Speed Secrets: Team Building

How important to your results is the team you race with? Critical, right? When working within any team environment, you really have three options.

Hey Look! There’s Nothing!

As human beings, we hate to look at nothing. We love to look at something. Anything. Even some things we don’t want to look at, right? Have you ever been faced with something disgusting or ugly, but you looked at it anyway?

Different Cars, Different Techniques!

The higher a car’s polar moment of inertia, the earlier and more gently you need to turn in. There’s a phrase that should get you thinking!

Vision, State of Mind & Performance

In preparation for some driver development work with a high-end simulator, I was talking with a friend (an ex-F1 driver I’ll call “David”), who had done a lot of sim work in England. He told me a fascinating story; it backs up the research in an area of driver performance I often use with the drivers I coach.

Speed Secrets: The Handling Debrief Process

Whether you have a team of engineers working on your car, or you discuss its handling problems while looking in a mirror each and every time you come off the track, you should consider what setup changes you could make to your car.

Speed Secrets: How to Practice

Your mental approach to testing and practice is important. You want to simulate the competitive spirit and environment as closely as possible. You want the same intensity and aggressiveness in practice as you do in the race. If you practice at 99%, that’s how you will perform in the race. It’s very difficult to get back to 100%.

Speed Secrets: Jeff Braun on Tires

One of the first BIG lessons I learned as a driver was how critically important tires were. What I’m really talking about is having an understanding how they work, how to treat them, and how to learn from what they were teaching me.

What’s Really Driving Your Car?

What percentage of your driving is mental and what percentage is physical? Whether you’re racing wheel-to-wheel, doing track days or driver education events, autocrossing, or whatever, how much of it is mental and how much physical?

Speed Secrets: How To Get Lucky – Preparation And Belief System

I suspect most people in racing have at one time, heard the saying, “You make your own luck.” I wonder how many of those people, though, understand what that really means.

Speed Secrets: Racing in the Rain – Lessons From Enzo the Dog

Racing in the rain. Drivers either love it or hate it. There are very few drivers who have a “take it or leave it” attitude towards splashing around a race track.

Speed Secrets: The Dreaded Understeer/Oversteer Problem

“The car understeers early in the corner, then snaps to oversteer at the exit.” That’s a common complaint from track day and race drivers. Most often, the priority becomes fixing the exit oversteer because it’s “scarier.” But the only car problem is the understeer.

Speed Secrets: How to Improve – Part 3

In Part 2, I presented the concept of how our brains work when driving a race car. Essentially, it can be summed up by Input-Process-Output. If you recall, information from our senses go into our brain/computer, where it is processed by our software/programming and we then get some form of output – our performance or skill.

Speed Secrets: How To Improve – Part 2

In Part 1, I challenged you to make a list of things you did well last season, and things you need to improve. The overall message I wanted to stress was that if you do the same things you’ve always done to prepare, you’ll get pretty much the same results again this coming season.

Speed Secrets: How To Improve – Part 1

Albert Einstein once said, “A sure sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something to change.” I don’t know if Albert was much of a race fan, but I’m pretty sure he was talking about race drivers when he said this! It appears that way, at least.

Speed Secrets: Free Track Maps

The good ol’ track map is still one of the most valuable tools a performance car or race car driver could ever have. Whether we use a printed copy or a tablet, making notes is one of the most powerful learning tools we have. But there hasn’t been a good resource for accurate, consistent maps designed for a driver to make notes. Until now.

Speed Secrets: Why Natural Talent Won’t Always Get You To The Top

I’d like to tell you a story about a young man, one who has become a slightly bitter young man. Let’s call him Buddy.

Buddy started racing karts at age ten, and was immediately very fast. He was smooth and brave, two factors that quickly led to speed. He was a tough racer also, one that rarely lost in a wheel-to-wheel battle. From his first season to the time he was sixteen, he won at least one championship per year.

Speed Secrets: Why “In Slow, Out Fast” is Bad Advice

Almost as soon as you graduated from a race drivers school (if not sooner), you no doubt began asking yourself, “how can I go faster?” Of course, you most likely looked first at what you could do to your car to make it faster, but that is not of much interest to me. What is of interest is what you can do as a driver. If you could only find the “secret” that would shave a few fractions of a second off your best time, you would be a happier driver. Well, the following thoughts and ideas might just help you figure out that “secret.”

Speed Secrets: Where Speed Comes From – Part 2

More on finding the “secrets” to driving faster: work on one thing at a time. When I’m learning a new track or car, I concentrate on finding the big chunks of time first, trying to improve two or three areas at a time.

Speed Secrets: Where Speed Comes From – Part 1

If you had the opportunity to analyze in great detail some very sophisticated computer data acquisition information from a variety of drivers of different levels and cars at numerous race tracks around North America, you would learn a lot about driving yourself.

Speed Secrets: What’s Really Driving Your Car?

What percentage of your driving is mental and what percentage is physical? Whether you’re racing wheel-to-wheel, doing track days or driver education events, autocrossing, or whatever, how much of it is mental and how much physical?