Insider Secrets Of Racing – Part 1
By: Daniel Charles
This section will be an article series that we’re be launching for the coming weeks which aims to provide information on questions that drivers always seem to ask us. So let us just use our 1st issue to answer our most asked question by our drivers from all around the world. Sometimes we even get up to 100 emails a day asking us the very same question. So what is the question?
“How do I become a Professional Race car driver?”
When answering this question, you must first understand that there is many parts to this question. There is no 1 straight way to becoming a professional race car driver. You need funding, skill, dedication, training and a lot of luck! But from the pattern of what most drivers go through, their career path to become a professional race car driver almost always starts off from the humble roots of Go karting.
Go karting is the most basic form of racing that can help you learn many fundamentals techniques that you’ll be using later on in your racing career. These fundamentals that you’ll be learning includes:
Knowledge of different types of corners
Braking and racing lines
Race Strategies
Overtaking and blocking maneuvers etc
All these are the core essences of what racing is all about and usually to truly master these basics, you need to be karting for about 6 – 7 years. Start off with a local race at your local kart track and attend a kart training school by a recognized coach after your first couple of months of karting. After that, get yourself involved in european kart racing ( Where all the action happens), by racing in a team and attending a full season of karting in competitions such as “ Italian open Masters Series”
The reason why you want to attend kart competitions in Europe is for 2 main reasons:
1)The competition there is the most competitive in the world so it will help you train your racing skills
2)All the major big sponsors reside in Europe such as the factory teams
So if you’re good in your race craft and you race in Europe, your chances of getting spotted by a sponsor or kart factory is higher. If that happens you may not need to deal with large financial issues after you’re ready to move out of karting.
Karting is not simply a sport that takes a few twisted metal piping with a lawn mower engine thrown on it. It takes skill to set up your kart and to learn how to race it. To truly master karting, a kart driver has to take note of 3 main aspects:
- Driving Skills
- Kart Technical Knowledge
- Fitness abilities
Driving Skills
Driving a kart is simple to operate. Right pedal to accelerate and left pedal to brake. Initially you may find it easy to drive the kart around the track and you will usually see huge cuts in your timing in your lap times as you get more and more comfortable with your kart. But after a while, when you reach a peak, you realise that no matter what you do, you can’t go any faster to break the circuit record that you’re eyeing on. That is when you know that you’ll need to attend a kart racing course to take you to the next level. The training will usually point out aspects of your driving that you’re losing time on and these may include:
- Too aggressive with steering
- Too much use on the kerbs
- Too slow on the pedals
- Improper pressure placed on brake pedals
- Wrong racing and braking lines for corners
- Incorrect weight distribution on the kart
All these can be worked on and improved to bring your lap times lower. You’ll be surprise that just through a 3 day karting course you may have improved your lap times by up to 6 seconds per lap. It is definitely something that you will want to take note of the next time you’re stuck in a plateau in your driving abilities.
Kart Technical Knowledge
There are many kart drivers out there with fantastic racing abilities but when it comes down to setting up a kart, they know nothing about it. But why is this important? You may think that as a driver your job is only to drive. That is where you’re WRONG!
You need to be able to know what is wrong with the kart so that you’ll be able to give that feedback to your race engineer. Only then he can help you tune your machine to better suit what you’re looking for e.g. more grip in the rear end. By knowing your equipment, you’ll be able to get the perfect set up for your kart in a much shorter amount of time. That saves time during competitions and it also gives you the chance to have a sensitive feel of what is wrong with the kart at any point of time.
For an inexperienced kart driver, he wouldn’t be able to tell if the kart is bent and may go on driving it telling the race engineer that everything with the kart is fine. But for an experienced kart driver that knows his equipment, he will be able to pick these up in an instant. And once these problems are sorted out, you’ll usually notice that it may be the difference between winning and losing.
Fitness abilities
Fitness is something that many drivers also overlook. That is because most drivers feel that as long as they can survive the number of laps required then it should be fine. But what they fail to know is that merely surviving the physical demands of the track and conquering the demands of the track can make a difference of up to 0.5 seconds per lap.
That may not seem like a lot but when you add up that difference every lap over the course of 30 – 50 laps, you’ll be a long way behind when the race ends. So establish your fitness level by eating healthy and maintain a good balance in the food that you eat. We’ll be taking more on this in the coming articles too.
Summary
When someone ask “ What is the route to become a professional racer”, the closest answer will have to be “Start karting now” Karting is the most basic form of racing and you need to have an adequate amount of that before you can decide to move on to higher levels of motorsports. The skills that you learn from karting will stay with you forever and you’ll always be looking back at your roots for fundamental racing techniques.
But you have to know that racing/ karting is not merely about driving. There are issues like physical health, driver skill and also technical knowledge. When all these combine, it makes up the essence of a talented driver.
Now do you have what it takes to be a racer? We’ll see.
In the next Issue:
In the next issue, we’ll be looking at what steps to take after you have master karting to move on to your goals in higher levels of motorsports such as touring car racing and formula racing.
Stay tuned for our next newsletter for that.