Do you pay more attention to other ranked racers in the field that have had success? Do you compare yourself to other drivers when you get to the track? If you answered yes, then you are a candidate for psyching yourself out of the race. Psych-outs are usually self-induced based on your paying too much attention to other riders. It happens in all sports —rookies or younger athletes worry too much about the competition instead of what they need to do to race their best. Just the reputation of a rider can make you feel intimidated—if you let it!

Intimidation in part is a confidence breakdown. Meaning you are not confident enough in your own talents to believe that you can race against the best drivers in your sport. “How can I beat him—he’s a National Champion?” you say to yourself at the start line. You have to take the approach that everyone has the same chance of winning and you have earned the right to compete at the event. Do not put others “on the podium” before the race even starts or look at drivers as superstars. They put one shoe on at a time just like you.

I remember what my High School football coach told us when we took the field against bigger, faster teams in our league. He said to pay attention to what we needed to do as a team to prepare for the game during our warm up and do not gawk at the other team—don’t give them any attention. This was great advice then and today! The more attention you give to other racers, the easier it is to get intimidated or psych yourself out. You have to treat the other drivers as nameless or numberless.

Making comparisons does not help either. Most of the time when you make a comparison to another driver, you compare yourself to racers who you think are better than you do. You then try to find out what makes them better and what you might me missing—a further knock to your own confidence. This is an error in confidence and does not help you fuel your own confidence. I would rather you focus on what makes you a good driver and your special talents. Another idea is to focus on the start, what you need to think about to get the hole shot, and how you will “beat the track.”

It is all about working your pre-race routine and getting your car and mind ready to do your best. The pre-race routine is very helpful for you to stay focused on the race and your race plan. This is when you should be visualizing the sections of the track and anticipating what you might have to do in given situations such as when making passes. Your routine should also include the usual preparations you take before the start of the race from going over your strategy to getting suited up to getting the car off the line.

Source: racingpsychology.com

The Early Years

From the 1920’s through the 1950’s, tires were tall and skinny and their contact patch was so small that details of wheel alignment did not seem to matter much. Throughout this period the engine was the dominant component that anyone knew how to improve. This focus, on increasing horsepower, resulted in more and more power with little improvement in handling.

The realities of high horsepower and very light cars became progressively evident from the 1960’s and into the 1980’s. Serious attention to design and application was concentrated on separate engine,  chassis, suspension and aerodynamic development programs.

Increasing loads on the chassis to improve straight line and cornering grip dictated: “fat” tires, better brakes and progressively sophisticated suspension and aerodynamic systems.

The 1990’s focused the interdependence of these separate programs into a discipline. A shift had occurred. Horsepower was no longer the major component of the go-fast equation. The Science of engineering a complete race car had been born. However, for many, even today, the early years legacy of a dominant focus on horsepower still exists.

What is in store for this decade?

Quite literally it will separate past from future. We will, in this next decade, come to understand how to engineer the driver as we engineer a race car.

Formula One driver development studies prove, once a certain level of driver betterment is reached, additional practice does not produce significant improvement in performance. This is easily seen in many racing drivers. They continue improvement up the ladder until they reach a plateau — where they stop improving.

Consider the environment of a racing car where things happen really quickly. Something happens… the driver works out a solution… then he reacts. By the time the processing is complete and the message has gotten down to the muscles in question quite a bit of time has elapsed in terms of rectifying what has happened.

The driver inputs a correction. Maybe it is a little too much. Maybe the input is a little too slow. In any event the driver thinks he is reacting to something that is happening NOW, but in terms of vehicle dynamics it actually happened a long time ago. In real-time vehicle dynamics, we are lagging pretty far behind the car.

The next thing you know, the car is going the other way. The driver reacts to that, but he is always behind — he is out-of-phase with the whole situation and he is in real trouble! It is this out-of-phase-lag that causes drivers to do things in the car they are convinced are happening in real-time when they are not.

At lower skill levels things do happen a lot slower and you can catch them as they happen. As a driver progresses to higher skill levels things get quicker and more difficult. With progress to higher skill levels, drivers need to change strategies to compensate for their increased skills and knowledge.

