The oversteering refers to that when the racing cars cornering, the actual steering angle is greater than the rotation angle of the front wheel, that means the rear wheel appears the outside sliding. That is, when the tailstock is pushed by the rear wheels away from the curve, the angle of the front wheel steering angle of wheel steering, which needs to be turned by the racing drivers is actually small than the radius of the actual curve needs. Increasing the weight of the rear wheel of the racing car can make it presents characteristics of oversteering, such as the Renault R25(as shown in the pic.), when most of the racing car teams have increased the counterweights in the front part of the racing cars to 47%, but the front counterweights of Renault is still below 40%. Conversely, if increasing the counterweights in the front part of the car, the it can exhibit the characteristics of understeering.

The requirements of F1 racing cars are particular about the counterweights, just like the drivers who trying to find the ideal driving directions, but not all the racing drivers like to drive their racing cars in a law-abiding way, for safety reasons, there are a lot of riders like the racing cars have the enactment with a slight understeering, such as Mika Pauli Häkkinen. In contrast, few of the top racing drivers prefer to handle the cars with oversteering characteristics, such as Ayrton Senna da Silva, Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen etc. These are entirely dependent on the racing driver's own driving style, and the counterweights distribution of the racing cars.

 

Since the overall weights of the racing cars are fixed after manufacturing, the various parts of the cars’ body also have to be calculated and set and also take the driver's weights into account. Therefore, the changes of racing drivers weights would effect the racing cars counterweights, which means that in addition to having a strong and sturdy body, the F1 racing driver must attache great attention to the increase and decrease of their own weight. Statistics show that the basic vehicle weight of F1 racing car is about 440 kilograms, when deducting the clothing and some other equipment weights of the racing drivers and the drivers own weights, that is about 60 kg weights can be used to add counterweights in order to precisely meet the driver's needs. A piece of tungsten sheet which price can be up to 40,000 euros will usually to be spent about 10 pieces in a racing season of a team.