Feedback Loops

How flow flows, in Optimum Drive I lay out why flow is the ultimate mental state for peak human performance. Flow is a semi-meditative mind state where humans preform optimally. It requires substantial time and exposure to a task to reach a level of sublime competence too be able flow in that task. This can occur naturally as a process of steady unconscious improvement that can come from prolonged experience alone or a deliberate trained conscious effort (or of course some combination of both).

Flow is purely subconscious, as a result it feels a little “out of body” because your conscious mind is free to observe intently or wonder aimlessly. Consciousness is not necessary for the task, it is only, after all, an observer (so we can say many animals only flow). It can be a real source of pride, wonder and awe if you consciously trained to attain flow or possibly (if it organically occurred) it can feel quite strange or weird all the way to just something else we never give a second thought and is part of a long list of things we take for granted.

In its simplest form think of it as a human motor function, all the things our body does (thankfully) without any conscious effort. Heart beating, breathing, those are obvious, there actually are eighteen named autonomic systems at work at all times just keeping us going (Homeostasis is the name for all of that). They are all part of our subconscious (or unconscious) mind that utilizes 95%(!) of our mental capacity. Besides the autonomic system(s), which keeps us ticking along, the rest of our subconscious (and a great majority of our mental capacity) is cognition, all the things we have learned but aren’t consciously thinking about so yes things like memories…but also things like walking. This is where flow lives. Walking is actually flow. Walking is automated and adaptable, completely subconsciously, it is vastly more complex that we could consciously handle (remember that’s only 5% of our mental capacity). Walking has hundreds of muscle firings (up to 600!) and we learned it…literally one step at a time over months as our young brains developed and grew to a capacity that the “program” “walking” could be written (and so on).  

This automation in our subconscious is made of feedback loops. It is every individual required sub-task in a self-correcting feedback loop. All working together to enable flow in the task. What does “all working together mean”? It is a complex system, every adjustment in any individual feedback loop effects the entire system, they are ripples and the system has to as a whole continue to function along the way compensating for the ripples or we fall down, just before that though our conscious mind gets a kick of adrenalin (still the best energy drink out there) along with the command to immediately do something (that’s what the adrenalin is for). So, the flow keeps flowing as long as everything is happening within spec for our subconscious program to handle the task but once things go out of spec the alarms go off, the flow state is broken and we are consciously trying to sort out this surprise new experience consciously. These moments are sub optimal and when describing it later tend to use words like lucky…or unlucky. Why those words? 5% isn’t going to solve much in the moment (even when jacked on adrenaline). We can only consciously focus on one thing as a time (conscious multitasking is a myth) so at all costs these moments are best avoided. This is why flow is peak human performance, we simply cannot perform better than being in flow, therefore make sure those feedback loops are all fully capable of self-correcting and the system for the task is as a result robust.

The feedback loops all take information from our senses (how we connect with the world), this information is continuously updating so this program is adaptive and self-updating (as of course then is the system) so don’t think of it as a fixed program. We walk for most of our lives and as we age it changes and right along with us (because it is us), our program called “walking” is continously adapting. As mentioned in the opening paragraph this can be also be done intentionally.

Teaching methodology, first rule of teaching is that there are no rules for teaching. Everyone is different, within reason, the ends justify the means. How small the loops (sub-tasks) need to be is very much up to the individual. Smaller is more detailed and therefore more accurate but some people can handle multivariable loops…others cannot.

Breaking down the tasks is the first thing to do (create the curriculum as it were). Next a safe, simple way to efficiently practice the skill and ample time to ingrain (program) the improvements and move to the next one. Make sure it all overlaps so there are no gaps. Test the individual sub-tasks and when combined with others test again. Move slowly and patiently. The enemy here is impatience and assumption, these will kill the chances of the end program being good enough for flow to occur. It takes time, it has to be accurate. What we are aiming for is two things; one is “normal range”, we want the sub-task to be self-correcting within normal range which is defined by experience. If we are teaching ourselves it is only our experiences, if we are fortunate enough it is a professional in that task/field and the normal range is more absolute and closer to the real ideal (moral of the story, get a professional to teach you). We then want to take that new normal range and ingrain in. The ingraining is the setting of the sub-task into the program in our subconscious effectively putting it in play. I say in Optimum Drive “the tell” that’s it’s done is the person can have normal conversation while doing the task (proving it is subconscious).

It’s not quite flow or no flow, there is a grey “semi-flow” in between where we (somewhat nervously) monitor the task not quite trusting things. This often happens when you change things or haven’t done the thing for a while. Once the trust is there the flow can be left to do it’s (nearly magical, nearly superhuman) thing. If not…back to work because, well, the job is never really done.

If you find human performance/potential interesting check out my book (Optimum Drive) and my website (www.theoptimumdrive.com) which has many blog posts on these topics and more

Behind the Veil

Most drivers realize that great precision is needed to go fast, “inch or millimeter precision” referencing the racing line, brake application point and getting back to power and full throttle as soon as possible. These are all real and worthy goals but there is so much more and honestly that’s when driving starts to get interesting.

Beyond the above statements there are more layers when it comes to what great drivers are doing. You hear minimum speed (or rolling speed) often these days (focus and phrasing seem to go in and out of fashion much like anything else). “Gotta’ get those minimum speeds up” or “carry more rolling speed into the corner”, sounds great but how the heck do you do that? Most often answer I hear is release the brake sooner, it superficially sounds about right, it will allow you to add minimum speed. If I enter at the same speed at turn in but trail off the brake sooner it will indeed raise my minimum speed but that shouldn’t actually work, the only way it would work is if you are over slowing the corner and happen to have underutilized tires (you aren’t actually at the limit) then by all means carry in a bit more speed but…what if you car is actually at the tires limit at least on one end of the car? I would optimistically assume (from the safety of behind my laptop screen) that you nearly all better damn well be at the limit of adhesion of at least the front or rear tires while you are cornering on a race track (or what’s the point?)

How do you feel about raising minimum speed now? The people who are recommending that’s what you do (in all likelihood doing a data overlay) giving you “some low hanging fruit” “If you just carry a bit more speed it’s worth half a second in that corner alone”. You are already at the limit but I’m losing a half a second? That makes no sense. You would automatically then think of the car as being the issue, it must be lacking grip (and if the overlay was the same car then the tires must be gone vs. when the reference lap was recorded) because you were at the limit, you felt the car slide.

Now people do sometimes imagine they felt the car slide. That comes from a perception reality disconnect. It’s surprisingly easy to do and comes from the correct desire to anticipate a slide rather than react to it. To exactly match the adjustment (correction) with the loss of grip. Sometimes people get a little too proactive and fix things that never happened but truly believe they fixed something (a bit of a paranoid “better safe than sorry mentality”). This can technically occur well below the limit but you would like to think they are at least close.

The other possibility is the slow driver that is lacking in confidence, the driver driving at their limit (not the cars), the limit of their comfort. This is also a perception reality disconnect. They have an inflated perceived risk that is slowing them down. What fixes all of this? Car control training; spending copious time in the paddock on a skid pad, slalom, braking, corner and putting them all together (simple) autocross building feel and confidence in a safe but relevant environment (please read Optimum Drive for a lot more on all of this, these blog posts build on the book’s foundation).

To finally answer the question of how to raise minimum speeds when your car is actually already at its “limit” in the corner (not perceived, an actual slide is imminent). The first thing to understand it the limit is never understeer or oversteer. Those are unbalanced limits which are below the minimum speed the car in its current form could corner at. The reason it that while two tires (front axle or rear) are indeed at and/or over their max the other end of the car isn’t, that means the overall car grip is not optimized. So, while the car is certainly cornering hard it is not at its actual limit until all four tires are at the limit. Understeer and oversteer are not limits they are simply indicators of an imbalanced car cornering too hard. This is where the minimum speed can be raised by changing the balance and therefore being able to increase entry speed. So, to the original point it is not just “rolling off the brake sooner” too raise mid corner speeds it would actually properly require a slightly later brake application with the intention of carrying more speed into the corner itself while balancing the car better with the brake release (timing with steering input)

Remember to focus on the timing of your inputs as the primary tool for car balance, not car set up. Only when you have exhausted every possible variation of trail braking vs. steering inputs should you ever consider touching the car. Everything you change on the car to fix balance has an effect on the car in every other corner (some negative some positive) and it becomes infinitely complex almost instantly on the gain and loss equation for the full lap/session/race while if you change what you are doing in that one corner to improve balance it only effects that one corner and only positively (or you wouldn’t do it). Think of the modern F1driver and steering wheel where they are adjusting everything dynamically always to help minimize the compromises the diff and the brake bias, anti-roll bars etc. (plus they are adjusting everything they can driving the car to minimize the adjustments required). It all gets a little crazy, keep it simple, leave the car alone with just a hint of mild understeer as your car setup balance base and work from there (any decent driver can work from that balance to optimize the car balance in any type of corner). How?

Timelines, think about timelines when it comes to optimizing car balance. Our car setup has mild understeer but the only time (we will allow) the car to understeer is in a very long carrousel type corner where our balance tools lose their reach (you can only trail brake so far realistically). The two timelines and your steering (steer in steer out) and your feet (Initial brake to brake release, throttle to full throttle). It is a subtle shifting of these two timelines that adjusts balance. There is of course infinite variability within the individual timelines but is the interaction between the two timelines that adjusts balance. Specifically, the timing of the brake release with the steering input into the corner and there is one more variable in play that guides us. Our mild understeer car is not always a mild understeer car. That is an average of what the car does relative to corner speed. Independent of our input just talking about car physics the lower the speed the greater the understeer and the faster the corner the less understeer (which is why a rear wing/spoiler is nice to help offset the growing oversteer tendency). With that we can see the timeline shift at its most basic form. The slower the corner the more we shift the braking timeline into the corner…the more we “trail brake”. Conversely the faster the corner the more we shift the braking timeline earlier…the less we trail brake. Now there is no excuse for understeer or oversteer, it is set by the driver and the whole responsibility of how the driver juggles the timelines to balance the car in any given scenario.

The other variable; line. In any basic school you will be shown the advantages of the late apex. It is a great place to start. It is important to start conservatively but the why behind it is important to see why it is variably later not just later. The premise is that we gain enough of an acceleration advantage with the late apex that it more than offsets the time loss of the tighter entry (more on this later). This is due to acceleration being tied to steering angle (the straighter the wheel the more throttle that car be applied, understanding that a car cornering at its limit is very sensitive to braking or throttle). We gain more than we lose and that’s why we do it. You could immediately see that would be car power dependent, if the car is low power you do it less or maybe not at all and if the car is high powered (all relative to grip) you would do it more. If the corner leads onto a straight the length of the straight also effects the benefits (longer straight, later apex). So like balance timelines vary with speed so do apexs with the added complexity of car power and does the corner lead onto the straight. The late apex is only for slow corners since that is where traction issues of acceleration exist (this has to do with tractive force diminishing with speed) and therefore the benefits of the late apex occur. By about 100kph (62mph) the apexes mostly go back to the fastest geometric center that gives you the maximum constant radius.

One last trick: So, in those slow late apex corners if we shift the apex later to get to it we turn later (we get a tiny benefit from being able brake later since turn in is moved down) but that late apex cost a few tenths with slower speeds the tighter first third of the corner requires. Everything is a compromise and as discussed we do it because we gain back on the exit more than we lose on the entry. What about the possibility of minimizing the compromise? Minimizing compromises are really where the great earn their keep. Physics are physics so you might think the compromised line is the same for everyone but …that is absolutely not the case. This is where we can take balance to a whole other level. You may have heard the word “rotation” it is an intentional (trail brake induced) mild oversteer only in that extra tight first third of a late apex corner. It is done for the same reason everything is done, it is simply faster when done correctly. Rotation is part of a main topic of Optimum Drive called “Zero Steer” where you are using rear slip to steer (the wheel) less. It is very advanced and makes the car turn more efficiently everywhere gaining the final tenths of cornering speed. It requires very fine motor, granular timeline shifting. Back to the rotation, if you can turn the car faster due to the rotation (while maintaining minimum speed) you have a real advantage because you can shift your turn in earlier and still make the late apex which as you might guess reduces the amount of time (and distance) to get to that late apex. The net net is the 0.4’s you might loose on the entrance to gain 0.5’s on the exit goes down to a 0.2’s loss on the entry with the same gain on the exit.

This is why it always come back to feel and car control, you can only get so far without it. Once you approach your perceived limit it is only your feel that can adjust balance to raise those minimum speeds and how fundamental understanding of your balance responsibilities determine the actual balance and steering efficiencies of your car. So, the next time you ponder an innocent statement or observation like “raise your minimum speeds” you realize the complex skillset that actually would allow that to happen. It isn’t surprising that going faster is so hard after a point. If we have ourselves convinced that speed only comes from car placement precision and great car setup we are completely missing what make great drivers great…it’s all about the feel.