One of the key tasks in engineering a driver is to identify these less than optimal solutions and help find better solutions. This is not achieved by simply comparing differences between drivers and showing one where he is slower than another. What is really needed is to provide the driver with insight. An understanding of why he does what he does, and why it is less than optimal.

Remember — for that driver — his solution did feel faster or was the right thing to do. With new understanding, a driver will have renewed comprehension, see the situation in a different perspective, and arrive at a more efficient solution naturally.

At a point in driver development the consequence of each driver’s performance becomes his particular solution to a specific situation and its immediate circumstances. The optimum solution for one car in a specific situation may not be the optimal solution for another in the same situation.

Why?

This may surprise you. It is our differences in perceiving the sensory information we act upon. Drivers suffer from both perceptual and decision making illusions. Sensory information upon which we base our driving strategies is often distorted. We are all familiar with illusions where something looks quite different from how it really is, like railway tracks converging in the distance. The straight rail lines are the fact. The apparent convergence is the mirage. If we base our judgments on the mirage, the distortion, our judgment will be flawed and our assessment less than optimum. It is all too easy to be tricked into thinking that any given solution is the optimum solution when it is not.

Most of a driver’s solutions are picked-up by trial and error. Within this trial and error process there are many diversions and dead ends that initially look helpful. But, ultimately prove to be less than optimal.

We want our driver to interpret all the incoming information and determine the optimum solution. When we can help the driver make this kind of change, in judgment, we find we have not just cured a problem. Rather, we have cured a whole class of problems that apply to different corners at different tracks.

Three iterations per second is the maximum speed at which the entire human motor control system can work. A relatively slow time in which to perceive changes in a fast paced driving environment and update your actions. That means a shortcut process must exist, multiple motor skills must be performed as a single instruction containing numerous complex sub-instructions.

The cerebellum is the area of the brain that processes information from your six senses. It sees the situation you are faced with going up into the brain and it sees the answer coming back down. Any task repeated often enough is stored in the cerebellum; so is the complete problem and solution.

Repeating the process enough times for the cerebellum to learn the solution is what practice is all about. Once enough practice using portions of the entire brain has occurred, the cerebellum stores the process and simply intercepts the problem and provides an immediate answer.

This shortcut operation by the cerebellum is completely unconscious and very fast. Of course you are not aware of these things happening in your brain. You simply perceive everything happening in real-time.

Numerous studies have shown, in general, great drivers do not typically have faster reflexes than other drivers. Then how is it that, Champion Drivers seem to have “all the time in the world” when their car is at the limit?

The answer. Quicker assessment.

The utility and success of a solution depends on our ability to assess. The only way to achieve quicker assessment is to develop a richer, a larger and more efficient bank of experience in the cerebellum. If five different inputs all end in the same output, the cerebellum will have a broad brush stroke approach. However, becoming aware of even subtle differences will develop a much richer set of answers.

The better a driver’s understanding of motion is optimized, the more ability he has to quickly assess, anticipate problems and select the appropriate response program in the cerebellum. It is critical to the success of outcome that these automatic shortcuts are optimized.

There is no need to always be behind, out-of-phase with the situation. If optimum decisions can be selected, a driver can afford extra time in the response sequence to let a couple of iterations proceed before he needs to make further corrections. There will be less need to rush and more time to choose when to rush.

Lesser skilled drivers have fewer choices of appropriate response sets. That means, on the next iteration of the response sequence, there is a larger margin between what they perceived the car was going to do and what it actually did.

Just how important is the driver? Of anything that can be changed, driver skillsets have the most significant effect on outcome.



This article was written for novice drivers who are just starting out with racing or intending to start racing.

The first thing that you will need to keep in mind is that cars and drivers alike only have a 100% capacity. If you are using 80% of your traction for braking, you only have 20% left over for cornering. If you’re using 80% of your traction for cornering, you only have 20% left over for acceleration.

Likewise, if the driver is using 80% of their attention towards steering inputs, they will only have 20% of their attention left for speed adjustments. To push the limits while driving, we need to adjust our street driving techniques for the track. Remember, just like while skiing, you go where you are looking, so you need to look as far down the track as possible to remain smooth and in control. Also, always keep your hands at the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock position, except when shifting. Your car talks to you through your steering wheel, so listen with both hands.

