The forces on a turning car are complex. When you are in a car turning, you feel like you're being pushed toward the outside of the turn. People refer to this as the centrifugal force, a term that is a unfortunate because there isn't any force pushing you outward. Centrifugal force is what physicists call a pseudo or a fictitious force, because it doesn't really exist.

The force that makes a car turn is called the centripetal force. Centripetal literally means "toward the center". Imagine having a tennis ball with a string attached to it. Whirl the tennis b

all over your head in a horizontal circle. What makes the tennis ball go in a circle instead of straight? It's the force the string exerts on the tennis ball, which pulls the tennis ball in a circle.

A race car doesn't have a string making it turn. The tires have to do that job, and they do it by exerting force toward the center of the turn. Engineers talk about lateral force. The lateral force is perpendicular to the direction the car is going at any moment.

The size of the centripetal force is given by multiplying the mass of the car by the speed of the car squared, and then dividing by the radius of the turn.

The faster you're going, the more force you need to be able to turn. Tighter turns also require more force. The formula for centripetal force is given for your reference. The important thing to notice is that the force isn't linearly dependent on the speed. If you double your speed, the force needed to turn goes up by a factor of four. If you triple your speed, the force increases by a factor of nine.

In this formula for centripetal force, m is the mass of the car, v is the speed of the car and r is the turn radius.

So is the centrifugal force isn't real, why do you feel like there's something pushing you out the right-side window when you take a turn at high speed? The answers lie in Newton's laws of motion. On object going straight will keep going straight unless a force makes it change speed, direction or both. So when a driver is coming down a straightaway and starts to turn, the centripetal force makes the car turn and, because he's buckled tightly into the car, he turns also. The force he feels is because his body is trying to keep going straight. The seat (via the car) is exerting a force on him toward the inside of the turn while he's trying to go straight. The net result is that the driver perceives a force to be acting outward, but it is actually acting inward.

The reason that this is so confusing is because any time you are in a reference frame that is accelerating, things get just a little strange. If you're traveling at constant speed in a straight line, you don't have to worry about any psuedoforces. When you accelerate (which means changing your speed, your direction or both), Newton's first and second laws of motion don't work. The side effect is that you perceive forces that don't actually exist. Writing The Physics of Drag Racing might have been a better place for me to start! This is one of the most confusing concepts in physics, so if you're still struggling with it, I promise that you are not alone.