The Data Trap

Our senses are analog, we talk a lot about digital and our enhanced amazing digital world but ultimately it is just a storage medium. As I say in Optimum Drive our brains are organic supercomputers but much better because we are blessed with some (varying levels) of reason that comes from our consciousness (that is some part nature and a big chunk learned). Everything digital is just a hugely simplified approximation of what we quite naturally do and learn to do better and better. It is so simplified because everything in our lives is interconnected and hugely complex as a result. Where do you draw the line between necessary information or just nice to have? You can’t code everything every time you try to replicate something, you strip away everything but the core components and roll with that and it works…to a point. You have to know your audience/market and at least hit their level of “good enough”. I like the analogy of music and art from preschool to grad school and the ever escalating “good enough”

Driving should and does fit that mold, we just have braking, accelerating and steering. Easy enough to log with a data system. Get a system and depending on the system (and your budget) log at five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred (or higher) samples per second (Hz) depending on the detail you desire, chuck in a little filtering to smooth it all out and there you have it, you have mapped a human driving. Thousands of people do this every weekend from track day drivers to F1. Petaflops of data on what amateurs and pros alike do while behind the wheel…yet

On a skid pad you know someone has it (is competent) when you can have a conversation with them while they are inducing and recovering slides, you realize it before they do which is always a hugely satisfying moment to be able to point that out to them after the session (say it in the moment and you’ll probably break the spell, so wait!). What have they achieved? They have mentally mapped the steering, throttle and brakes individually (how fast and how much) and then how they interact. That is a good basic preschool level, good enough for anyone venturing near the limit of a car they are controlling (not relying on electronic nannies). Out of the thousands logging data every weekend how may are at even that basic level? From that entry level start point they add experience (most obvious is vehicle speed and grip which demand much more speed and precision) as the journey continues. The saying “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” proves we can and should learn to anticipate, after a while the car can’t “fool you” (surprise you might be more appropriate), you can feel the forces growing due to your inputs and curb them appropriately too settle the car right at the limit (without a serious overshoot of the limit). This is fundamental car balancing. That gets combined with your understanding of what the ideal balance should be through the various positions in various corner types. Slower longer corners? Later apex with more initial rotation. Faster shorter corner? More geometric apex with no initial rotation and mapping all points in between those extremes. That knowledge combined with a working car set-up (that allows ideal balance to be set by you in the variety of corners mentioned). Then add competitive car that while being balanced by you makes a competitive G number under braking, cornering and accelerating conditions. Sounds efficient right? Simple with T’s crossed and I’s dotted, you can practically visualize the checkered flag. Then add race craft into the mix and you really have something.

In the two prior paragraphs is a fairly detailed (yet succinct) description of driving where if you were efficiently accurately doing that it would put you at the level of a professional driver. Yet there are so few. Yet so many have data. What happens? What’s broken? Where is the disconnect? The answer: Feel > Data. Data is a crutch for drivers, drivers are ultimately feel animals. Blending the controls may be infinitely measurable but in the car not a lick of that matters, it is only your ability to judge what the car (the tires more precisely) need to be optimized at any given moment that matters. Data while great information taken in outside the car, while you are actually driving it’s another story entirely, think about it... We try and do what the data suggests, things like brake later (usually harder initially), carry more mid-corner speed (minimum speed), square the car up (get to full throttle sooner) as examples.

Why though? Why aren’t we doing things correctly? We can’t feel the limit. We cannot take the data and just do it unless we had the feel in the first place and at that point we would already be doing it because we could feel what the data is so clunkily attempting to saying. The reason you need to do it is the same reason why you’re not doing it…you can’t feel it. Data for a driver should only be confirmation of what you are feeling, not telling you what to do. Do I use data? Heck yea, do F1 drivers use data? Also, heck yea, but for confirmation not direction. You do hear it though even in F1: One teammate asking where the other is faster for example. That is just a shortcut and an embarrassing one at that, they should focus on feeling the car at the limit and know where the time is.

Data is for engineers, it should not be for drivers and reliance on data verses your own good judgement is, as stated, is just a crutch. “Analysis paralysis” is the result of a poor ratio of feel verses data. I talk a lot about flow in Optimum Drive and for a damn good reason, it is the only state of mind where the possibility of greatness at any level exists. If you are focusing on braking later (for example) instead of optimizing your tires under braking you will never reach flow state. It is why I absolutely insist on (continual) car control as being the foundation of driving. That is where all the physical cues about those contact patches exist in a controlled manner can therefore be isolated and ingrained. Layer by layer step by step the why behind it all. It becomes part of you…not something you need to read off a screen.

This is going to sound like a OK Boomer moment (I am not a Boomer…Gen X FTW!) but this topic brings up the big issue with electronics in the car, not the data system but the ABS, TC and Stability Control. All killers of feel, even an electronic throttle, electric power steering, paddle shifters, brake by wire (yikes). These are things people who can feel the difference complain about and people who can’t call those people crazy.

These electronics are invading our lives and while creating simplicity and improving accessibility are killing quality…at their entry levels. Same thing in music, movies and products of all types. It’s not all doom and gloom though, for all the MP3 music crap there is a lossless equivalent and we can by music all the way from vinyl up to resolutions we wouldn’t have been able to dream of a few years ago. If you are listening to hi res audio through your Earpods then shame on you for saying there’s not a difference and calling it a scam and likewise telling me how your Tesla is a “drivers car” just because it’s fast. Anything you should be doing as a career (hopefully) and hobby (certainly) should by definition be a passion project to you. Unless you’re an uber nerd there is no passion in data (and let’s be honest uber nerd, you’re kinda’ just telling yourself that), it is soulless, not to say it isn’t interesting but realize it is a trap. but getting out and actually driving, really driving a car. Balanced by you, put on the limit by you, optimized by you, living, flowing in the moment…the best analog you…the only actual you (and can I get a collective “to hell with the Metaverse”).

The Traps of "Smooth is Fast"

Besides “eyes up” “smooth is fast” is the next most common advice given to drivers. I am well documented and on-the-record (read Optimum Drive!) for dismissing “eyes up” as lazy coaching (since it is a symptom, not the actual problem). I have nearly equal contempt for the overuse of “smooth is fast”.

You end up having the same issue every time you try to summarize something as infinitely variable as driving. People tend to apply it to everything unless they are given context and the fact that they are asking in the first place meant they are not at a level to process the context, they aren’t ready. That all but guarantees they will misunderstand and misapply the advice. If that stops them from overdriving that day and potentially crashing the car it’s probably a tradeoff worth making but if they always apply it from that day forward it over time becomes a mediocrity trap.

I coach people all the time that are a second or two off and are very focused on being smooth. What are the signs? Pinching radiuses and progressive braking are the two that really jump out on the data. When giving a hot lap or doing a data overlay they will be shocked at the relative violence of the brake application and the initial rate of turn (yaw rate) fast drivers input into the car. Those two things get you a ton of time. Neither feel very “smooth” (they are though relatively to the tire and that’s what matters). It just needs to keep the tire hooked up, your inputs should be (at turn in and brake application) right at the limit of what the tires car accept without sliding. If you are ever building to the limit you are losing time so a smooth brake application will cost you brake distance and turning in smoothly you are costing yourself radius (a fast turn in gets you a bigger more constant radius…think curve on the bottom of an egg vs. slow progressive turn in where the radius looks like the top curve on an egg which will result in lower mid corner speeds).

“Smooth is fast” is more in the context of a car (tires) on the limit already after the brake application or turn inassuming we have the car balanced right at the limit that is where and when the platform demands a delicate touch, when done correctly, there is no extra available grip so it is all give and take to optimize the car as we go. This is true of the relationship between brake and steering and steering and throttle…this is where the smoothness counts. When you think of the brake application or turn in the tires are not at their limit which is why we don’t want or need to be “smooth”, we want to get the tires to their limits as quickly (and as accurately) as possible. Anything less than that is simply time lost.

Balance

When looking at the responses to my last blog post “Passive Overdriving” I saw a repetitive theme to many of the comments. People either confused or calling me out on an apparent contradiction. If it is so bad to drive mild understeer why do the same people to profess that set their cars up with mild understeer as the vehicles mechanical balance?

First we must understand that mechanical balance and dynamic balance are different things. Mechanical balance is the car “setup”, the springs the dampers, bars, roll centers, alignment all adjusted so when the car is in steady state cornering (for example on a skid pad) going a constant speed as we gently increase the speed when the car slides (this is a slide not a skid since it is intentional) it is the front that slides first. It is considered mild understeer if the rear tires are close to sliding when the fronts let go and gross or excessive understeer if the rears are nowhere near their limit when the front let go.

Dynamic balance is what the car does in response to braking and acceleration forces that are introduced while the car is cornering. Tires are load sensitive so when you are slowing and cornering or accelerating and cornering you are shifting grip forwards and backward proportionally to the end of the car you are “dynamically” giving the load. As you can see dynamic balance is set by the driver while the car is in motion. On the road done well it is a chauffeur able to get you from A to B serenely without spilling your drink on the race track it is a car that can effectively use all of the grip available (all four tires) for more of the corner making it simply faster.

Let’s pause for a moment and explain why it’s faster. If the car is set up neutral on the skidpad when we bump the speed it will slide all four tires at the same time and it will be doing so at a slightly higher speed than the mild understeer setup. Yes, mid corner it is faster but race tracks are not skidpads, they may and often do have sections in the middle of long corners where steady state cornering does exist (no brake and just enough throttle to maintain speed waiting for the corner exit) but the issue is you have to get the car there…dynamically and the neutral car is unstable therefore slower everywhere else which (and this is the key) more than offsets their mid corner speed advantage making it slower over all.

In simple terms the mechanically set up neutral car wants to oversteer/spin on entry and can’t put power down as well on exit so even though it is faster in that one steady state section of the tracks one long corner it loses more time one entry and exit everywhere else than it gains in the middle of that one long corner.

There is another issue with the neutral car, I mentioned it wants to spin and won’t put power down as well so it is much trickier too drive, it’s too “loose” and near it’s limit it will require a lot of cognitive bandwidth to simply keep it on the road. It will also put a lot of heat into its rear tires and overheat them relative to the front tires. You hear people sometimes say (or boast) about their “neutral” qualifying setup but actually it’s technically a closer to neutral mild understeer setup…but still mild understeer. Sometimes in qualifying it is hard to get heat in the tires quickly enough to take advantage of the tires tiny peak grip window so you can end up with strange setups specifically for a single lap flyer that you could never complete a full race distance with.

So, back to the initial point you want mild understeer in setup but you want too dynamically balance the car to not understeer when you are driving it. We do this with the brakes on the way into the corner (trail braking) and the throttle on the way out all relative to steering and how close we are to the cornering limit. We want the car to always be dynamically close to neutral so we are using all of the grip for as much of the corner as possible but the car is not trying to spin on its own we have to put it there due to its own natural set up balance is benign mild understeer.

Airplanes, rockets, ships, swords just about anything you can wield or control follows these same principles of inherent stability. On an aircraft center of pressure is always slightly behind center of gravity, same on a rocket (or an aero dependent race car) and a sword needs balance so that it not only responds when you swing it but more importantly stops or slow and turns precisely when you need it to. You don’t want anything to be inherently (set up to be) unstable. It simply makes that thing dangerous to use so you can’t effectively use all of its potential safely, repeatedly or for extended periods of time. We need inherent stability in the object so it retains benign predictability, that is an object we can hope to control at the limits of our own and hopefully its capabilities.

Speaking of hope, I hope this make things a little clearer and if you like this sort of thing check out my web site (theoptimumdrive.com) and of course the book I wrote that this is all built and based on Optimum Drive (available on Amazon). I also hope I managed to answer what is a very confusing statement: “Set you car up to mild understeer but then never drive it in mild understeer” I hope you now know why.

Passive Overdriving

Two words that don’t go together using conventional driving wisdom. How can someone possibly be “passively overdriving”? The funny thing is that I see it more often than anything else when with a new student…especially if they have prior experience.

In Optimum Drive I drone on and on about the foundational significance of car control. Typically, car control is thought of as an ability to correct understeer and oversteer skids. This enables a driver to actually push the car up to and beyond its limits and live to tell the tale because the inevitable skid is deftly caught by the driver. Crucial stuff for any aspiring driver. We should (and hopefully do) spend enough time skidding on a skid pad to ingrain this ability to “catch” the car before any track lapping. There is more to it though…

A big part of being able to catch a skid is recognition, the faster and more accurately you detect the skid (or better still anticipate) the less of a correction is required and therefore minimizes the inevitable associated time loss. Recognition is “feel” and to a driver feel is literally everything. It is the enabler of confidence and confidence is in turn the enabler of flow…and no human has ever done anything great without flow. This is the basic “org chart” of ability.

I also mention in Optimum Drive how people misuse skid pad time, focusing on drifting. If your goal is being fast time spent drifting will only cost you speed and that is the most understood form of overdriving, a lot of spectacular excessive oversteer “take it by the scruff of the neck and make it do your bidding” …spectacular without doubt but also without championships (the steep price of driving narcissism). No doubt drifting is as fun as it is counterproductive which explains why people fall into this common speed trap. This however is not passive overdriving.

Passive overdriving is more subtle and that is the issue, they have no idea they are doing it. They have not developed feel for it and it is… (sad trombone) mild understeer. Almost everyone I have ever ridden with hasn’t developed enough of a feel for the front end, what they think is imminent understeer is a car that is already actually understeering and they put the car there corner after corner lap after lap. It is not horribly slow (but it’s not fast either) and it feels safe…benign. That is precisely the issue as soon as the front goes the car becomes unresponsive and numb, it no longer readily responds to the controls and that can feel safe but also can be frustrating since the car almost seems stuck there like that is “the set” or “balance” the car has while the driver puts it there thinking “that’s the limit” also remember it feels comfortable which feels right and it becomes habit. Habitual mild understeer.

It’s hard to get people to create oversteer on the skid pad because they can’t feel understeer. If the car is already understeering (even just a little) booting the throttle or an abrupt lift (the two most effective ways of intentionally making oversteer on a skid pad) will get you either more understeer (booting the throttle) or just less understeer (the abrupt lift). You need to have the front tires either at the limit or below for the car to respond appropriately, if it is already understeering it just kind of sits there, lazy, unresponsive.

Therefore, the single most important thing to learn about driving at the limit (hopefully on a skid pad) is to develop an innate feel for front grip. The signs are all there, the radius subtlety growing in size, the lightening of steering wheel resistance, slight steering wheel vibration that vanishes, on a good front end you can feel the inside wheel lose grip just before the outside (due to load and geometry) and depending on the tire certain noise pitch characteristics. The car held just below or at front end limit is eager and alive, ready to take your balance inputs and can be deftly put anywhere from neutral to oversteer as needed. The car can now be driven.