There are several different activities going on while cornering a car, but to simplify it for new drivers, we are only going to talk about the two main things. Steering inputs and speed control. We must learn to handle them together. So let’s start with some basic definitions. Every corner has three parts: the corner entry (or turn-in), the apex, and the corner exit (or track-out).

Corner entry (turn-in) begins at the end of the straightaway when you first turn the steering wheel. This should be made from the far opposite side of the track from the direction of the turn. If the turn is to the right, corner entry should be made from far track left.

The apex is the mid-corner point where the car meets the inside of the track. If the turn is to the right, this is when the car is far track right.

Corner exit (track-out) is where the steering input is removed and the car is now once again going straight. If the turn is to the right, corner exit should be far track left.

The objective when cornering is to use the entire track so the turn will have as large a radius as possible. The tighter the turn radius, the slower the car speed will be due to decreased traction and increased drag caused by increasing tire slip angles.

Another objective is to minimize the number of steering inputs so as not to unsettle the car’s suspension throughout the corner. The perfect corner would be one smooth steering input to get the car from corner entry to the apex, and one smooth unwinding of the steering wheel to get the car from the apex to corner exit.

While the ‘correct line’ around a corner remains the same for different driver skill levels, the speed will certainly be higher with more advanced drivers. An entry-level racecar driver needs to keep throttle and brake inputs simple so as to have the best possibility of handling the necessary speed adjustments throughout a corner.

All braking should take place while the car is still going straight, thus the brakes should be released at the corner entry. To use the maximum traction capabilities of the tire, it can’t handle braking and turning duties at the same time. The car will therefor be at its slowest speed in the corner at this point so that the tire can handle maximum side loading. This also allows the driver to concentrate on just one task at a time. Light throttle application will occur from corner entry to the apex while the tire and driver are at their highest workload.

From the apex to corner exit throttle application will smoothly increase to maximum as steering input is decreased and tire traction capabilities increase. The advanced technique of trail braking (braking after turn-in) should be saved for a later time.

Proper cornering technique

Lift – While driving in a straight line, look ahead and smoothly lift off the throttle.

Brake On – Smoothly and progressively apply the brakes while in a straight line. Keep in mind, not all turns require the use of the brakes.

Downshift – Using the heel-toe technique, downshift to the appropriate gear to accelerate out of the corner. Keep in mind, not all corners require downshifting.

Brake Off – Looking ahead to the apex, smoothly release the brakes prior to corner entry.

Turn in – Look where you want to be, not where you are. Smoothly turn the steering wheel to initiate the turn.

Accelerate – After initiating the turn, smoothly apply light throttle to keep a little weight off the front tires and allow them to steer. Progressively increase the throttle as you pass the apex and head for the track-out point.

Driving tips review

Braking and shifting should be done in a straight line. Braking should be completed by turn-in, upshifting should be done after track-out.

Do not lift off the throttle while in the corner. Use light throttle to keep the car settled to the apex, and then increase the throttle towards corner exit.

Use the brakes to slow the car, not the transmission. Downshifting is to put the car in the correct gear for accelerating, not for slowing the car.

Keep your throttle, brake, and steering inputs smooth yet decisive. Avoid jerky actions that could unsettle the car.

Don’t coast, you should either be on the gas or on the brakes.

These tips should help you be on your way to build up the necessary confidence on the track. These tips are great for building up the basics for beginners but are not necessarily the fastest ways to go around corners.

As you advance in skill through training and practice, you will start to learn about other advanced techniques which several veteran drivers use, such as trail braking and left foot braking. These are additional techniques which are used to achieve faster lap times. For now, just remember to build up on the basics first.

