Car mods aside, 2014 vs 2019 aside, Tesla driver might just be a bad driver. The only way to know is to swap the drivers and have them race again. If Nissan Leaf wins again, then it's the better car.
The Leaf driver is a car journalist who was able to keep up with a Porsche in a less powerful car. [1]
The Tesla driver is Jitosho Hikari, who is a rally car driver. [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/bgz0nj/a_former_assis...
[2] https://www.ewrc-results.com/entries/52859-ark-sprint-300-20...
This is also a problem for having the drivers switch cars. If they don't have the knowledge of the car they're driving, they cannot fully take advantage of it.
Easy answer: Always as much braking as possible. There is no light braking in racing. You want to maintain full speed until you absolutely have to slow down. You brake as late as possible. The skill is not in judging how hard to brake, but when to begin braking. Watch F1 with the telemetry on the screen. Throttle goes up and down in corners. Braking is always either full-on or nothing.
If you lose control under hard braking it means you chose to brake at the wrong point.
In racing that is not a thing. There is never a situation where a car needs to "slow down a bit". The goal is to stay as fast as possible as much as possible. That means either going flat out (either in speed or cornering) or be under maximum braking (to minimize time at lower speeds). If you are ever "a bit" too fast then you have made a mistake. You began braking too late. On the next lap you will alter your braking point, not adjust your braking pressure.
>> tail spin
Also not a thing under braking. "Tail spins", or to use the correct term oversteer occur when a rwd car applies too much power (or some 4wd). The back end slips. When you brake too hard entering a corner the front wheels will depart first, causing an understeer rather than a tailspin. The car will push forwards and fail to turn.
I have a few days experience on track with an SCCA instructor. Braking late and at maximum deceleration is the basic idea, but braking can do lots of things and be used lots of ways.
A light application of braking is sometimes important, not to slow the vehicle, but just to transfer weight to the front wheels before a turn. Also, it is possible to use light braking to induce some rotation mid-turn, especially in an FWD vehicle like a Leaf that will likely exhibit significant understeer.
Driving a car around a real track is humbling for the first time. The first event I was at, some instructor was taking a few laps with his personal Chevy Volt, and he was effortlessly passing students in a variety of high dollar sports cars.
Watch the brake and throttle indicators. He is off the brakes long before committing to the corner. And whenever he is on the brakes it is total. If you gradually move from braking to throttle you will take the turn too sharply. You set the speed before the corner so that during the corner the tires work only on turning. Then you apply the throttle as much as possible on the way out. Braking during the first half of a turn is done for some specific turn geometry (decreasing radius turns, or a car with higher acceleration than braking ability) but is generally a bad habit.
Trail braking is pretty common I think, especially without anti-lock brakes as in F1. Without it then there would be lockups at every corner as the aero effects reduce with the rapid loss in speed.
https://www.brembo.com/en/company/news/formula-1-how-hamilto...
https://youtu.be/eloZhdIyyv0?t=69
It is true that the braking plot-line looks a bit like an step function, but it never is, there's a huge difference between taking half a second to press the brake and it being machine-like and taking just some milliseconds.
It is even more pronounced when releasing the brake pedal. There you can always see a slope.
Honestly, watch the video.
Too simplified. It requires a precise definition of 'as much as possible'.
Measured answer: You have to prevent the wheels to lock, so always brake just an infinitesimal bit below this locking point: now you have invented ABS brakes.
If it was just a matter of 'slam your foot to the metal', cars would never have needed ABS brakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...