Take this onto the track proper and we now add the possibility of increasing front grip even further by with potentially using trail braking to add load (and therefore grip) to those crucial front contact patches increasing front grip relative to rear making the car even more eager to turn. This responsive platform enabled and maintained by the drivers innate feel for grip and balance. Don’t overdrive in any case…Optimum Drive.

The Hardest Mountain to Climb

Written By: Paul Gerrard

Photos: courtesy of Dave Liddle

It started with a photo on Facebook. A single picture on the Performance Race Industries (PRI) news feed. It showed a rolling tubular chassis with a twin turbo Chevy LS (of course!) sitting behind a tiny driver cell with giant meaty tires hung off a formula style pushrod three spring suspension. “Interesting” I muttered as zoomed in trying to gobble up any details I could, “that looks like it would be a bonkers Pikes Peak car”.

My scanning came up with a name: LoveFab. A quick search came up with a YouTube Video, a video with a lot of views and a lot of fire. “well that’s not good…”. Against my better judgment I didn’t let it go, I messaged LoveFab and got a response from a guy named Cody Loveland… the builder and pilot of the fireball. We exchanged pleasantries and quickly cut to the chase:

Me “is this car built for Pikes Peak?”

Cody “yes”

Me “I’d like to drive it”

Cody “….” (he googles me while I wait for a response) 

Cody “how tall are you?”

Me “5’7” “

Cody “OK”

The first tiny steps in a journey up a 14,115ft mountain, one of fifty eight “fourteeners” in Colorado but this one is special, it has a road all that way to the top and unlike Mt. Evans (that you can also drive to the top of) Pikes Peak has happened to host a Race To the Clouds for nearly a century there, the only older race in the United States is the Indy 500. Why does this race perceiver, why is it adored internationally? It is impossible that’s why. You see it is a public road for 364 days of the year and it moves. That’s right the paved road physically moves, the whole mountain is constantly shifting geologically. That was OK when it was gravel since it was always graded smooth but the Sierra Club got a bee in its bonnet in 1998 and decided to make a statement on America’s Mountain. It took 13 years and the paving was complete…on top of a continuously shifting and heaving mountain.

We now had a paved road, game changer, no more beautiful arching drifts performed by everything from Stock Cars to Wells Coyotes or occasionally exotic foreign factory built 1000hp fire breathing AWD monsters (go to YouTube and watch “Climb Dance”). Couldn’t you now just show up with and Indy Car a F1 car or group C prototype and rule the roost, rewrite the record books?  The mountain moves. You now had more grip but more bumps, the Wells didn’t have the grip for pavement but it had the travel for the bumps while the Le Mans car had the grip but not the wheel travel. Suddenly (well, over 13 years suddenly) there wasn’t a car that could tame the mountain. The mountain is and always will be in charge from its continuously undulating surface to its ever changing unpredictable and often violent weather.

The fireball guy (Cody Loveland) knew this, in his small shop in rural Michigan he hatched a plan. Build a modern Pikes Peak special, there have been many Pikes Peak Specials over the hundred years but this one, this one was the first purpose-built car to come with the moving pavement in the crosshairs. What did it require? A prototype with suspension travel. Steal all the positive attributes form the old school dirt cars and marry them to a modern prototypes’ downforce and grip. 

The Enviate (NSX+V8, an homage to Cody’s prior builds)

It’s a hybrid, oh don’t worry, not the gas sipping left lane sitting kind of hybrid, the cool kind like a lonely werewolf meets a vampire kind of hybrid… that chugs Sunoco 118 octane like an army of frat boys with beer bongs. It’s got it all travel, downforce and grip. Perfect uphill weight distribution that lets it launch off corners like it was AWD without the added weight and complexity of AWD. It’s designed for today’s very different and difficult Pikes Peak.

If this were your typical marketing story from a manufacturer it would be simple matter now of sending Cody’s bank a rather large seven figure check and then ordering some champagne to spray at the top when the deed is done. We can dream can’t we? Because I the driver/writer am not employed by a corporation and sitting writing this in a spotless and spacious corner office, I am a dude who likes to drive for a living and has to scrape together every possible potential opportunity that comes my way. Cody knows the feeling all too well but his scars run deeper, yea there is the fireball moment but he also has to foot the bill, the car is his, the financial reality of his dream. Dreaming is free but reality, reality is expensive. 

Day by Day, Dollar by Dollar

It begins, we have a car, we have a driver, we have a goal, the 2016 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. Now you’ll probably be asking yourself if the year is a typo. No, that’s racing as they say. The best laid plans and all that. Pike Peak is a unique event, you see you have to be invited. This presents a problem to small new team especially is they have already done something quite memorable on the mountain (like burst into flames for example). The problem is universal, we have a dream and an actual rolling car but no sponsors and the one thing any sponsor does not want to hear is that we might get in. Please send us stuff and/or money because we might be able to fulfill our obligations to you is not a strong marketing pitch. The other tricky bit is that entries are not confirmed until April only giving you a practically useless three months to make it all happen. Would love to see that all become more sponsor friendly in the future but that is todays reality. So, 2016 was not meant to be but a least we now had a more realistic block of time to get things accomplished.

Switzerland, Home of Fine Chocolates, Diamonds, Watches and…

A simple Facebook photo, it got my attention but I wasn’t the only one. A small village called Hinwil near Zurich appropriately at the base of a large mountain sits one of only two Formula One teams not to reside in the United Kingdom (the other being Ferrari). Sauber, it’s a medium sized F1 team (300 employees) with a long and storied history of being gritty, determined and always punching well above it weight (budget). Out of the 300, many (as you might guess) are engineers and as you might also guess have Facebook accounts. Formula One may be the ultimate expression of motorsports but it certainly is not the paradigm of self-expression. Formula One is about two things: Rules and Money. Two things relatively that boxed all 300 of the Suaber employees into the midfield at best. No dreaming here just cold hard facts, rules and boxes that the car and the team, had to fit into. Somewhere deep in the inner workings of this fine mid-priced Swiss watch was a cog with an imagination, a cog with a dream…and Facebook.

Sebastien Lamour: F1 Aerodynamicist

When Cody in sitting in his cold, dark shop in Michigan in the middle of a long bleak Midwestern Winter just looking for something to weld so he might stay warm and hears his cheery Facebook messenger chime and casually has a peek at his phone (which is permanently attached to the front of Cody’s face, welding or not). “Hmmm Se-bas-tien La-Mour, who is that?”

Seb: “ello Cody, I work for the Sauber F1 team”

Cody thinks “and I’m the president of the United States” but actually asks for more information and starts Googling immediately…he is legit. Cody answers: “what do you do there?”

Seb: “I am an aerodynamicist, I saw you picture and I have always wanted to do Pikes Peak”

Cody: instantly sobbing uncontrollably types “yes please”

An Unlikely Alliance

So you have an old school tubular chassis (albeit it with perfect geometry, thanks to Aric Streeter) mated to an old school Chevy LS TT driven by a part time lifetime pro and soon to be wrapped in state of the art carbon fiber designed by one on the best in the business all being done on a shoestring budget by Cody. He had to learn how to build carbon fiber parts but if you know Cody, it doesn’t matter, zero fear in that man, with a talent for learning things nearly instantaneously.

Seb is sending CAD files running it all virtually in the wind tunnel and Cody and I are out on our own sponsor hunting but we are not alone, we are not the only people who saw that photo. I mentioned Aric Streeter the cheery Sirius/XM engineer, Manuel Grenier also from Sauber (specializing in suspension), Shawn Zimmerman the crew chief, Adam Peeling the engine tuner, Tyler Hassing the engine builder, Nick Jesaitis mechanic, Cole Duran the Colorado Springs shop owner and Dan Piper, finally Jessica Crowbridge who gets the unenviable task of making us somehow seem presentable. All of us from different parts of the world with distinctive pieces of a common puzzle a common dream, Cody’s crazy dream. He and the mountains cast a spell on us, we had to see the car to the top, the ultimate underdog story. Can David really slay Goliath? 

Reality Bites

While I did sit in Enviate at the PRI show in December 2016 I did not get to drive her until June 2nd 2017, it didn’t go very well. One just my second lap in the car the throttle stuck wide open, now if you know driving you know this is not a small thing especially when you are unfamiliar with the car, fortunately my first reaction was to swipe the switches I had just been walked through a few minutes prior and crises averted, after that was resolved I was able to sample the awesome pace and visceral power of a car with a one to one power to weight ratio, perfect weight distribution, big sticky tires and carbon brakes. It means in every direction this car without the aero downforce (low speeds) can generate about 2G’s of force, that’s accelerating (very rare, usually only drag cars) cornering and braking, then you add in the aero component and the cars speed very rapidly increases and you soon can corner and brake well above 4G’s. We called it good after the cooling system starting showing signs of overheating, we suspected it was due to the low speed nature of the IMI track but as it turns out this would haunt us all the way to the top of Pikes Peak.

Reality Really Does Bite 

The next time I drove the car was at LaJunta which was a WWII B-24 base, it’s rough, perfect, it would test the suspension and see if it would be up to the rigors of Pike Peak (or so we hoped). Again, the car showed staggering speed (close to the track record in a few laps) but as fast as it went the temps would also rise which limited us to short runs. One the second run accelerating over a bump on the exit of the corner a rear suspension pushrod folded in two instantly dropping the right rear on the deck, I dutifully slowed the car and the team rolled out to recover me and the stricken Enviate. It was late, just after sunset and evidently a significant proportion of the mosquitos in the world live at the track and sleep until sunset. We were attacked as we tried to load the car with each of us suffering from hundreds if not thousands of bites in what seemed like an eternity getting the bottomed-out car into the trailer.

The car may have been loaded and us on our way but we still had a two-hour drive to the shop in Colorado Springs, did I mention the next morning was our mandatory official test on the mountain? Did I mention we were on double secret probation with the Pikes Peak officials because fireball? This was the first of many many all-nighters to come from the crew. We were mere weeks from the race and driving the car in anger for the first time (#teamnosleep became a thing). The ticking from the clock was getting overbearingly loud.

The Test

Pikes Peak mountain is big, so big that you never get to drive to the top in a single run, for testing they break it into sections to spread people all over the mountain and maximize driving time albeit one section at a time. We were on the bottom. They also are pragmatic in another sense, it’s a toll road so they don’t want to lose any potential revenue so we test early, real early. Usually from 5 AM until 8:30 AM, that means we usually have to leave by THREE IN THE MORNING to be set up in time. Somehow Cody Aric and Nick with the help of Cole and Dale had managed not just to repair but completely reengineer the pushrods on both sides and replace the bending heim joints in the rear suspension, re-align the car and get it to the mountain, that’s after being eaten by mosquitos and arriving at the shop at 11PM. The first of many nights catching a few minutes of sleep on a couch (this was to become a really miserable version of Groundhog Day by the time race week arrived). 

We are in line, I am excited and a bit apprehensive (suspension failures and sticking throttles tend to do that) but my job is simple on Groundhog Day, wipe the slate clean a just drive the car. I have one job to drive the car at its current possible limit while keeping it on the road (oh and provide feedback to the team). First run and I’m off and it feels like the car has a mind of its own, darting all over the road. What felt good on a racetrack felt positively diabolical, leaping from side to side while going straight braking or cornering, only under power did it feel just OK. It was a test though I couldn’t just cruise up the segment, they were watching. On the last run I just went for it taking a huge chunk of time off and as we found out after passing our probation test as we were now officially in! We had made that mistake that assumption that I am sure countless teams have made: “Pikes Peak is probably about as bumpy as a bad race track” “and I can go test on a bad race track therefore and get my Pikes Peak setup dialed in without having to really go there” wrong wrong wrong, Pikes Peak is so much bumpier (and maybe more important: undulating) that you can’t compare it to anywhere else. We were in but we had a lot of work ahead of us.

The Leap of Faith

As a racing driver, leaps of faith are bad ideas. I talk about it in my book Optimum Drive. Be rational and incremental, earn your speed step by step. It is sound advice but there is a problem. Some setups especially on aero cars feel so bad when they are driven slowly that you never feel safe enough, confident enough to get into the window where the car is actually working. Supercross bikes are the same way, the suspension is so stiff that unless you are a Supercross rider that can comfortably hit those jumps with full commitment you’ll swear the suspension is broken, locked solid. Aero cars and racing tires work the same way, they operate in a window that it takes years of experience to reach. OK, now try that on a crazy surface that is much bumpier that any track and you see the problem. It’s so much harder to reach the operating window so it never feels happy. I had to trust the aero so much more than when I had driven similar cars on smooth track, that it turns out, is relatively easy. The other factor of course is safety. Pikes Peak is a mountain road, not just bumpy but narrower than a normal race track, about a 1/3 to ½ narrower in fact. Then there is the cost of failure, no gravel traps, paved run-off zones, buffers of any kind, in most places there are no guardrails protecting you from the cliff rocks and drops. So, add the leap of faith comments to the safety comments and you see why driver confidence and comfort pushing the car to the limit are difficult to achieve but essential if success is to be the outcome. Dropping one wheel off could not only hurt you physically but it could do so much damage that you would be out of the event. The pavement may be undulating bumpy and narrow but it’s a good bit better than going off the road. 

The Grind

We had discovered when I had pushed the car on the final run at the Pikes Peak Tire Test that the car was darty, the suspension got better as I pushed harder but was still not nearly ideal. We decided to put in a slower ratio steering rack to reduce the twitchiness. The problem was that the car and Cody were now in Michigan and I was not and we needed to test it locally, as luck would have it there was a Gridlife event that weekend Gingerman Raceway so I drove out there and hoped in the car for what I hoped was a productive day of testing. Three laps for 20 hours of driving, that’s what I got, two flying laps after a warm up and oil spewing out of the too small catch can then started a small fire that burned ignition wires and ended our day. Was it a wasted trip? Far from it, the steering was much improved, we had taken a large step forward.

