The first thing we need to understand is inertia or an object’s tendency to continue what it is doing until another force acts upon it. In theory a car travelling 50 mph will continue moving at the same speed and a car moving at 0 mph will not move at all.

In order for the car speed up, turn, or slow down a force needs to act on it. The car has three systems on it that will create this force: the engine, the steering system, and the brakes. The engine makes it travel faster, the steering system makes it travel in a different direction, and the brakes make it travel slower. However, the only parts of the car that touches the road are the tires so all the forces that the engine, steering system, and the brakes create go through the tires.

The tire’s ability to act upon the road is called traction. Without traction if the car tried to accelerate would spin its tires, if it tried to turn it would continue traveling in the same direction, and if the car tried to stop it would continue to travel forward. Without getting into detail, the car’s traction is determined by the weight of the car on each of its tires, the stickiness of its tires and the road, and the width of its tires.

So now we have an imaginary car driving along an imaginary highway. It travels in a certain direction at a certain speed and continues to travel in that direction at that speed until you use the engine, steering, or brakes to change it. The car’s tires have traction which allows you to perform these changes, without this traction the car would continue to travel in the same direction at the same speed.

I thought gravity also plays a factor in inertia to some extent, first as a slowing force, and it also forces the object to continue in the same direction on top of inertia effects, once you apply the proverbial steering. That is where G force comes into play in a whiplash, or drift technique. The side gravity that pulls at you also affects the rate of inertia in things I have read about concerning that forces speed increases and decreases etc.

So much goes into a car racing technique that the average person does not consider. Inertia is indeed a major factor. But I think that traction has more component parts than what is implied by Newton’s law alone. Traction is a good factor to point out with respect to a car’s tires. Most people never learn that rule. There are ways to compensate for bad tire traction, but they are best left to people with extraordinary levels of reflex and know how. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

JIO

Technically gravity is the attraction between objects proportional to the objects masses. In practical terms the only gravity that we need to be concerned with is between an object and the Earth. This attraction is an acceleration of 9.8 m/s from the objects center of mass to the Earth's center of mass, basically downwards.

I believe you are misunderstanding the term gravity because it is also used as a unit of measure of acceleration, "g-forces". As an example if a car were traveling at 98 m/s a came to a stop in 2 seconds it would experience an acceleration of 49 m/s^2, (49 m/s^2 = 98 m/s / 2 s). This would be 5 Gs (5 g = 49 m/s^2 / 9.8 m/s^2). In other words the car experiences an effect similar to being on a planet with five times Earth's gravity, but in a sidewards direction.

The whiplash effect in drifting has to do with the loading and unloading of the springs on one side of the car and the car's angular momentum which is related to the car's polar moment of inertia. It is a separate issue and is completely compatible with my statements about traction.

You might have misunderstood some of what you read because inertia is a principle, not a measurable quantity so "rate of inertia" makes no sense at all.

To put it simply a car has only 4 ways to interact with the ground: the 4 tires. Traction is basically the ability of the tires to interact with the ground. A car floating in space has no meaningful way to interact with its environment and do anything because it has no traction.

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