Slipstream - June 2001

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Corners of the Mind: Practice 1, On Track By Paul Young, San Diego Region (from The Windblown Witness) The key to success in any skill is practice, practice, practice. Obviously there is much to learn by reading books on the subject, observing someone else, or listening to a discussion. But the actual experience of doing is the best way to gain experience and learn. This applies to sports, art, vocation, hobby, and, of course, driving. Generally those that have more experience are more successful. At an autocross or time trial, we get certain amount of time or number of laps. It would be to our advantage therefore, to attend as many of these events as feasible. An autocross is an event where cars are allowed on a track at intervals designed to allow an adequate margin of safety between cars. If a car spins out, for instance, there must be plenty of time for the next car to avoid the incident (with the help of a yellow flag from the corner worker). Time trials are driving events with continuous lap practice, and are often held on large (2.5 miles), fast race tracks. The start and finish lines are the same, so you drive successively around the course for a specified time (15 to 30 minutes per session). Since the entire run group (up to 25 cars) is out on the course at the same time, passing is necessary. This is handled with the emphasis on safety. You have the added responsibilities of watching your mirrors, giving passing signals, being passed, passing other cars, watching the corner workers more carefully (who now have 4 or 5 different flags instead of just yellow), while running continually for up to 30 minutes at higher than autocross speeds. All this can become second nature with a good deal of practice (track time), but to the newcomer it can be a drain on mental resources, allowing little time to think about learning driving skills! Nonetheless, a time trial affords many miles of track experience and several hours of on the track practice during the weekend. The focus and concentration of the continuous lap format allow you to get into a groove and really work on your driving. I didn't get seriously involved in time trials until I had the basics of driving solidly understood (after a year of autocrossing). I recommend that you first have car control well in hand before starting to time trial. There are many new things to keep account of while driving at these events. If you are trying to keep track of all these things while struggling with how your Porsche handles... well, you get the picture. Later, you can go beyond our time trial series into club racing, vintage racing, or other types of professional motorsports. But it's interesting to see that even the most experienced drivers still find a challenge and opportunity to learn at an autocross, where the emphasis is on figuring out the course smoothly but quickly. The point is this: in order to maximize track time, participate in as many events as your time and finances allow. I don't know of any secrets to getting more actual on-track time. Our rules are different now, but it used to be you could register for two groups, or register two cars at an event. I did just that back in the Fall '86 series and won two trophies in two different classes. But it was too much work, especially at Holtville! Bob Lemke says that sometimes I'm getting more actual track time than him because my lap times are slower. Uh huh, I guess that makes sense - slower means more time. Hey, by extending that logic, you can get a lot of track time just by walking the course. Now there's an idea. So if we've exhausted every idea for getting more track time, what else is there? If quantity of track time is optimized, let's work on increasing the quality of the track time that we do have. Exactly what do we mean by quality track time? For our purposes, we want to learn as much as we can in any given amount of time we do have. If we drive a practice lap and learn nothing from it, that lap was not practice; it was useless. Perhaps you weren't aware of what you learned, so don't just throw out every lap that has no obvious lesson to it. The more education you can glean from any given lap, the more you can find to improve from, the better that lap was. Hey, it's called a practice lap, so consciously learn everything you can from it! What are the methods of getting the most from a practice lap, and what tools can we use to learn the most we can? Well, we talked about attitude, and that has a lot to do with opening our minds to new ideas. Another key to absorbing the most experience is concentration or focus. Any distraction will inhibit our ability to receive and process input and ideas. One factor that can be a major internal distraction is tension - physical, mental or emotional. By relaxing ourselves, we can actually free our minds 20
up to better focus on our task of learning the course and driving technique. What I am talking about is relaxation as a method of reducing or removing tension. Do you ever get nervous while waiting in the pregrid line at a time trial or autocross, especially for timed runs? Your heart beats faster, your breathing is heavy with anticipation, your knuckles turn white as you grip the wheel tighter, you look over at your date and... oops, wrong scene! But the symptoms are similar. I can tell you that with experience (driving experience, that is), the nervousness does become less pronounced, though it never completely goes away. However I have found a few things that help me, and I do these as a matter of habit, even if I don't feel very nervous at all. While waiting in pre-grid, I scan my entire body starting at my toes and working up gradually through my head and arms. This mental scan looks for any muscle or nerve tension along the way and I imagine the stress being neutralized. Without moving my limbs, I will tense and then relax every