If the car begins to oversteer or understeer, the system applies braking on individual wheels to restore stability.

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In a sharp corner, it can toe out the rear outside wheel, increasing yaw rate and helping to neutralize understeer.

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This 7, in contrast, has a bevy of technological tricks that make it able to corner much more acutely without attendant understeer.

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The car gathers understeer as steering angles increase it pushes like a front-drive car will, in other words, with an increasing bleating from the front tires.

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"At the start of the session, we had way too much understeer and I couldn't do anything with it and then on lap three, the rear started going away, " Button told BBC Sport.

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The signature piece in this car is the all-wheel-drive system, which can shunt most of the engine torque to the rear wheels as necessary and will direct more torque to the outside rear wheel in a corner to help null out understeer.

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Typically, drivers never come close to the cornering loads necessary to feel the difference, but in the RLX, the quicker you go, the more the nose-heaviness manifests itself in understeer, a tendency to lose grip at the front end while cornering at high lateral loads.

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World champion Hamilton, 24, struggled with understeer on a crucial sector of a flying lap in the first session of qualifying, from which five drivers are knocked out, and ended up among the last five drivers on the grid for only the second time in his career.

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