Race Week

#teamnosleep had a list a mile long to complete and very little time to do it, it was race week and we had to test at LaJunta one last time before we were locked into inflexible raceweek with all its  traditions, procedures (like tech inspection) and finally testing and racing got into full swing. The oil and cooling systems were all getting major revisions, the whole crew had arrived for the most part and it was all hands on deck for the LaJunta test. You see we could do 10 minute runs there once on the mountain it would be very hard to tell if we have solved out cooling problems with the mountain segments only being a few minutes. I get in the car, the engine guys have been busy, the boost is up, we are making serious horsepower now, it makes me smile. I like really fast cars for some reason they suite me, they make me happy therefore boost makes me happy. I was happy, the car flew, power changes cars, it was easier to get into the window, everything came alive, became harmonious, you could feel all of Seb’s areo complement Cody’s chassis and Aric’s (and Manuel’s) setup it was glorious until the rear wing exploded at 170MPH. I once again dutifully brought the car back to the pits, it had been less than ten minutes so we didn’t know about the cooling system and we now had to figure out how to build of rebuild a disintegrated wing in less than 24 hours to pass tech inspection. Back to the bat cave (Cole’s spotless shop, RPM Performance).

It was frustrating for everyone, two steps forward one step back but then you just had to remember this is a one off custom design and not some show car. We were trying to progress the car in a few weeks what should have taken months if not years. The fact that there were steps forward happening was a minor miracle. On the outside the car made every day and every run on the mountain if not for the PTSD symptoms displayed by the team each morning you’d think we had simply put in it the trailer each day after we ran it and then pulled it out at the track the next morning…boy was that not the case. 

Cody is Calm?

We were all back at the shop, carbon jigsaw puzzle laying on the floor. We are stressing but we are not talented fabricators… Cody just looks at the mess and knows he can put it back together. I am not so sure, I think back to my earliest days driving and Paul Ricard Circuit, standing at the spot Elio De Angelis died…from a broken rear wing. You remember moments like that all your life. Then I thought I’ll be up on a mountain road in a car faster than Elios F1 car. I made a phone call, like when a doctor gives you news you don’t want to accept, you want a second opinion. This was Cody’s first carbon fiber word he had ever done but I happen to be friends with a guy that has a resume’ in carbon that has stretched for decades and to the extremes of that magical material. His name is Eric Strauss and he is completely nuts… he fit in immediately. I shouldn’t have been worried, Eric saw the master fabricators work after dropping everything to come a rescue me and simply said…”that’ll work”. Cody is calm.

Cody is not just calm, he is also the man. All of this was for him, he is magnetic, everyone there sucked into his dream. We all desperately wanted to make it happen for him like some crazy idea that seemed brilliant at the time, with your best friends, in a tree fort, when you were 11. Only we aren’t 11, we had developed skills and resources, we now could actually accomplish things now not just stare up at the branches swaying in the wind and the clouds drifting by dreaming. 

Dreaming is Easy, Life is Hard 

As per usual for #teamnosleep we cut things close and get to tech inspection with minutes to spare. As soon as we roll the car out of the trailer the crowd is there, the cameras are clicking. The car and Cody have a surprisingly huge internet following. It has to do of course with the underdog absurdity of it all. You simple don’t just build a prototype in your shop and take it to Pikes Peak. You build a Subaru or an EVO, maybe a Porsche or a GTR. Those are known cars with a performance backgrounds and strong aftermarket support. You just need money to buy stuff that already exists on a shelf somewhere. That’s not Cody’s DNA. Nothing off the shelf was going to threaten an overall on the mountain, that was done by prototypes and prototypes cost millions to build and run, unless you are Cody who welds like a demon and learns carbon fiber like Neo learns Kung Fu in the Matrix. The internet loves people like Cody, people we can all vicariously live through.

The tech inspection team also seems charmed by the Enviate sitting there looking like, well, a million bucks. We breezed through tech, could have sworn I heard Cody say “these are not the droids you are looking for” several times. Whatever, it worked, the only fix was shortening the seat belts slack. We were in shock and Cody was just smirking “told ya’ so”.

On Mountain Testing Begins

We were feeling pretty good considering. It was dark, cold 4:30 AM and we at 13,000ft waiting for the sun to come up. Car was ready, many fixes in place, rear wing now stuffed with aluminum and rivets, cooling system, catch can systems all new and improved. Strapped in minutes after sunrise and off we go. What do I notice? Car is all over the place bumps are yanking the wheel out of my hands and I catching air in places which is fine if I’m trying to set a world record with Hot Wheels for jumping distance in a truck (like I did with Tanner Foust in 2011). This though is a car with two very generous inches of total wheel travel (for a prototype) not a Baja truck. It was the most scared I had ever been on the mountain. Mainly I was surprised, on the racetrack the car was fun, predictable and balanced but that crazy undulating surface from the tire test was so much worse on the top. We thought we had solved it with the slower ratio steering rack but now on the bigger bumps on the top section I realized it was much worse that we thought. Luckily this was an optional day and that meant we would get to try the top again before the race on Sunday. Our experienced competitors flew, we were slow with big gaps to the front. This was not going to be easy, I was quiet on the way down, the mountain had humbled me, there was much work to do (#teamnosleep).

Qualifying

As luck would have it the very first day of official practice was our qualifying. The field was broken up into three groups and out of the three days whenever you were on the lower section that was your qualifying run. It happened to be our first day. The bottom is fast and it’s also the longest section from the start to Glen Cove. We had a very robust debrief after day one and fortunately the smart guys on the team (everyone but me basically) had corrected my assumptions on what to do next with the suspension. I wanted to go softer thinking all of that jarring and bouncing was caused by the suspension was too stiff (because it felt so good on the racetrack) but it turns out that our fancy third heave springs were actually too soft and we weren’t too stiff, we were bottoming, we actually needed to be much stiffer. Counter intuitive in a way but absolutely correct. The car was transformed with much of the dartiness banished to a bad memory. One the third run we slapped on the Soft tires fresh off the warmers at 200F and went for a time. The warmed tires felt amazing and I was finally getting into a rhythm in a 1000hp high downforce car rocketing up a narrow mountain road. I was sure we would be second or so which would really help our start position race day. Unfortunately two minutes in a wire (we later found out) to one of the water pumps got pinched and shorted out causing the car to immediately overheat I nursed it to the finish much slower that the cars potential but still good enough for what it turns out would be seventh overall. From that moment though failing pump aside that we were competitive on the mountain (not just setting lap records on smooth racetracks), the car worked here, Cody, Sebastien and Aric were right, this missile was a true modern Pikes Peak Special.

Fast is One Thing…

The whole this about racing that attracts us in the first place is the shear speed. Speed alone rarely ever wins races. It is consistency and consistency comes from two things reliability and predictability. It is the objective science saying the package is known, we understand it, can control it and therefore predict it. From that we get a feeling: Trust, when a driver can trust the car they can do something almost magical, they can become one with the car they can flow…together. This is where real speed comes from. I know that’s not what people outside of racing want to believe they want us to be crazy but we are not we are more like meditating monks who happen to be controlling something going hopefully extraordinarily fast. (personal plug: if this seems remotely interesting to you pick up my book Optimum Drive). Enviate and I now had the beginnings of trust and the times showed it was, reliability problems aside, the second fastest car on the mountain. 

Them’s the Brakes

One thing I haven’t mentioned was the brake package, common sense tells Pikes Peak drivers not to use carbon brakes, the reason is warm up time, they don’t work until about 800F (up to about 1400F) so for the first few miles you have basically no brakes, not good. RPS though had a new process that allowed the brakes to work at 300F, that’s easy to get to, especially if you have 1000hp, just the odd drag of the left foot while on the gas will get them in range and they are ready to go before you need them (very important point). I’m the lucky guy that first got to try them on the mountain and they are staggeringly great brakes. Power is absurd (with Seb’s areo in full effect), modulation easy and granular release characteristics (for all you trailbreakers out there). Best brakes I have ever used and this car demanded no less than that.

Middle Section

The mountain is very different top to bottom. Curvy flowing and fast surrounded by trees gives way to stop and go ultra-narrow hairpins as you climb above tree line. Very different rhythm and challenge. Strangely enough on paper you’d think our car wouldn’t like the stop and go middle section while in reality it is really good at it. You see Cody and Aric didn’t just replicate a Le Mans car they knew the speed of Pikes Peak were much lower and on some of the hairpins you go as slow as 25mph. Our car is just rear wheel drive but it has more static weight on the back than a normal mid-engine car so it launches of any corner like it was a drag car and I already told you how good the RPS brakes are so yea, this thing works everywhere. 

Slow is Fast?

So, the last day of practice arrives, back to Devils Playground at 13,000FT. Another all-nighter adding this time five more degrees of caster to the mix, nut and bolt the entire car (every night), corner weighted, aero tweaks. I don’t know the half of what gets done to the car every night, you want to know why? I’m sleeping that’s why, they kick me out, they want me fresh and ready in the morning, it feels terrible leaving them at 10PM when you know they are going to show up at the house at 1AM only to have to get up at around 2AM, but they are right. It’s a waste of all their effort if I’m too wiped to focus. For this I am eternally grateful to them, the selflessness. So, I go out on my first run, taking it easy, un-warmed tires, just a shakedown like I do every morning. It turns out we go second quickest and are within 1.4 seconds of Romain Dumas…The King of the Mountain. This is getting interesting. Fog rolls in and closes the curtain on a very productive practice week. The car has gone from scary undriveable to a real contender. Golf clap for an amazing crew.

Fan Fest

Colorado Springs really embraces the Hill Climb and the Friday of race week they shut down downtown and we set up and sign autographs and fire up the car on the two step (a drag launch system that builds boost by dumping fuel and igniting it after the cylinders) crating a serious racket that really gets the thousands of fans whipped up into a fervor (hopefully just short of looting or stripping the car for souvenirs). Good fun and a nice change of pace from the never stop, never done mentality of the practice day.

Show Time

We meet at the gate at 11:30PM and sleep until 2AM then head up and sleep in the car at the start line until 6AM or so than go to the drivers meeting, try to find a place to brush your teeth and have a cup of tea. Ah the glamor of racing right there. So, with my uncut hair pointing in ten directions and feeling a bit groggy and sore (not a camping fan, nor a car sleeping aficionado) we wait. The car is ready, I have been driving the mountain every day for hours after practice, doing low speed loops on the next-days section, endless loops until I can feel my brain shutting off and nothing more to be gained. It’s fun to think as putter around with the tourists how somehow I get to come back the next morning and drive this same section of road in a car that is not remotely street legal and one of the fastest racecars in the world and have the same rangers that watch with an eagles eye for a hint of speeding on public days cheer me on as I rip past them in the racecar at 150MPH. Love Pikes Peak.

I’m very relaxed at the start line, I’m not always relaxed but I am today. The universe seems content, the car seems ready, the team confident. What I should mention is that if we flash backwards 24 hours we would realize that the entire thing almost fell to pieces on a road by the shop and that the car had had a serious rebuild to have me sitting on the start line period let alone calm.

Remember the fog that shut down the final day of practice? It actually had Rob from RPS a little concerned, you see the carbon brakes like moisture, if the humidity goes up the brakes absorb the water and it comes out the next time you get the water to boil. It comes out as steam and creates a frictionless layer between the pads and rotors. Frictionless brakes? What a terrible idea, so Rob insisted we run the car at the shop and get the steam out. Fine idea except we also managed to get a bunch of steam out of the engine and into the cooling system just as Cody’s vision was blurring as the boost hit (true story). That meant only one thing and it wasn’t good. We had blown head gaskets, the engine needed to come apart and we needed to be loaded into the mountain at no later than 6PM for the race the next day. At 5:55PM Enviate rolls through the gates Pikes Peak, one more miracle added to a now, rather long list.

The light turns green. I am off, engine feels strong, grip good with a touch of new high speed oversteer. Make a note: Easy on the rear tires, they have to last so I back it down a notch from full kill mode and try to keep flowing. The road is going by fast, remember we only do it by sections so it feels very different to drive the whole thing and there are people everywhere waving, this feels cool, this feels special. Driving something this fast on a road like this in front of thousands of people. Through the picnic grounds foot to the floor, if I get to the shift lights in fourth that will be around 150MPH which will be (and was) faster than anyone that day. Turn after turn, they are all weird, unique not like a racetrack, the mountain decided how this road flowed and it feels nothing like a racetrack, the rhythm is different and better, less antiseptic more real, like The Nurburgring, it isn’t watered down. It’s a car that performs like an F1 car on a normal road and we are climbing at an alarming rate as I get up past Elk Park I notice something else climbing at an alarming rate… the oil temp. I quickly glance to the left and the rock steady 190F of water temp is now 207F and climbing, we are in trouble, not even half way up with the stop and go W’s to contend with before the ultra-fast road and thin air at the top section. My mission has now changed from victory to survival, I must finish for the team, too much work, too many naysayers, I had to get to the top. That meant short shifting (not going to redline) and once you get into top gear holding throttle to maximize airflow while minimizing load hopefully meaning the engine stays alive as it transitions from water to air cooled (something it was never designed to obviously do). All temps were off the scale the engine could/should seize at any moment but I was still somehow going, as I cleared the W’s I knew I was getting close, carving corners, late on the wonderful carbon brakes trying to balance time loss with reaching the top. With my super efficiency mode engaged I was trying to carry more speed where I could because it would help airflow and get me to the top faster but I was almost fired of the mountain at the notoriously bumpy patches just before Cog Cut, settle down re-focus, less than a mile to go. The mountain wasn’t quite finished with me yet though. One more hairpin, Olympic corner is approached by a fast top of third bumpy right hander as I exit the corner and line up braking for Olympic I do my little coast to keep the engine alive then go for the brakes, as soon as I downshift the engine dies, I release the clutch in second and nothing try it again in first, nothing then the car just stops. 150 yards from the finish in the middle of the corner. I hit the starter and it barely turns over. I flip off the water pumps (air pumps at that point!?) to give the starter more juice and it turns over faster but still won’t fire, what to do next? Well I am from Colorado and live on a very steep mountain and there have been many times where I have re-fired a car by bump starting it in reverse. Put it in reverse, let of the brake, cranked the wheel so I don’t back off the cliff and GO! The engine immediately fires, I stick it in first and blast across the line. WE… HAVE… DONE… IT!

