How to Backside Cones in Autocross and Rallycross

Some things in motorsport are intiuitive. Other things not so much. Backsiding cones, for me anyway, was in the latter category.

If you watch a lot of Formula 1, or spent formative hours with Gran Turismo, you built a mental model of how fast cars corner. The racing line — or raceline — is the theoretical fastest path through a corner, and the core idea is simple: make the curve as straight as possible. You enter from the outside of the track, hit the apex on the middle of the inside, and exit back toward the outside.

That framework isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete, and autocross and rallycross will expose the gaps in it pretty quickly. If you approach a cone on one of these courses and treat it like the ideal place to apex the turn, it often won’t be the fasted line. That’s where backsiding comes in.

What It Actually Means

Here’s the clearest way I’ve found to think about it. Imagine a straight line runing down the track as the point of reference for your car’s angle on the course, as shown in the graphic below. The orange squares represent cones on the course.

For a beginner, the tendency is to think of a cone as the apex of a turn, and to pass by it so that the middle of the car passes the cone when the car is parrallel to the imaginary reference line connecting the two cones.

In this idealized scenario, as the car turns right it will cross the reference line mid-way between the two cones. As it crosses the line the car’s balance will be midway between shifting from the left side to the right side as it begins to turn left.

Backsiding the first cone looks more like this:

Instead of the first cone being the apex of the turn, the driver has started the turn earlier and apexed before reaching the cone. The car passes the center reference line closer to the cone, so that it is midway across just 30 percent of the way between the cones. I’m making the 30 percent number up for illustrative purposes – the point is that it’s not 50 percent and closer to the first cone.

It’s called backsiding because the middle of the car is passing by the backside of the cone, instead of the side of the cone. Also, one way to visualize this when driving is that your back quarterpanel will pass close to the cone.

The mental trick here is to think of the cones as defining a curvy road, but that the road is shifted towards thed r. In essence, you are driving the same shaped path, just in different relation to the cones.

Why It Makes You Faster

So why is backsiding cones faster? There are a few reasons.

Reaction Time & Margin of Error

First, it gives you more time to prepare for the next element that’s coming. When you backside the cone, you are passing the cone as you are finishing your turn the time when the car is traveling straight and is balanced. This gives you more time to process and drive the car into the ideal line for the next element.

This benefit of backsiding can be particularly important in rallycross, where the course is constantly changing and the cars handling on loose surfaces less predictable. Stage rally and rallycross drivers tend to late apex turns for just this reason, as it gives you a greater margin for error in unpredictable circumstances.

If you were doing the standard raceline around a cone and your car got squirrely halfway between the cones, you have less time to react. If you’d backsided the cone, there’s more time to get the car back undercontrol before the next element.

The correlary to having more margin of error is that you can be more agressive. If the car brakes loose because you are pushing it harder, you have more time to get back on track.

Maximizing Straightaway Speed

Another important reason for backsiding cones relates to the old racing addage of “slow in, fast out,” which refers to prioritizing speed on the exit of a turn over speed on the entrance of the turn.

The idea is to line yourself perfectly so that you can maximize speed on the exit of a turn and into a straightaway, which will lead to a better overall lap time. Put another way, going fast on the straights is more important that going fast in turns.

Backsiding the cones is a long slalom pattern might not save you time in the slalom itsself, but on the last cone you will straighten out sooner. This allows give you more space reach higher speeds between that last slalom cone and the next element. Here’s a visual:

The car on the top is backsiding cones which means the can drive straight longer (blue line), and therefore faster, than the car on the bottom that is driving a standard apex through the cones. The bottom car’s straightline run between the last cone and the gate is shorter because it still has to finish the turn past the last cone.

Learning the Basics

Now that you understand the basic theory behind backsiding cones, you’ll need to put it into practice. A good first step is to find a place to try doing it very slowly. For instance, I have gone to a community college parking lot when its empty on the weekend and set up some cones in a slalom and drive through them slowey.

The first thing you’ll notice is that you have to start the pattern before the first cone. You need to approach the cone at a somewhat wider trajectory so you have time to finish the arc of the turn just as you pass the cone. Learning how wide to go at the start is part of perfecting your technique.

As you pass the backside of the cone with your back quarterpanel, the car is in the neutral transition point between left and right turns, or vice versa. This is the time when, if you need more speed, you are accelerating or finishing accelerating.

After you have passed the cone, you will begin your turn to set up for the next cone–earlier than you would if you were doing a standard apex line. This is where steering and load transfer come into play. When you are driving this practice line slowly, you can focus on just steering, but as you get faster, you’ll need to use load transfer (lifting off the gas and/or breaking to shift weight forward) to initiate the turn.

Once you’ve reached the apex of the turn, you can begin to accelerate out of the turn and past the next cone that you are backsiding, assuming you need to add speed.

Timing, Inputs, and Where to Look

Now that you know the basics, we’ll cover some concents and tips that will help you refine you technique.

One of the most important things to remember is to keep your head up and look forward, not at the cone right in front you. This is true for all driving, but particulary when driving in a tight course, as you need to be looking forward to be able to react quickly and put in inputs early.

And speaking of inputs. While your precise inputs to the car – steering, throttle, breaking, gearing – will vary depending on the course and your progress through it, its helpful to have a basic pattern in mind for different kinds of course elements.

Here, we’ve been talking about a simple slalom pattern like the one below.

The slalom pattern for backsiding cones is to swing a bit wide before the first cone, then turn in, break and hold, let off the break and accelerate as needed. Then repeat for the next turn.

One thing I’ll point out here, is that you aren’t necessarily breaking to slow the car here. The break and hold, in this idealized scenario, is to transfer weight forward to help the car turn. If you need to slow down, you can do that as well. But don’t get confused between slowing down and changing the cars balance.

This pattern of turn, break, accelerate and the perfect timing and application of each is vexing to master, but in my experience is critical to learning to race.

Practice, Practice, Practice

I think that pretty much covers the basics. Backsiding cones a deep topic, and I’m just now starting to get the hang of it. I did it by driving slowly in a parking lot first, then spending a rallycross day focusing just on backsiding cones and the input pattern noting above.

Here we focused on a slalom set up, but you’ll find other applications for using backsiding on autocross and rallycross courses. One thing to note is that backsiding cones is related to the topic of late apexing, which is particularly important in rally driving and I’ll cover in a different post.

I’m sure there are lots of opinions on the topic, so if you have something to add or correct, please chime in the comments. Otherwise, good luck with this technique. Your new mantra is “attack the back!”