1. NOT ENOUGH MENTAL PRACTICE

The more complex the task, the more improvement is likely to result from mental practice; and motor racing would surely qualify as sufficiently complex. Mental practice is the most important part of any driving exercise. Stretching the mind prior to competition prevents mental cramps. Imagery can be used to create intensely realistic pre-experiences that give the feeling of having been there before, with the confidence and competence that comes with it. Arrange the course into a mental slide show. With your eyes closed replay the course exactly as you intend to drive it. Mentally rotate the steering wheel, shift gears and brake at appropriate locations. Repeat these images until they become fluid. Since the brain makes little distinction between a visual image and a thought image, by practicing purely within your mind, imagery can create, modify or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles. Fine skills or complex techniques can be slowed down, analyzed, and on-track driving scenes and actions can become familiar. Familiar scenes are important in order to process the abundance of real-time information created by increasing speed.

2. NOT SCANNING

Keeping the eyes in constant motion helps maintain a little better sensory connection with the environment. Movement is necessary for sensory input. If you stare too fixedly at a single point your eye develops a momentary blind spot. To maintain visual contact you have to keep your eye moving, sweeping the target area in a searching behavior. Wherever you are, take a quick visual scan of the area in front of you. Start at the horizon on your left and scan across it to the horizon on your far right. Do not concern yourself with breaking the scan down, just scan the area in front of you left to right as you would normally. Use the horizon as an outward limit, but concentrate on seeing everything between you and it. Close your eyes and take a mental inventory of what was perceived. Repeat the scan. This time, break the visualization into six or eight mental snapshots as your eyes move. Compare the first mental picture to the second. It is amazing and fun to perceive detail that was not noticed before. Try it again, this time behind the wheel of the car at speed. Breaking the scan picture into mental snap shots of familiar scenes radically improves the odds of doing the right thing at the right time.

3. NOT LOOKING FAR ENOUGH AHEAD

Vision is our overwhelming dominant sense: the “king of the senses”. Eyesight is so intimately involved in almost every athletic task that superstars often are credited with what amounts to an unfair visual advantage. Scanning familiar scenes at the point of emerging information provides a necessary perspective for increasing speed. Your eyes lead the way and control smoothness. Without proper visual perspective “High Speed” can be like driving in a bank of fog where planning ahead is unthinkable, but critical. Looking ahead not only gets a racer where he needs to be, it focuses concentration. However, scanning the point of emerging information is not enough. Learn to project ahead. As objects in your scan become closer, anticipate a shift to objects even further ahead. Anticipation is crucial because everything happens very quickly at high speed. The ability to look ahead immunizes against accidents.

4. SCARING OR SURPRISING THE BRAIN

The brain allows the driver to anticipate and, therefore, is his best ally. Overload, scare or misuse that ally and response becomes involuntary (emotional). One example: ground rush — many objects flying by quicker than can be mentally sorted. Ground rush is caused by failing to continually adjust vision further ahead, particularly as speed increases. Escalating speed magnifies anxiety. As visual depths of field get shorter with increasing speed, anxiety progressively grows. If this cascade of events continues, once eye placement is inside reaction distance and speed continues to mount, eye movement becomes fixed and scanning for crucial information stops. Fear is the result of progressively increasing anxiety. Fear brings panic inputs, and involuntary panic input is always wrong. A brain that has been scared sends off commands like: “Lift!” “Look over here, instead of where you are going!” “BRAKE!! in the middle of this turn”.

5. UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The quickest indication of an unskilled driver is the hurried move. The hurried move does not come from starting a skill to soon but from neglecting to finish the skill that preceded it, cutting it off short. Just as a wide receiver must “put the ball away” before he starts to run with it, so must any driver put away the movement at hand before starting the next. It’s a paradox: taking time to finish one move gives you more time to get the next one started right. Skill is simply performing in a higher gear where there is less of the grinding inefficiency of a lower gear to multiply task difficulty. Skill allows you not to rush and lets you have time to choose when to rush. You have to have confidence to take time to control the car. Next time you’re having trouble, try telling yourself you have more time than you think you have. You’ll find another several inches of incoming trajectory to work with, during which you can focus on finishing the skill at hand. That few inches is enough; it is a few inches in time, if you have confidence enough to take it. The result, another racing paradox: You must slow down in order to go fast.