The car built in a shop by a guy in a place that has perpetual winter and darkness has just finished 2nd in Unlimited class after sitting on the mountain stalled for over 30 seconds. The last and final miracle has occurred. Cody Loveland beats the mountain or maybe more fittingly shows what can be done if you just believe, have the grace under pressure to stay calm and the perseverance to see it through… until the very top. 

The drive down after the race is one of motorsports true magical moments (made even more magical since the car actually started after a few hours of sitting, waiting for the rest of the field to finish). All the competitors parade down together after the last car has finished and those marvelous fans line the course and cheer as we all idle down high-fiving thousands of people, it is actually very emotional. It is a very satisfying thing just to make it to the top and the appreciation shown by the fans really magnifies that and it sinks in on that long slow and very hands on ride down. When you finally do arrive at the bottom and see the smiles on the teams faces that really cements the satisfaction of the accomplishment. As racers though, you never stop planning so as soon as I was out of the car and saw Cody we were already thinking

Photo credit: Larry Chen

Me: “Cody, let’s do it again in 2018, I’m sure with some refinements and testing we can get the record”

Cody: “OK” …Cody is calm.

Explaining the Dunning-Kruger Effect

We’ve all seen this graph (or at least some version of it) and seen it applied to just about anything involving human confidence versus competence (in this case “conviction vs. knowledge”… same idea).

Following up with the actual definition, according to Wikipedia: “In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.”

You often hear it described as “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and, if we are a person with some ego (everyone who is at least a little bit competitive), it’s easy to end up unwittingly on the left side of the graph. If that is a personality trait for us, we will go through this in every aspect of our lives. That means we can apply this to anything, but, of course, here I will focus on using advanced driving techniques as the example. 

The particular focus is figuring out what we don’t know, because the path to enlightenment might start with one step but how do we figure out the direction? In Optimum Drive, I use the word “nuance” a lot. I state that greatness is in the nuance; it is the holistic, all-encompassing understanding that is when it all snaps into focus, connects, and flows.

People stuck in Dunning-Kruger firstly don’t know it (obviously), but what is it they don’t know and what makes them oblivious to it? It’s actually pretty easy to see how it happens…one word: oversimplification. They are people who go too far in stripping things down into understandable chunks… and this is the important part: They just try to perfect their simplified version instead of continuing to add nuance. Near perfect simple is not nearly potentially as good as imperfect more complex. 

Example: Most drivers up to very high levels of experience (could be decades of competitive driving) think being fast is only about speed and position. The goal is a well set-up car, then deftly held at the grip limit (defined by the set-up), while positioning the car exactly on the ideal line. That should be it, right? It’s not, and it’s typically over a second off what the car could truly do. Here’s why: Just managing understeer and oversteer is not enough, and by managing, I mean that the driver as quickly as they can fixes them so they don’t get so big that they feel (or see on their data later) a measurable loss of time. Imagine (maybe you don’t have to) “feeling” your lap was “perfect” and being a second off? That would be smack in the Dunning-Kruger vortex…definition of frustrating? That lap was near perfection (“See, look at the data!”). The problem there is something important, some nuance missing from their knowledge base that’s causing the time loss and resulting frustration. 

This is where it’s tempting to think or say someone is more talented than them (or cheating, or outspending them, etc.). Well, if talent is knowledge, they might be right, but by calling it talent, they’re saying it’s unattainable for them. It’s not; it’s just that they, as mentioned, don’t know the direction of the first step. 

They have to be able to picture how a car holistically works. It is common to have a “pro” driver hop in someone else’s car and have them immediately go significantly faster than the owner. They get called “alien” a lot (or something similar) when that happens. How does a driver get in the same car and go faster when the owner has the data trace and feeling that they drove a near perfect lap? Must be magic, right? At that moment, the owner of the car has been rather rudely sliding over to the right on the Dunning-Kruger chart. They have jumped off the cliff of over-confidence (and the blissfully ignorant position of being able to blame your lack of speed on everything but themselves). I say jumped and not pushed because they let them do it (usually hoping they would find something wrong with the car, not their driving). It’s good though; the journey can now begin.

Looking at the data will likely not help. There are very few people who can really see what is going on because they need to read all the driver channels simultaneously (to visualize the car completely) to see what’s actually happening. You will hear things that sound useful, things like you could brake later, you need to carry more speed here or there, stuff like that, but not how you are able to do it, when with every ounce of your being, knowing that your best lap had the car at the limit the whole way around on your lap. If you would try to brake where they brake or corner at their minimum speed, the tires would lock and the car would slide and you would lose time and certainly not gain anything. They are at the bottom of the chart, time to start clawing their way out of the hole. Time to earn some nuance. You’ll notice on the graph I have chosen (out of the many that exist) that this one wavers as it climbs, not the steady arc up that are on the typical Dunning-Kruger graph. The reason is that growth (and experience that enables growth) is messy. You have to be willing to fail and fail often to earn that nuance. There is only one way to do it right and infinite mistakes to make along the way. Be patient with yourself, stay motivated, and pay attention. Track time is expensive and getting the most out of every lap is a must. 

So just where is this last second and how is someone on the same line as you able to brake later and carry more speed through the corners with the exact same car? The trick is to realize understeer and oversteer are not the limit. If the driver lets them happen, even if they correct quickly, they are losing speed and, therefore, time. As drivers, we can think of tires in pairs: front axle and rear axle. A well-set-up car can understeer (slide the front axle) or oversteer (slide the rear axle) at many different places on a single lap. The variations are the speed of the corner and where in the corner. The pro driver can anticipate where and when one or the other might happen and, instead of letting it happen and correcting, they alter breaking and accelerating relative to steering. Why? Because if you let one axle slide, it is over the limit and produces less grip, and then, by definition, the other end is under the limit, so the combined grip of both axles is below their limits and the car to hold the same radius (assuming the same ideal line) must go slower to stay on that line. So, the pro keeps the axles grip near the limit, intentionally manipulating front and rear axle grip at any given moment to help the car turn on entry hold in the middle (maximizing minimum speed in the corner) and put power down efficiently on the exit, remembering that all corners are different and it all changes lap to lap due to tire wear and track evolution. That is some serious nuance and you might guess, with the almost infinite variability of what I described above, the wobbly climb up the Dunning-Kruger chart is measured in years, not hours. It is accessible to anyone who takes the time to notice there are no aliens, just more experienced drivers that have acknowledged and now routinely solve for variables that people on the left peak of the chart don’t even realize exist. Of course once you get a reasonable grasp now being a great car balancer you add in the next variable you discovered along the way of your never-ending journey.

In Optimum Drive, I go into much more detail than I can in a simple blog post. I can really unravel the balance thing to great detail by spending a lot of time understanding the all-critical tires and us as human beings (and how they learn efficiently). We are all susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect (it is only natural, after all) and it does admittedly feel pretty blissful to not know any better. The sad part is the precious time and money that is wasted there. Along this journey, at some point your confidence and ability are finally equal and you are safe, fast, and consistent, making it all look far too easy…if they only knew what it took to get there, the years-long roller coaster ride of the Dunning-Kruger graph… Buckle up, let’s go.

The Optimum Path

 I spend a lot of time talking about the human side of motorsports, how we have to be rational and efficient if we ever hope to get close to our true potential. We are all fighting the clock to see how good we can be and to have fun along the way, to enjoy the process. We all have our heroes who we use for inspiration. We like their stories; we find them relatable and see some of their attributes in ourselves, and this provides useful motivation. Whether it’s Senna, Clark, Fangio, Moss, Villeneuve, Schumacher, Hamilton, or Verstappen, they are very different individuals with different personalities, but all ended up at the very top of the podium more so than most. 

Motorsports has seen many changes over the decades that have opened track driving up to a much larger group of people. Motorsports have been made much more accessible, and, in many ways, that is a very good thing. Sadly, though, in the quest for cheaper and easier, some things were lost along the way. Since these changes are old enough to be considered generational, we have a different culture at the track than existed before. They don’t know what they are missing since the old guard isn’t there to remind them. It’s a genuine paradigm shift in the way things are thought of and therefore done. 

You do hear of something these days called “traditional” motorsports, referring to Formula cars, sports cars, racing and the ladder system (how you progress up the ranks), and it is just now a much less popular subset of motorsports generally. The club-based track day groups dominate track rental and usage. The net is that the track day crowd has about a ten to one advantage, and they are two distinct and separate ways to enjoy motorsports, each having a different focus. Traditional has a career as the goal, while track day is a hobbyist. 

We all share the same heroes, though, whether it’s track day or traditionalist professional racing that provides the motivation for enjoying driving on a track. That is the fantasy fulfillment part that pushes us all. The track day crowd hasn’t yet produced a hero. It’s a bit surprising, given its huge numbers advantage and, in my opinion, it seldom will produce a hero, because of its culture. Now, it’s important to say that’s OK, not everyone needs a shot at the big leagues, even if they idolize someone who did. Track days and the culture that grew out of track days are much more about having fun – maximum seat time in a safe environment based on mostly road cars.

There is a basic downside, though, because the standards of track access had to be made so much easier (no professional school required), because that was the big road block. Very few people could see the reasoning behind all of the required training. It seemed like an unnecessary money grab by the schools. Why? Because the very people that want to go on the track consider themselves excellent drivers already, and therefore don’t feel they need any training. 

I know this because I have worked and managed several professional schools. Almost everyone who called wanted to know how quickly on the first day they got to go out on the track and how much total track time there was. Any “paddock exercises” or classroom sessions were considered to be beneath them, so we were under constant pressure from sales and marketing to reduce them and increase lapping time. The conundrum we were in is obvious, when you think about it. Then here come the track day groups, “track time for everyone, no minimal experience necessary.” This was the message every self-proclaimed excellent driver was dying to finally hear. “These guys get it; I don’t want to or need to go to school, I just want to get out on the track and drive.” Thousands and thousands of people flooded racetracks all over the world over the course of ten years or so. Track days won and traditional racing numbers dwindled; even karting suffering as a result. It was nothing less than a paradigm shift that financially helped get tracks built and keep them profitable (which is great), but at the same time traditional schools and racing in general suffered. The absolute irony of all this is that track days succeeded because they marketed to the illusion that everyone who really liked driving enough was ready to drive on the track. People unwittingly flocked in and, due to their lack of ability and experience, created an insular culture that would all but ensure they would never get the chance to become an actual excellent driver.

I’m probably sounding a bit like a bitter motorsports traditionalist whining about a battle he lost but won’t move on from. You know what? Now thinking about it, that’s pretty accurate! But it is for real reasons; it’s not completely my pride I’m trying to protect here. It is your potential I am most worried about; that’s what got thrown out with the new culture. Now I sound like a parent or, worse yet, a teacher – “If they would just apply themselves, they could reach their potential.” Yikes, is that me now? I guess I better own it so we can move on.

You just have to decide what’s important to you: having fun on the track or challenging yourself on the track (which, BTW, can be just as much fun). One is enjoying building your car, hanging out with buddies, all low stress relatively. It’s super fun and an experience, for sure. The other is the competitive side. We need to always be faster; when we spend a dollar, what gets us the best return in lap time? There always is competition on the track, whether it is spoken of or not. It’s just that one culture deemphasizes it, while the other cherishes it and holds it central in its culture. Are you more interested in having fun or chasing/creating the best version of yourself? 

That track day culture I am referring to creates really weird car setups that don’t work in traditional motorsports, all because the drivers have skipped learning the fundamentals that everyone has to be taught (they are not natural); they haven’t been given the early guidance that gives you a process and a framework that teaches you to rationally, logically, and efficiently make yourself more complete and, yes, faster. As a result, most of us spend much too much money on our cars when we should be investing in ourselves. Again, this all comes from the culture. If there isn’t a real professional traditional racer running the show, all we are left with is more seat time and spending money on our cars to make them faster, while we dream of selling them and buying faster cars still. We can think we don’t need help because even the data shows we are as good as anyone else out there. We are trapped in an expensive circle of mediocrity, but the good news is we don’t realize it because everyone is doing it. That’s the good news; the bad news is that motorsports is slowly dying because no one wants to put in the work to really be good at it. We like experiences over real, gritty, hard earned adventures. We like the idea of being challenged but not the reality of it. We are missing out on life, as a result; it’s not about experiences, it’s about conquering adversity for personal gain in the form of skills and the wisdom it brings. Track days are artificial. They are just a detailed simulation of motorsports. What would our heroes say? Would they be impressed with our choices? To invest more in our cars than ourselves?  Luckily, we don’t have to theorize about what they would advise. Almost all have written a book or done dozens of interviews, and the message between all of this collective wisdom is consistent, so let’s listen to our heroes and what they have to say.

