Narrator: For everyday drivers,
driving in the rain raises the risk
of a fatal crash by 34%.
For professional race-car drivers,
who regularly compete in the rain,
talent can only help so much
when you're driving over three times
the pedestrian speed limit.
Yeah. It's basically like if you were to dive
into a really murky lake
and you couldn't see your hands
in front of you when you dove.
That's kind of what it's like,
but at 200 miles an hour.
Narrator: That's Colton Herta,
the youngest driver ever to win an IndyCar race.
His most recent win,
at 2022's rain-drenched GMR Grand Prix,
had so many ugly crashes
that yellow caution flags were pulled out eight times.
The track turned slick, puddles built up,
and cars were sent flying.
Colton tells us how professional race-car drivers
survive and even win high-speed races
during a torrential downpour.
Colton: When it's dry, we can push a lot harder,
because we kind of know
what the grip level's going to be,
whereas in the wet, you kind of have to
go up to the limit a little bit slower
just because of how treacherous the conditions are,
and you don't know what it's going to be
corner to corner.
So, braking points are the same
as when you were to take driver's ed.
And for me, it wasn't too long ago,
so I remember this.
But they would basically say
if it takes a car 200 feet
to brake from 60 to 0,
basically double that.
So that's just kind of a general scale
that they might give you
when you're learning to drive, but it is true.
It does move the braking points drastically.
Let's say we're going 200 miles an hour
into a corner that's maybe 80 miles an hour
and we're braking in 300 feet.
It might move back to around 500 feet.
And, again, you do want to be cautious with this
because any little mistake, any little lock-up,
is going to create a bigger problem.
So, let's say you had a lock-up
and you'd go 3 feet wide in the dry.
That might change to going
10 to 12 feet wide in the wet.
So that's why you see a lot more mistakes
and a lot more drivers going off track,
because the margins are so much tinier.
Commentator: He's on the wettest part of the track,
and he just got on the curb.
He was already locked up.
The front tires are completely locked.
Colton: The other biggest thing is
the racing line that you take is very different.
What happens when we drive in the dry
is we drive on slick tires,
so the rubber gets pushed in,
and it gets ripped off the tires into the ground.
When it gets a little wet, it's extremely slippery.
So you'll see all the black patches
where we normally run,
and then basically off of that is pavement
that's never really touched by race cars
because it's not the optimal line,
it's not the fastest way to get around the track.
And that's kind of where you try to position the car,
so running a little bit wider in the corner,
maybe a car length outside of the apex,
and then vice versa.
Wherever you can find the grip
that isn't on the traditional line,
that's where it tends to be.
Narrator: Drivers wouldn't be able to handle
racing in the rain without
the proper equipment setup, though.
It starts with tires.
Colton: So, what you would have on your road car
would be what we would run in the wet.
It is a wet-weather tire,
or an all-weather tire, as people would say,
for the road. The reason that you have
these kind of gaps in the tires,
like you would see in a street car
and what we would run in the wet,
is it actually creates less of a contact patch,
and the water runs through the veins of the tire
instead of just sitting on top
of where the slick tire would be.
A normal race setup would look very stiff.
And then when you turn it to the wet,
you want a little bit more of the car
to be able to roll, and roll into the corner.
So you might take anti-roll bars
completely off the car.
For sure you'd make the springs and damping
a lot softer than it would be for the dry,
and then, obviously, adding as much downforce
as you can as well.
It's all about softening the car,
letting the car roll a lot more
and dig into the ground,
because it is on top of the surface
when you're driving in the wet.
Narrator: No matter how talented
and well equipped a driver may be, though,
actually winning a race in the pouring rain
comes down to guesswork and being willing to take chances.
There are points that, during that race
or really just at the end of that race,
that it got a little bit too much.
I think we had maybe two minutes left,
and it was very dangerous.
But we only had two minutes left, so we just thought,
"Just get the race over with. Just finish it up."
But yeah, it was pretty brutal at the end there
with aquaplaning and not really sure where the grip was,
where the rivers were running through the track.
When we say aquaplaning,
it tends to be a complete loss of control of the car
because of a puddle.
And why that happens is the tires get flooded.
And so you have a brief moment
where the car is just skidding.
I'm sure many people have felt that
on the road at some points,
when you go through a big puddle
and you feel like you lose control completely.
There were times in the race
that guys could barely even see
the front wing of their car.
So that's about 3½, 4 feet
from where their eyes are.
But that's probably the most dangerous part about it,
is the fact that there is no vision,
there's no cues on what you can and can't see.
Probably the toughest conditions that you will have
as a racing driver is changing conditions.
And in this race in particular,
we had it maybe three times, I want to say,
from wet to dry, the rain stops,
or it keeps getting heavier.
You are constantly changing your braking points
and changing how much speed
you can roll through the corners
when you can get back on throttle.
So the driver will be relaying information
to the team in the timing stand
about what the conditions are
and what they need for the conditions at the moment.
And then the team will make an educated guess
on what we need going into
the next stop in the future.
So it is a guessing game sometimes
for some of that stuff.
I think the biggest thing
is probably just to keep your eyes up,
keep your eyes as far forward as possible.
It might be different for us in racing
because we are always looking for different parts
of the racetrack that might have more grip
or where the water is and such,
whereas the hazards on the road
might be other drivers and stuff.
So we don't typically have to worry about that as much,
because we get to drive with
a lot of great racing drivers,
whereas on the road you do not get to.