Defeating Karting Race Day Nerves
I have a real admiration for drivers who suffer like hell from fear and nerves. It could be from the sensation and realities of physical danger in karting, confrontation with psycho drivers, general performance anxieties (If I’m slow I’m crap) or a heady mix of the whole lot.
If that’s you, you get my admiration because if you feel like you are going to die and still head ‘once more into the breach’, then by my own definition you are heroic. Especially because you choose to do it, through the love of racing and knowing you simply must race - but you still hate it too and it is horrific!
Hero or not - nerves will mess you up
Nerves are disabling, making the whole day a struggle, ruining concentration and focus in the pits, because all the brain says is ‘screw this, we are gonna die’ and it wants out of the situation altogether - regardless of your love for racing!
Drivers shut down and become very self absorbed with nerves. They come across as rude and entitled . It’s not really the case, their brain is in a high alert survival state.
In the tent looking at data for example, where someone is showing you how to go faster - which you know you must absorb and execute on - deep inside, your gut says ‘faster? STFU! - we need to survive!’.
You absorb nothing, like you are underwater and you just hear noise.
Then something happens just as you feel you are beginning to settle down with the nerves. Rain.
‘Oh god no’. You look to the sky. ‘Why have you forsaken me?’
So you become more ignorant, over dramatic and self-obsessed. Not your fault, but it makes life very difficult at the track, and attracts a lot of criticism that isn’t your fault, or relevant. You are stuck in a trap.
Dealing with nervous drivers who hide it well is like dealing with a narcissist, who is also hell-bent on self-defeat and obsessed with doing the exact opposite of anything performance enhancing.
I was a nervous driver in juniors - the dummy grid was purgatory
When I started karting, the dummy grid wait was a nightmare. I would be constantly checking my front wheel nuts, fiddling around with my St Christopher pendant and trying to not feel so sick.
I was NOT running through mental plans, sizing up the weaknesses of opponents or trying to mess with their heads.
I was worried, and that was all I could deal with. Sitting on the dummy grid is supposed to be good prep time. Instead it becomes clutching-at-straws time, trying to calm oneself, thinking up superstitions.
I was also starved, sleep deprived and dehydrated, because I wouldn’t eat, sleep or drink.
I was already ignorant, still am, but I was even more distant than usual and not in any respect on the ball, at all.
I get along with nervous drivers, scared drivers, very well because I am one really.
What changed for me to kill the crippling nerves
The difference for myself when all those nerves disappeared was massive.
I went from all consuming fear and nerves - to just not giving a damn and looking forward to bringing all hell on the opposition whatever the situation. The experience became entirely different.
The source of my own nerves: I didn’t really know what I was doing
I also didn’t know that it was possible to know what I was doing. Not properly.