It starts with the right environment, so that means finding the right culture for us. It could very well be doing track day. I generalize a lot (you have to when you write or it just gets too unwieldy and confusing), but there are heathy track day cultures of varying degrees. Find one that challenges you and puts more emphasis on your growth than your car, make sure they endlessly teach fundamentals, easy access to a skid pad, braking exercise, and classroom sessions. That’s better, but what they’re really saying is to go karting (not indoor karting, which is OK and better than nothing, but, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t add up to much). Proper outdoor karting (like direct drive or shifter 2-strokes, to be clear) is the most productive fun that can be had in motorsports (until you can spend mid six figures on a purpose-built race car) and it costs less, is cheaper to run, and is faster than nearly any track day car. If we could shift the serious 10% of track day drivers into karting, we could keep motorsports growing, heathy, and alive. In actual fact, 75% would probably like it significantly better than track days, and you could go back to having a reasonable street car, not much of a trailer (if any; it’s optional), more garage space, cheap consumables, etc. Oh, and you’d actually be racing wheel to wheel and, instead of stagnating (and thinking you need a newer, faster car to fix that), you would have the consistent challenge to improve yourself and your process. Get professional coaching, go to professional schools. Once karting has spit you out a competitive driver, you head to Formula Ford, F4, F3, F2 and so on. You don’t ever have to leave karting; it has everything you need for a lifetime of love and growth as a driver, and that’s why our heroes always went back to it. You are never too good or outgrow it. It will always have the best bang for your buck in motorsports. Another path, though, to potentially follow is making the jump over to sports cars (after some F4 and F3) with LMP3 and on up that ladder. The point is that now you are well beyond the skill set of anyone at a track day, all because you pivoted and spent your time and money in a more beneficial direction. It’s the same you but because you put yourself on a more efficient path, this you is orders of magnitude a better driver than you would have been if you hadn’t taken this risk and gotten out of the loop. You’re now in an years long funnel of growth and on the other end is the potential for you to one day become someone’s hero. 

Race Car Driver or Racing Driver?

 At some point we start calling ourselves racing drivers. At first, a friend or relative introduces you saying that and we’re all humble and embarrassed but we see their positive reaction and we’re suddenly not so opposed to people saying it, and the next step is we start using that moniker ourselves. From this point forward…I am a racing driver. Tens of thousands of people have had this little epiphany (or some version of it) but when are you actually a racing driver? What is the threshold where you’ve actually earned those stripes? Do you have to be a professional driver (someone who is paid to drive a car in a professional series) or do you just have to drive a race car of any type or description? Can an auto crosser be one? Hey, how about a drifter?  

Each type of motorsports has its own definitions based on historic thresholds or levels, to a certain extent, but could we generally define when someone reaches that level as a driver? A racing driver drives in races. Races are wheel to wheel, meaning there is passing (unlike rally, for example). A race car driver does not necessarily race wheel to wheel (something like time attack or rally). Drifting is in the middle – it is wheel to wheel, but without passing and timing. A bit confusing and perhaps perplexing. Actually, it’s all those variations (and many I haven’t even mentioned so this doesn’t drag on longer than it needs to) that makes it all so cool. All represent a different type of challenge, but it’s the things they have in common that give us the clues to answer the original question.

What do you have to understand, do, then master, to be an actual racing driver or race car driver? 

First part of the job description: Go fast. That’s purely relative to your motorsport because even the drift drivers have to go as fast as they can (though it’s not timed, per say, since they are partly judged on speed, so going fast is still a factor). “Speed” is relative to your direct competition that day. So, go faster, got it. 

Second part: Don’t crash (at least not often and/or for no good reason) – “to finish first you must first finish.”

Third part: This is more subtle but perhaps the most important and the thing that wins championships. Every team and every driver has off races (setup missed, strategy blown, etc.). The trick is (relatively, it is always relatively) you have to suffer less on those days than your competitors (example: instead of finishing 7th, you finish 4th, with equivalent bad luck or mistakes). You need to be scrappy and never give up.

The key to these three parts is attitude: Attitude gives you adaptability. Your job as a racing driver is to drive a good car fast, a bad car well, and everything in between (rain or shine). It makes no difference. There has never been a perfect race car but with a real driver at the wheel, no one needs to know. It is that symbiotic relationship between human and machine, and an efficient team putting them in a position to succeed. 

So, we are in position to succeed. What is it exactly that the driver needs to be relatively better at? The driver needs to be a better car balancer, able to deftly make an understeering car neutral (same with an oversteering car), any type of corner, any part of a corner, and under any conditions (that’s where the consistent speed comes from). The driver needs to optimally manage the tires (car balancer), brakes, and engine temperature, while perhaps racing wheel to wheel. The driver has to make the team’s strategy work and adapt to an ever-changing race (remember, it’s all relative). There is an amazing level of work load happening that requires very high levels of accurate subconscious programming (see The Optimum Drive consciousness/free will blogs) that will have taken years to ingrain (that’s where those closely supervised, always coached youngsters in karting have a big advantage). These are the real racing drivers, where everything is taxed to the maximum and done in real time with full commitment. Since you are doing the peacetime version of dogfighting…it is basically war. 

All racing counts, but is just different. Rally is its own type of war, as is time attack. We adapt to the particular challenges to the maximum of resolution a human being is capable of. The driver of a Top Fuel dragster has amazing throttle control, as does a motorcycle racer, because their disciplines demand it. Formula 1 and prototypes demand granular feel of downforce to take advantage of the particular physics of those classes. It is all frankly amazing. No one thing is harder than the other, just different, though some forms of motorsports are taken much further due to their popularity (and the money that they bring in) and that some part of that money will be used to improve human performance, which will make them more developed than less lucrative forms of motorsports. That does mean the best drivers are in top motorsports, as you would expect, but not because they are fundamentally better. They are built and developed better due to the higher standards that are their “normal.”

You are officially a racing driver (or race car driver), in this author’s opinion, when in your discipline this is all second nature to you – holistically you can feel and visualize all the nuance that is required to “flow” at the limit. Will you always win with this level and approach? Probably not because in any decent series, there will be two or three other teams at the same level pushing you as hard as you are pushing them. You are mutually responsible for the levels you have reached; the trick is to reach the next level one race sooner! As implied, though, you will be on the podium, or not far from it, every weekend and therefore be battling for the championship. A racing driver is competitive, and therefore respected and feared by their fellow racers. This is how you know you’ve arrived.

If you just do the math on that, saying the level is the top three – maybe four – teams battling for the championship, who have real racing drivers at the wheel, you end up with about 25% of people who drive race cars as real race car drivers (I’m allowing for up and coming talent working their way up in that). Whether you go on calling yourself a racing driver is ultimately up to you, but I hope this little thought experiment has helped clarify when real race car driving begins and thrives. The intent is not to discourage anyone but to put down a marker, because that is where motivation comes from, first having to understand that there is more (spoiler alert, there is always more!). We have no limits to how good we can become; it is mostly only dependent on time and motivation. The third variable is intelligence, or, since this is a team sport, collective intelligence. Intelligence is a multiplier of time plus motivation because it provides the more direct path through the efficiency it affords. Surround yourself with smart people and you will learn faster than you would on your own. On every level in every form of the amazing endeavor we call motorsports, this is the formula for success that creates the true racing driver.

Consciousness Continued (Part 2)…

In the last installment of The Optimum Drive blog, we dissected and pondered the biggest of the big human topics: consciousness and the hopefully resulting byproduct…free will. The truth of the matter is that our consciousness bandwidth, while the greatest in the animal kingdom, is tiny compared to the amount of information we gather ever second, forcing us to filter to the point that, at any given second, we have very little to actually work with. Compounding this are the lifetimes of layering of filters (similar to algorithms) that distort what actually reaches our conscious minds. This makes our reality a bit (or a lot) like a self-created simulation of what our well-meaning subconscious thinks we want to experience at any given moment. 

To back all of this “crazy” talk up, there have been countless studies decoding this and actually measuring the delay that we have with all of our senses (hearing is the fastest, followed by touch, then sight, and finally taste). These delays are processing time, which include filtering based on physiology and our particular algorithms.

What is the goal? You’d think we would just want vivid, unfiltered reality at all times, but that is not our base program. The system is designed to keep you alive and sane. It doesn’t always succeed but it is its best educated guess for you, for what you need now (fingers crossed). 

Within this system, we have a wide variety of human existence, everyone trying to do their level best with what they have. Wait though, it’s not that, it’s what we think we have. That is where the opportunity exists that created da Vinci, Einstein and Michelangelo, and also a whole bunch of humans who, paraphrasing Brad Pitt in the movie Troy, have existed but whose names will be remembered by no one (cruel but fair).

The idea from all this is to harness free will, to give it tasks that actually improve the efficiency of your processing towards some goal. As mentioned in Optimum Drive, this should be driven by the greatest of human attributes: our curiosity. Some just might be tempted to call this enlightenment(?).

If we don’t do this, we waste our precious consciousness and go through life like, well, a “lesser” animal and live our lives on instinct, blindly trusting the filtering and not improving, which we will conveniently allow ourselves to think is the limit of our potential…and no one will remember our names.

The process that makes this all work is understanding the significance of the phrase “root causes.” It explains that true lasting change is not superficial; you can’t just tack on another algorithm on top of our existing programming. We have to dig all the way down and back to the root of the idea or concept and wholly reconstruct it from the beginning. It must be eradicated, not patched (in Optimum Drive, I provide actual examples and details of how this would work using a racing driver as the example).

Conclusions: Deeply ponder this gift of consciousness and what it really means, what free will is and how best to use it. None of this is easy; that’s exactly the point. Next…is it worth it? You need to decide this for yourself but understand you’ll only get one shot at this life and the clock…it never stops ticking. Will we remember your name? 

The Reality of Free Will

In this blog post we’ll take a look deep down the rabbit hole exploring our own actual abilities and potential vs. how we perceive those things. It is staggering to think how little is actually understood on the most important topic of all; our free will, our ability to actually make productive decisions. Let’s start this journey using a simple analogy and build from there, this is important stuff.

“If This Then That” (IFTTT) is a clever little computer app that allows users to automate simple tasks. It creates chains of conditional statements, allowing the user to automate actions based on those conditional statements, called applets. IFTTT is so elegant in its simplicity – it can do such things as tell a motion detector to turn on a light when it detects motion or automatically save photos from social media. The next level up is the Algorithm – similar to IFTTT, but more capable and a staple of computer programming. The idea behind these programs is logical problem solving that is ideally elegant (and efficient). 

Artificial Intelligence is the next step up. It is IFTTT and algorithms taken to the next (ultimate?) logical progression, where ever-more complex systems of algorithms have the ability to learn, by being able to write their own algorithms in an effort to continue to solve more complex problems. It is all quite amazing and we have seen nearly exponential growth in these areas as technology improves and improves. None of this is new, however. These concepts have been imagined, pondered, written, and predicted since antiquity (around 2500 BC), all in an effort to simply push what is possible, driven by our desire, our curiosity – pushing the limits of math to hopefully one day digitally replicate a human brain and presumably beyond. 

It is a fascinating thought as we realize we provide the inspiration, the model, as it were, for our future robot overlords. Don’t worry; this should not devolve into some mediocre Science Fiction. It is more the musings about the contrasts and parallels of the human condition and our attempts to replicate our intellect mathematically and logically when of course…we are neither. 

Define consciousness. It has many explanations but no real definition other than variations of “self-awareness.” Somehow, we have this thing (awareness) that is the whole point of our existence, and we hopefully have a desire to make it meaningful. It is completely intangible…yet there it sits in the very center of our existence. Nothing mathematical at all or is there? Are we born with consciousness? Did we have it in the womb (and just can’t remember?). Did it or does it show up at some point as we grow and gain experiences and it just appears (evolves)? It makes me think of the amazing octopus who learns quicker than typical humans but only lives a couple of years. If an octopus lived a few decades, how smart could it become…at some point would it become conscious?

Applying that logic to Artificial Intelligence…how many algorithms before the spark of self-awareness hits? This, amazingly, cannot be answered, but… it does seem logical.

Are we simply an unimaginably huge number of IFTTTs and algorithms? It’s how we learn; you can clearly see the process in children. It is our base program, but unlike the computer that just sits there and needs everything to be imputed (programmed) and then takes it from there, we are jacked into the universe with five senses that, in some way, shape, or form, are continuously reading data – estimated to be around 11 million bytes of information per second. It has also been measured that we can consciously (vs. subconsciously) only process 50 bytes per second! Where does it go? This is the amazing part that makes us who we are.

Do you remember our ridiculously incalculable collection of IFTTT applets and algorithms? They are handling the 10,999,950 other bytes of information coming at us every second while we casually noodle or fret about the 50 bytes we are currently focused upon. Think of it as a massive filtering and sorting system that is completely automated except for the conscious 50 bytes per second. And we wonder why we say we are creatures of habit? 

So, we exist almost entirely on autopilot. Think of walking, your heart beating, or breathing, all very automated. Almost everything we do…is completely automated. Think of phobias and the myriad of human quirks, flaws, behaviors – good and bad – that we simply do (automatically) and as response to stimuli (from our senses). Think of how little control we actually have over it and ourselves. Factor in time and how it compounds things because our “programming” gets so unwieldy and indecipherable over time that we lose any idea on how to change things (“can’t teach an old dog new tricks”). We do not have nearly the free will we think we do or should have. We (a bit lazily) rely on the autopilot and it makes it very hard to change behavior, whether that is quitting smoking or just trying to improve ourselves doing something we feel is worth the attention (why we feel that is another story!). 

We get smothered, averaged out, inconsequential in our own existence. 50 bytes vs. nearly 11 billion (?); we never stood a chance. We have to trust our subconscious to decide which 50 to give us at any given second, but then when you realize how flawed the process has become over time, you are locked in, an emotional slave to your own mind, layer upon layer of accumulated best guesses. 

Or are we?