muscle, making sure they are unstressed. Afterwards, my muscles and nerves are left rested and ready to perform their tasks with a minimum of any pre-stressed condition that might fatigue them or distract the mind - consciously or subconsciously. Another technique is to inhale slowly and deeply for five seconds, hold this full breath for five seconds, then exhale smoothly and completely for five seconds. Then I breathe deeply and normally for a few seconds and repeat this process two or three times. This deep breathing exercise slows my heart a bit, regulates my breathing, relaxes a bunch of muscles and calms my nerves. Perhaps most importantly, it gets oxygen flowing to my brain (no I did not learn this from Bill Clinton). Finally, I remind myself to be intense (focused), but not tense... intense, not tense... intense, not tense. This entire ritual - scan, breath, focus - takes just a few minutes. When it's done I feel refreshed, unstressed, relaxed, and yet alert and ready to concentrate on driving. My muscles are ready to respond without being pre-stressed. My hands control the wheel with a steady, moderate grip. My mind is looking straight ahead, on the track, my driving, the tasks at hand, and learning. Seem a bit silly? Not if you are serious about driving faster. Hell, I'll use any legal advantage I can get! Perhaps these exercises and imagery are not quite right for you, or maybe you have other techniques. But give it a try, or at least look for ways of relaxing your body and focusing your mind during those times that you might get a bit nervous. Out on the course, there are things to work on to improve the quality of your practice. We want to learn the course as fast as possible while maintaining smoothness. Except for how your car behaves at the limits, everything you need to learn about the course can be picked up at greatly reduced speeds (even while walking the course). This means that if you are driving smoothly, you are learning the course. If you are at or near the limits, you are learning car control (not the course). This does not mean that you should always drive well below the limits, nor always probing the limits; just know when and where to use each technique. It may seem obvious, but it is important to know the feel of your Porsche. This is an understanding of how your car behaves in a variety of situations. It is not necessary to have a physics degree specializing in automobile chassis dynamics to understand your car any more than you need to be a psychologist to interact with people. We learn through experience. You will get to know your Porsche better and better. In order to maximize this learning process, it helps to first minimize distractions, as we have been discussing. As we gain experience, we need to increase the link between driver and car. Fine performance automobiles are touted as being an extension of the driver, but we humanoids need to adapt our senses to our Porsches too. We can improve our driving skills if we can more thoroughly understand how our car behaves under assorted conditions. Nobody is the perfect driver - none of us can extract the absolute most out of any given car. So the driver is the limiting factor in practical terms. But in theory, the car has a limit; the maximum that that car can theoretically achieve with a perfect driver. If we accommodate to the car, we can come closer to that hypothetical boundary - driving the car as well as it can be driven. We also learn which sensory inputs we need to be aware of and which are distractions to be ignored, thus freeing our minds to focus on what is truly important. With practice, we can learn which situations will likely produce certain responses from our Porsches, and tune our sensitivity accordingly. For example, understeer (front wheels plowing) can best be sensed through our eyes and hands (steering wheel), whereas oversteer (rear wheels loose) is better felt with the seat of your pants - the perception of lateral motion. If we are in a tight corner and we want to use a bit of controlled oversteer to our advantage to get through the turn quickly, we can anticipate the sensation of impending oversteer, and handle the car appropriately for the desired result. These may sound like advanced concepts, but many drivers do these things subconsciously. It will take some time, but we can get into the mindset of learning quickly. By understanding the process of connecting with your Porsche, we can expeditiously conform to other cars and learn their characteristics quickly also. This adaptability will allow us to quickly adjust to new cars, tracks and situations. A great car, like a Porsche, will have solid, predictable, repeatable performance, but it cannot adapt to the driver. It is our job to learn how a car behaves, just as we learn how to interact with a variety of people. If you know your car perfectly (none of us do), and you know the course completely (again, nobody does), you still can work on how your Porsche handles on that particular course, given this day's conditions (track surface, traffic, weather, etc.). The point is that there always will be something to work on and improve, so select a study topic and tackle it! As your car control and course familiarization skills advance, the improvements will come more slowly. But keep working at it despite the seemingly slow progress you may encounter at times. The key to performance driving practice is quantity and quality of track time. To improve the quality we can heighten our concentration by minimizing tension and stress. We can prepare for our lap or run group by relaxing our body and focusing our thoughts. On the track, we should attempt to become an extension of the car, tuning our senses to the car and the particular situation. Each car has a theoretical best lap, and we should strive to adapt ourselves to the car with the goal of getting closer to that ideal. 21
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