Break Through Your Performance Plateau

This weeks paid subscriber only edition is about how to overcome a performance plateau. This means how to step up a level, when you feel like you are at the limit of what you can do. Thanks to a subscriber called Saw for asking me to address this problem. It’s something I came up against myself, so I hope this helps you if you feel stuck!

Hitting the Wall and Shattering It

Every racer hits a performance plateau at some stage; like when you’ve hit a limit and can’t find new speed.

I vividly remember this frustration from my own racing days back in the 1990s racing at Shenington, especially after the long straight leading into a flat right-hander and then a hairpin.

I was fast enough, but I remember barrelling down that straight, thinking,

"I must be able to go faster than this!!"

It felt too easy, almost as if I wasn't pushing enough and there must be a way to find more speed.

That's when I'd wind myself up and decide to take a big bite out of a braking zone, go in hot, try harder. Obviously I would mess the corner up and lose time. All I could do, through trying hard, was go slower.

And that’s it – the ‘performance plateau’.

It's like being stuck in a rut, but it's not that terrible because you're still performing well. I won the event that day - but felt unfulfilled because it seemed there had to be more to squeeze out of racing than just going round in circles all day.

Hitting this plateau can be a real downer, making you question everything. Why am I racing? What am I learning? For me, it became a reason to consider quitting. I was winning but not doing anything thrilling.

But here's what I needed to discover: there's always another level, a deeper aspect of driving that hadn’t been tapped into yet.

If you’ve ever felt the same, i.e, when you've tried all the obvious solutions and find they only make you slower, then you need to dig deeper into the art of driving.

Here are ways to dig yourself out of a performance plateau rut, and onto a whole new level and give your driving fresh energy and excitement:

1. Mistake Elimination Over a Full Run

Can you eliminate all error and diversions from your perfect lines for your entire 15-minute run? This shifts your focus to total performance, pushing you into a deeper level of concentration.

It's a completely different exercise from trying to hammer out a fast lap. You get into a real zone. I've seen this often with drivers, especially on simulators.

Without trying anything specific, just by focusing on nailing the whole run without any errors, they start making tiny improvements in loads of different areas. Becoming 1% better at 100 different things makes you massively faster over the entire run. When your mindset is "I don't want to make any mistakes; I want to get everything perfect," you focus on every single mark, and you hit them.

By doing this over a whole 15-minute run, and then repeating it, you get incredibly good at hitting your marks without losing time. You make micro-improvements, and your lap times start to drop.

The weird thing is you can't pinpoint what part of the track you've improved on.

There won’t be a big noticeable change. It's about all these little adjustments that accumulate and make a huge difference. This method trains your mind and body to operate at a higher performance level consistently, not just in bursts.

It's about sustained perfection rather than fleeting moments of brilliance.