Can we gain access and start to effect change?

YES.

But…most people shuffle through life without ever having a serious thought about anything ever in their entire lives. People joke and ponder about us living in a simulation, we absolutely do but it’s not the version in science fiction. The simulation is generated by our subconscious providing us with the simplest most acceptable version of every situation as it filters existence for us. Peoplejust follow the prompts from their subconscious, all day, every day and never stop to ponder “why.” You can have a pleasant “normal,” even happy, life never asking why…ignorance truly can be bliss. Finding why can be miserable and we are emotional beings (comes with the consciousness so, uh, sorry about that). I feel on some level we know, and therefore fear, what we might find and that creates a paradox that locks most of us in at roughly who we are. We are very good at making excuses and believing them so strongly that they become the pillars of our existence. It just makes everything so much simpler and easier. 

“Why” is the most powerful thought in existence. It is the impetus, the motivation, the spark behind anything pondered, proposed and eventually proven or disproven. Without why we are automatons wasting precious air and space. Curiosity that fuels motivation that leads to understanding that eradicates fear is the journey any meaningful human being must take. What will you do with your 50 bytes per second and how far will you let it take you?

Perfection, just like true enlightenment, is unattainable; our flaws see to that. But the journey, oh the journey, is a life well lived. 

Fake It Until You Make It?

There is a prevalent type of experienced driver who looks fast but isn’t. People categorize then as “over drivers” but in most cases they are going under the actual limit of the cars maximum cornering speed …but they are somehow sliding. It sounds a bit irrational because the car only slides at the limit right(?). Not exactly, the actual point of great driving is to raise the limit of the car by manipulating its balance therefore the car really has a variable limit depending of the ability of the driver.

The slow but scary driver (or inducer) lacks the finesse (and often patience) to really seek out the actual limit, they just make the car slide when they “feel” they are at the limit. They do so with more abrupt than is ideal inputs. A good example of this to visualize is a drifter initiating a slide using a hydraulic handbrake or a quick little (Scandinavian) flick to initiate the oversteer. That’s an extreme example but it makes the point. You have to ask yourself, are you patient enough to find the real limit, the perfectly balanced limit where the car slides purely from excessive speed and not from a driver induced slide?

The line between the two is pretty fine which is perhaps why it is fairly prevalent, I even sometimes catch myself playing this game especially in the first couple of laps, building tire temp and confidence and in that context it’s (just) OK but it needs to as quickly as possible disappear, replaced by actual knowledge producing real finesse at the true limit (and the flow that results).

There are appropriate times to induce a slide but only for emergencies as an avoidance maneuver or even a spin when that might be the best option. It’s a spur of the moment, making the best of a bad situation decision. Even then it is less than ideal, finesse even in those moments will yield better results.

That is the trick, have the knowledge to minimize the chance of having to ever induce a slide from the car. Know it’s balance so intimately that you are always making finesse balance adjustments at the true limit. You can imagine the nightmare of engineers trying to set up a car around an inducer, don’t make slow look scary, it might seem spectacular to the untrained eye but the poor results will be obvious to everyone.

F1 Blog Final Pt.4

The idea behind these articles was to provide a lead-in for the Optimum Drive podcast on FBC. It was also a way for me to tie a few of the book themes into the current hot Formula 1 topics. With so many changes from 2016-2017 it seemed like a good time to chat about the challenges that the teams face as the 2017 season relentlessly approaches.

I have to sincerely thank Paul and Todd for giving me this opportunity. They are amazing guys that do a fantastic job keeping their fingers on the pulse on the racing scene and relaying it to the masses who possess the excellent taste and judgment to follow along.

As a final topic to discuss here we should probably spend a bit of time talking about drivers and their skill sets. To kick it off, maybe a not so obvious statement: We as people are surprisingly different from one another. I say surprising because we spend a great deal of bandwidth in normal life trying to fit in. Society pretty relentlessly demands it of us and we are brought up to try to fit in. Underneath it all though we are indeed unique. You can see it in sports especially at the elite/professional level. Michael Phelps does not try to conform in his swimming, his ability transcends the norms, he gets to determine his own path, to write his own story.

In motorsports it is the same way, they have reached a level where to conform would hurt their individual potential. We are all a sum on one side of our genetics and the other our experiences, there are so many variables in those two sides that the best we can hope for is to say one driver has similar characteristics to another but they are never the same. The only thing we really have to compare them is their results and when you start comparing results you start seeing the characteristics that create champions.

One thing that really pops out is that the drivers that are spectacular to watch (best example Gilles Villeneuve) seldom if ever win Championships. Such a bummer right!?! There is just so much to winning a championship, first in the car having the presence of mind to go as fast as is possible without hammering the tires, knowing how hard to push at any given moment. That takes a very sorted clinical mind, not typically the guy that is all emotion at 11/10’s every time they hit the track.

There is a middle ground though and he is named Senna. You occasionally have someone that is so singularly focused, so developed on the clinical side that they can get the car set up to such a point that when they get on the track they can allow a bit of emotion and put the car right at the limit, driving at 100% when 101 would be over driving and abusing the tires and car. You see, getting yourself to perform at the limit and win championships requires as much work out of the car as in it and you rely on every member of the team to help put you in that position.

It is that very confidence of knowing you are more prepared that the other drivers that lets you be aggressive, be the attacker. Balancing that with what battles you can lose and still win the war. It is much more complicated than the perception, it requires everything of you if you want your moments of greatness and if you want to sustain that level you’ll have to continue to give everything. Greatness is a relative term though, it does not imply perfection, it says you are on a level above everyone else and they can’t define the difference, what you’re doing therefore to them and everyone else appears to be slightly superhuman. That’s the mystery that surrounds greatness. At that moment it’s a puzzle that only you can solve. Not perfect, merely great.

Optimum Drive is about defining each piece of the puzzle that elevates the often-plateaued good driver to the level of great.

The one defining characteristic that is at the core of a great driver is confidence, not necessarily general confidence (think of how shy Jim Clark was for instance), I mean confidence in the moment in the car. If you have that you can think clearly and if you can think clearly you are a rare driver especially if you can simultaneously balance a car at the limit and think clearly, you will be formidable behind the wheel.

What enables that comfort level out there? Simple: car control. If you are able to say “whether the car oversteers, understeers, four wheel drifts, locks a wheel or two under braking… I got it no worries at all”. It is that very worry that takes an intelligent person outside of the car and in the car they’re hopelessly lost and scared. They can’t think if they are anywhere near the limit, the specter of the surprise skid dominates their thoughts whenever the try to go fast.

It’s amazing to think that there are drivers in Formula 1 that have this fear. Let me say this clearly, only a handful don’t have this fear. Only the few top drivers (in any championship) have complete confidence in the moment. You see it manifest everywhere but especially the drivers that spin a lot and they do it because the skid was a surprise to them and they had to react, that was too slow and it many cases too much and spin. Now in their defense some of the cars are very hard to drive and snappy which is the nature of poor mid-pack and back typical design but they knew that when they got in the car so it’s still their fault. Bad car control is everywhere, it’s why people crash, it’s not an instinct either, it is focused practice and training.

Car control is the very foundation of great driving but it can be abused, the Gilles Villeneuve example earlier works well here, he needed the temperament to know what was enough and what was too much, you can rely too much on car control, it can make you lazy knowing “you got it not matter what” and it is that Senna (and several others) ability to say not only “I got it” but also be fanatically obsessed with making the car faster at the same time. I think Gilles would have turned into an amazing complete driver if he hadn’t lost his life so tragically so early. We all would have loved to see what he could have done with more time.

Maybe the other interesting point about race car drivers and their individualism is how they race. How they handle pressure and how they provide pressure. Always amazing to see someone rise to the occasion as well as the shock of seeing someone who is very fast but is a hot mess when racing wheel to wheel. What it boils down to is that it is hard…very, very hard to get anywhere near great, there are so many factors in and out of the car to deal with. Being amazing at one or two aspects is not nearly enough, you’re just scratching the surface.

Their job is to make it all look easy, after all Michael Phelps is just swimming faster but what got him all those golds is a backstory where every detail was given equal attention over a lifetime focused practice.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my particular take on what’s going on in motorsports. I also hope you have a listen to the podcast and put any potential questions you might have in the comments so we can answer them.

Paul Gerrard

F1 Blog Pt.3

Imagine the Wright brothers on their first flight, all the testing with kites and models had reassured them that lift was a real thing but testing a model is one thing climbing aboard an actual aircraft yourself for the first time, that’s a different level of believe altogether. It’s an amazing thing to realize that the idea of flipping the wing over to create downforce would take an additional 60 years to really stake its claim in motorsports.

Downforce & Drag

That tardiness to the party didn’t diminish the impact. It changed the sport forever, cars didn’t just need to be streamlined they also needed to make downforce and do it efficiently (there’s that word again). Downforce is not free, it comes with a negative attached called drag. Drag is aerodynamic friction or resistance, drag slows the car down as the downforce attempts to make it faster. The idea, obviously, is to have the downforce gain be greater than the loss from drag giving a net increase of speed around the track.

I say net increase because the downforce will lower the cars top speed on the straights, the net gain comes from it being faster everywhere else. It also increases at a square of the speed so the faster you go, the more downforce (and corresponding drag) you get. Generalizing a bit, measurable downforce starts being really noticeable at a bit under 100kph (62mph) and starts getting serious soon there after reaching the amazing “stick to the ceiling” numbers above 160kph (100mph) in top tier aero car.

Grip & Load

Downforce makes the car faster due to another relationship: grip and vertical load. This is of course directly describing the load sensitivity of tires. Everything about the setup and driving of the car is derived from understanding load sensitivity—more load, more grip. That’s why the drivers main job is dynamically and continually balancing that load as they drive and if the car produces downforce its invisible hand is also pushing down on the tires (through the car) as well.

Downforce adding load is really cool because it doesn’t add weight to the car, now this is kind of interesting to imagine. You might be sitting there thinking if adding load gives me more grip I should just strap manhole covers to the floor of the car and I’ll have more grip and not just when the car is going fast. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it’s not the same due to the extra weight the car has to carry vs. downforce. Downforce is load, not weight and that means that when you brake, corner and accelerate the downforce doesn’t add mass to the car (like the manhole covers would) and that means downforce doesn’t add inertia or momentum like the weight does. Other than the associated drag it is just free grip.

The ideal then is maximum efficient downforce with the lightest car possible. Wait… I think I just described a Formula 1 car. Chuck in a 900hp power unit and you have then most capable land based G machine on the planet.

They could actually pull more G’s though and even though we shall probable see those 2004 lap records fall this year, the cars are still extraordinarily restricted, just like a 10,000+ HP Top Fuel dragster is restricted. It only seems like these sports are at the very limit of what can be technologically done but that is not even close to being true.

It is typically a balance of safety, budget and spectacle. This year’s considerable bump should produce more physically demanding racing which will test the driver’s fitness (as we talked about in Pt. 1) and the tire construction should allow the cars to be pushed (not babied) for their entire life. It is definitely a move in the right direction as long as the disparity between the teams has not gone the wrong way.

Why the 2017 regulations may work

The tires will actually play a crucial role in determining if the increased downforce of 2017’s rules package will be effective. If you’ve been watching the broadcasts for any amount of time you’ll have heard the word “graining” used by the teams, drivers and commentators. It is usually caused by pushing a tire that you can’t (or haven’t) got up to optimum temperature yet. Driving through understeer on a cold tire. The old tires where very susceptible to graining because Pirelli intentionally made the tires overly sensitive and delicate (at the request of the FIA) in a questionable effort to control disparity and improve the racing. These tires also grained in another situation that is very important to any hope of real racing, the ability to follow closely.

As soon as the cornering speeds get aerodynamic, the ability to follow closely is hugely effected by the wake of the car you are trying to follow. If their wake causes your front wing to lose downforce it makes your car understeer and when it understeers the tires are susceptible to graining. Graining basically sheers the rubber off the tire without the adhesion the tire needs to get into operating temperature range. That is why the tires in 2017 are not just bigger their compounding and construction will resist graining by being more tolerant of understeer.

The other way the FIA is trying to close the field up, besides tire improvements, is that they are actually adjusting the wake of the leading car. Race cars make downforce in two distinct ways; air going over the car and air going under it. Remember when we were talking about how the FIA restricts everything earlier(?), well one of the big adjustments they made in the rule book is the shape of the floor under the car, along with the ride height and the size/position of the wings, it’s another ratio they can play with. The air under the car (which exits the diffuser) leaves a relatively “clean” wake while the wings leave a relatively “dirty” wake.

In 2017 by increasing the diffuser size the teams will hopefully run less wing front and rear therefore even though they have increased cornering speeds considerably, the wake the following driver needs to drive through to pass or follow should be cleaner and provide more downforce to their front wings while the tires are now better at coping with potential graining.

Just like Orville and Wilber continuously refined their aerodynamics and adjusted lift to drag ratios depending on available power as their experience base grew, the FIA and the teams are furiously competing on the world’s stage that is Formula 1. Over the course of the Winter they have simulated and modeled countless combinations hoping to “out efficiency” the other guys. They have had their wind tunnels working 24/7 since the 2017 rules package was released and ran the cars on “shaker” rigs simulating every track on the calendar while the drivers drive every possible variant on the driving simulators. Just a little bit less efficiency in the aerodynamics can mean a losing season for the team especially if it is a fundamental flaw in the shape of a part of the car that cannot be altered once the car has been FIA crashed tested (for example).

If the culprits are little trim bits and pieces, then the season can be salvaged but if the package is fundamentally inefficient or unbalanced they are in trouble. Fortunately, they have at least unlocked the engine development which could help level the playing field (assuming Mercedes does not simply progress at the same rate).

Horsepower!