6. CARRYING TOO MUCH SPEED INTO A TURN

How much speed is too much? When it keeps you from going precisely where you planned it is too much. Carrying too much speed into a turn can be thrilling and may feel fast, but it keeps you from your planned positions. The primary purpose of braking is to slow the vehicle to target turn-in speed. A car can be slowed faster than it can be accelerated. Over equal distances brakes are capable of producing greater changes in speed than acceleration. Speed is not the issue though, CONTROL is. Control of speed and control of self. Driving is all about making good judgments. “Judgment” is not a sensation. Judgment and experience take the form of thought. Motions generate thoughts too, but feelings of going fast can also be attached to motions. These “feel-fast” sensations are distractions and can be quite unrelated to speed. Carrying demon amounts of speed into a turn might “feel” fast or gain a few hundredths of a second initially, but overall speed is sacrificed and entire seconds can be lost.

7. OVERDRIVING

Technical proficiency requires little physical effort because the performances are always controlled, balanced. Less technically perfected efforts require as much physical and emotional strength as necessary to continually snatch oneself back from disaster time after time. To do something inefficiently (badly) requires more effort, like driving a car with an out-of-balance wheel. “Natural talent” is no substitute for careful learning and diligent practice. Beginners should not expect to post times that would champions would be proud to claim. Experienced drivers who have been idle should expect to spend practice time to find and refine old skills. Approaching perfection that’s when the pro-athlete most recognizes the need for his coach. To extract that last 10% to 15% is inordinately more difficult.

8. MOTIVATION.

Once you perform a skill to your own satisfaction you tend to stop looking for improvement. Yet the physiological limits to your performance of the skill may be a great deal higher the upper reaches are virtually limitless, provided there is sufficient motivation to reach them. Have we forgotten the effort required to “get it right?” There is such an emphasis today on instant gratification and being a winner that we often forget the valuable lessons we learn from losing. Remember that the fact of trying something, even if it does not work, often opens doors that would have otherwise remained closed. Small failures lead to incremental improvements. More than any film, bench-racing session or ride a long, not being able to make it through a turn will sear into your brain the importance of doing it right. Discipline yourself to concentrate on what it takes to be where you need to be. On track, focus on the present and save analysis for the paddock. It is the driver’s job to learn to do the hard thing easily, gracefully, efficiently. Improvement is there for the taking only if the effort is invested.

9. OUT OF “ZONE” PERFORMANCE.

A large part of any sport comes from the compelling sensation of getting it right. A coming together of “Art” and “Science” is where magic happens. The feeling is almost mystical. When timing is right: motion is smooth; skill levels are elevated; driving actions are quicker, more forceful and more accurate. In the “zone,” effort is optimized, not over stressed, and endurance is increased; a driver is performing “within” himself. Concentration slows time to allow for confidence, the ultimate tool for getting control of the time sequence. More interesting is what control of the time sequence within the movement does for skill. Different arcs or portions of arcs within a sequence of motion can be moved with brilliant results. Today’s technology is capable of designing a machine to replicate perfect driving, but the rhythm it produces will always be identifiable, instantly, as machine produced. It is “cold”. To warm it up, put a hand on it. Change the time sequence, introduce human control. It is not the gizmo, not the tool, it is the tool-user that makes the real difference.

10. NOT RECOGNIZING FATIGUE

Everything in racing is dynamic: temperature, tire wear, track conditions, excitement, passing opportunities, FATIGUE. When you become physically tired, the first thing to go is your sense of judgment. Fatigue causes lines to get sloppy, crisp turn-in suffers, throttle action becomes more abrupt and driving no longer flows from one action to another. To grow increasingly numb to the “sensation” of speed with each successive lap is normal. Increasing speed to “chase” this seductive sensation can have disastrous results no matter the cause of deteriorating conditions.

Failure to recognize mistakes, failure to anticipate and adjust are all indications of lost concentration FATIGUE. Why driving suffers is no mystery. We are poised for flight, our muscle systems are cocked for emergencies — and release — that never come. We get tired of being poised, but we can’t willfully let go. Fatigue itself is a snowballing mechanism: tired muscles contract themselves involuntarily and thus use still more energy, generating more fatigue in the uncontrolled effort. Fatigue has focused concentration on your body. If your attention is on your body, it is not on your driving. Adhere to the Three Mistake Rule: Three mental and/or physical mistakes in a row — slow down, go into the pits; REGROUP.

Source: motorsports.sae.org