going outside, inside, outside as much as you can, but that will be on maybe half the track width.

If the weather is wet and rainy, that adds even more complexity.

Racers may compromise their line even further in search of areas of the track that have more grip.

Formula One drivers are constantly making calculations to adapt to any condition and still maintain a good racing line.

And they can do that because they're not thinking of the line as they're driving.

They just do it.

If I went to pretty much every F1 track, even tracks I've never actually been to before, I would probably know pretty much where I want the car to be from driving on simulators or watching videos and all that kind of thing.

So it's not a guess.

Once race day arrives with all its variables and rivalries, the focus is no longer on ideals.

It's on the strategic compromises a racer is willing to make to get ahead of the competition.

That's really what separates drivers.

You've got various inputs that you're making as a driver.

Throttle input, braking, steering, changing gear, communicating with pits, conversing with your engineers, strategy.

But the biggest one of all of those is the steering, it is the line you're taking.