That brings up my last point: Horsepower is downforce. I am not talking about blown diffusers and the like, I am referring to the well proven fact that if you have more horsepower you can set the car to run with more downforce and drag. The straightaway speeds will be around the same but your braking cornering and accelerating will be improved as will relative tire wear…it is the sneaky and smart way to win races and championships.

Whether you are a fan of aero or not, there is no denying the influence it now has in any form of racing, now that we know the benefits of downforce no matter the rules, teams will shape the car (within those rules) to maximize the downforce to drag ratio and produce the optimally efficient car that basks in the winner’s circle at the end of the race.

Why Coaching Drivers Reveals Unique Insights

When trying to understand human nature typically you have people who study behavior in clinical and controlled circumstances. They want to control the environment to of course eliminate the variables. They use observation and objective measurement to develop a hypothesis and draw conclusions. These studies can last hours, days, weeks and sometimes years, the longer you run it the more subjects and the more you can rely on the data.

For over 20 years I have been running the same experiment. I sit next to people, all kinds of people and in a really fun way, in a matter of seconds my environment will reveal who they really are. We are actually two people, the real us and the us we pretend to be. We don't really think about this much because it is part of our normal routine. Many cultures have names for the "inside man and the outside man" that I'm referring to. Who we really are vs. what we think society expects to see of us.

It is a bit alarming and initially awkward for them to sit next to a stranger and have them learn your deepest secrets but at the same time it can be liberating as a journey of self discovery.

The unique thing about my experiment is its accessibility. Just about everyone can drive a car and most do on a daily bases. Learning within that familiar environment makes it attractive, it's sneaky that way, people don't realize as soon as the car skids it will instantly trigger "fight or flight" response in everyone that hasn't experienced it before.

As soon as fight or flight is triggered you are dealing with that persons subconscious, the inner person. As uncomfortable as this may sound it is actually pretty fun for the student, much like a roller coaster or a scary movie. 

The difference is that it's a teaching environment as well. This means I am observing and measuring the individuals reactions to come up with the most efficient course of action for this person. 

It is amazing how different people are, some are overtly boastful before, some meek and humble though most of course fall somewhere in between. What is interesting is that it has absolutely no correlation with how they actually are. The person we act as can be vastly different to who we really are. Since we are consciously adapting to circumstances we can only do it in environments where we are so comfortable that we can stay one step ahead.

The skidding car shatters the facade, think of a friend that has a really funny laugh (or maybe a snort!) that comes out only when they are genuinely surprised by something hilarious. There are many more things we can repress. Look at the definition of repression:  "a mental process by which distressing thoughts, memories, or impulses that may give rise to anxiety are excluded from consciousness and left to operate in the unconscious"

"Left to operate in the subconscious", Houston we have a problem. burying a problem works as long as we feel we are in control, specifically no surprises (the snort laugh). 

So with students I have the honer of seeing them as they really are. We then form a bit of mutual trust (I will only use this knowledge to help you) and we start making progress step by step. For each person though the steps are different, different sizes, different shapes and sometimes in a different order. The clarity of not having to filter everything though the conscious facade makes the progress super efficient and quite pure.

Again an absolute honor and of course I must add I am the same, with the same issues. I realized all of that after years of teaching that in a way they were teaching me because I would see the same traits mirrored in myself. I feel that's when it hit me, I had developed a sense of empathy, I could bring up things anticipating what they needed next so we could avoid stalling the progress. 

I went from a facilitator to a actual teacher and soon thereafter I realized I need to write a book. Optimum Drive is about this cathartic journey of self-discovery and insight into what actually makes us tick. I understand now why people plateau, I can see their potential but they can't, my job is to clear the clutter we all put in the way of our own journey. I truly believe we all have to potential for greatness within us.

-Paul F. Gerrard

F1 Blog Entry 2

Tires: Of all the components of motorsports from the teams to the drivers to the cars and the tracks the humble tire stands out from the rest as the single most important point of focus in racing. As an example, you hear more talk of tires than any other topic during the commentary of any race. In racing, indeed everything matters but also everything must go through the tire. It is the single point of convergence in racing. What happens where the tire hits the road surface is simply all that matters.

When I was contemplating writing Optimum Drive the thought that really compelled me was the epiphany we’ve selfishly always set the car up for the driver. What we should always be doing is setting the car and driver up for the tire. Winning is largely accomplished by being more efficient with your tires. 

Sometimes people struggle with the concept of efficiency in racing, it seems a contradiction in motorsports. Motorsports appears to be all about wasting things on the surface, you burn through everything at startling rates in motorsports compared to road driving, that part is true. The crucible of motorsports and how it pulverizes and punishes everything at an alarming rate is the very thing that makes it interesting and useful (and expensive and frankly fun). Want to know how your car will hold up in a hundred thousand miles? Just race it for a hundred, you’ll go though all the tires, brakes, clutch, engine wear, you name it and then some. 

So racing is hard but why is it efficient? Due to the stresses it places on everything, if you can get those thousands of components of the car to just last a little longer than the other guys you gain a huge advantage (whether it is 100,000 miles on the road or 100 miles on the track). The two that matter the most are: Fuel, if you can have the same straight line speed as the other guys and use less fuel you have a fantastic advantage due the less frequent fuel stops and less weight in fuel that you have to carry. The second is of course the topic here; tires. If you can produce the same grip but at the same time do less wear (called degradation in engineering terms) you, just like the fuel efficiency example, have a measurable advantage. As the others consume at a higher rate, their speed difference (or delta) between the first lap on the tires and their last is greater. By the end of the race or stint on those tires (if it’s a race with tire changes) they will be a sitting duck. This is due to a result of the degradation; the tires get slower every lap after they have reached operating temperature. There may be a small plateau of a few consistent laps but then the degradation inevitable sets in. 

If you’ve ever wondered why a car that qualifies well slowly drifts back in the race you now have your answer. It is relatively easy to get a set up in the car that is fast over one flying lap and much more tricky to reduce degradation relative to the other teams. The qualifying setup is about efficiency of speed over one lap while the race setup is about the fastest average lap time over the life of the tire. Two very different goals. That’s what the teams are doing when they talk about “focusing on long runs not lap times” during testing and practice. It’s tempting for teams to go for the glory of topping the test times for the day but that’s a bit short sighted because winning races is about reducing the degradation delta and giving in to the absolutely most important component of the car… the humble tire.

The humble tire is actually quite complex, as I wrote in Optimum Drive, I, like many other racers, didn’t think tires were that complex or that different. Man, was I wrong, all it took was doing some work with a tire manufacture, it’s actually more complex than any other component on the car as well. The vast sums of development money and overwhelming number of choices (variables) in their construction make the rest of the car seem like it comes from the Stone Ages.

When I started doing tire testing for Michelin I was handed a “subjective handling sheet”, I had seen these before doing vehicle validation and testing for vehicle manufactures and you assume since the vehicle manufactures sheet (since it included not only the tire but the entire car) that it would be longer, only makes sense right? Wrong, very wrong, you know the saying that the Eskimos have 100 words for snow? That is Michelin and tires, the subjective handling sheet was pages long and had many, many terms (and sometime made up Michelin words that were an interesting mix of French and English) to describe all of the individual characteristics of the tires in stunning, vivid detail.

I learned over time that they all had a subtlety different connotation that were not only measurable objectively but could, with considerable practice, be felt. Add them all up and those differences really started to matter, to define the character and performance of that particular tire. They had sliced it up so many times that you could start to define the feel and confidence that particular tire provided. It was far beyond what I had seen any vehicle manufacture do, it was just part of their “so much is riding on your tires” culture they had refined and perfected over the course of a hundred plus years of continuous development.

There are many variables in tire construction, there is also considerable technology. Those two statements would be a pretty big surprise to most average consumers (but you are not average are you). They think tires are all simply “round and black” and the premium ones are just overpriced, overhyped versions of the cheapest ones. Perhaps the saddest thing I see at “Cars & Coffee” is a wonderfully complex, lovingly developed vehicle with $40 tires on it. Tells me all I need to know about this undeserving owner thinking they are smart and savvy by saving money on tires. I have the same comment for people who live in snowy climates and are too shortsighted or misinformed to put dedicated Winter tires on their car. No people, even the best All-Season tire does not preform nearly as well as a good Winter tire.

The bottom line here with all of this tire talk is that whether we are setting lap records, winning races and championships or perhaps just out on a Sunday enjoying the finest piece of machinery we can modestly afford or maybe just out getting some milk on a snowy night, nothing has a greater influence on our joy and success than the humble tire.

F1 Blog Entry 1

What better way to highlight the upcoming release of a new book on driving than to have the author, Paul Gerrard, do a series of pieces and a podcast interview for FBC discussing some of the finer elements of driving? In a new series, we are calling Optimum Drive with Paul Gerrard, we will focus on some intriguing parts of Paul’s new book coming out this April. You can pre-order the book right here from Amazon. If you’re a fan of the art of driving, this book is a must-have and we are very honored to be working with Paul on this special series just for our readers/listeners.

Paul Gerrard:

Paul F. Gerrard is an accomplished professional racing driver, precision/stunt driver, advanced driving instructor, vehicle evaluator and presenter. His career started in Europe winning a prestigious Winfield Scholarship that lead to successfully racing formula cars in both Europe and the United States. He made the transition into racing sports cars and simultaneously started instructing a wide range of drivers from military special forces to aspiring racers to teen drivers.

Next on his progression was television appearing as an automotive expert and driver on shows such as Top Gear (UK and US editions), MythBusters, Speedmakers, Supercars Exposed, Ultimate Factories and many others. He has presented on every automotive topic imaginable and specializes in make technology and driving easy to understand for people at any level. Paul is also a sought-after expert witness in high-level automotive court cases.

He has continually raced winning several national championships along the way racing everything from Pikes Peak to just about every professional road racing series all the way to being ranked number three in the world in vehicle jumping distance for a 2010 Hot Wheels Stunt.

Also under his belt is over two decades of racing driver coaching and director level responsibilities at some of the most advanced racing schools in the world. While his passion is and always was racing, Paul has cultivated and created a career that allows him to not only enjoy his passion but do something that is perhaps even more satisfying… share that passion for what he considers the most accessible and highest level mechanical interaction possible… a car and our uniquely human ability to connect with it.

Optimum Drive:

Optimum Drive is a book about achieving driving greatness. Its focus is not on the simple mechanics of vehicle line and calculated corner speed but about the granular dynamic balancing a great driver can do to actually up that speed above what most people think is possible. There exists a secret handshake of sorts for the greats, an elite club at a level that almost seems superhuman. The process in this book exposes and describes the steps anyone can take to gain access into the most elusive step a driver can take…turning what they do with three simple controls into art.

The Art and Science of Test Driving and Testing

Good usable repeatable laps that is what the team wants the driver to do, seems simple enough but so few are really good at it. For a driver, it takes a lot of restraint to do repeatable useable good laps, the very mentality of a competitive person is to be aggressive not show restraint. You’ll see teams favor certain drivers for certain testing tasks, the lower down the totem pole you are, the more menial the driving task all the way from only straight line running to correlate wind tunnel with real world to individual testing/running of vehicle systems. The initial running is seldom done anywhere near the limit so those duties usually fall to the “Friday drivers”.

I mentioned the word correlation a moment ago and that is what the teams need to establish, a baseline. While the car may be turning its first real laps it, in fact, has probably done a whole season virtually over this Winter. The teams need to take all that virtual data and see how close it is to actual data they collect during the test. That is the all-important correlation they are after. Is the car behaving exactly how the simulations predicted?

To do this they break everything down as much as time will allow. The fairly recent draconian (cost cutting lol) restrictions on testing have made the reliance on simulations greater so there is a lot of pressure to get them right because the car is turning less laps and later in the process and that makes everyone very nervous. They don’t have much time to correct things if the correlation is poor. I wonder if a car has ever turned out better than they predicted? Usually of course the opposite is the case and there is always a team or two flying in some bits while the car misses some crucial track time or is embarrassingly off the pace relative to last season.

Through it all, the test driver (not the race driver) hat is on dutifully driving the car as precisely as possible so they themselves are not make the data harder to be correlated due to them being on their own driving program (like trying to go too fast and therefore perhaps being inconsistent).

The time for speed will come though some teams will fly under the radar until unleashing the cars full potential in Melbourne qualifying. Others (usually those who have something to prove or are still sponsor hunting) will go for a lap at the end of each day to show the world that this year is going to be different and generate some short-lived but important pre-season buzz.

The bottom line is that everyone is on their own program, some will be frantic, some restrained and others quietly confident. Meanwhile the drivers circulate with engineers dutifully checking data, all with fingers crossed that the car is living up to its virtual potential as it’s turning ones and zeros into actual physical form…untold millions invested, eight meager test days, then only a month to Melbourne…what could possible go wrong!?

The difference between two distinct yet necessary driver types: The test driver vs. the race driver.

Now, it is safe to say any good, let alone great, driver should be able to do both. One sets up the car and the other races it. The test driver is like a robot, they put the same good known input in (within reason) regardless of output (understeer, oversteer, lock-up, or wheel spin), and the engineers adjust and re-adjust the car until the output is as close to perfect as possible.

That’s how you set- up a car to maximize its performance. The more consistent the test driver’s inputs, the more accurate the engineers’ data, and the closer the can get to the ideal compromise in the car’s set-up. Then the race starts and the driver switches modes; the car’s set-up is now pretty fixed (just usually brake bias, anti-roll bars, and tire pressures, and wing adjustments at the pit stops), so the driver now needs to not be the rock-solid robot doing exactly the same thing every lap. They now need to be focused instead only on the output, continuously adjusting their inputs to optimize the output. The whole idea of our role being that dynamic car balancer is us in race mode, but the test (mode) driver balances the car and repeats the run exactly as the engineers tweak.