Driving by Numbers: The Secret to Unlocking Insane Lap Times

Squeezing Every Last Tenth by Hyper-Focusing on Speed and RPM Numbers as You drive

Welcome to a paid subscriber edition of Terence Dove On Racing Drivers. Don’t forget there is more detail in the audio👆 so you can listen in the car on the way to the track. What’s on offer this week:

1. An inside look at how an underdog driver unlocked insane lap times.

2. The incredibly difficult "driving by numbers" technique for extracting maximum speed.

3. A step-by-step guide to implementing this powerful approach in your own driving.

Hit the magic number!

Will Dendy - Skint driver with incredible capacity for detail

In the world of racing, there are those drivers who seem to have an almost supernatural ability to find speed. They're the ones who consistently outpace their competitors, even when their equipment isn't top-notch. So, what sets these drivers apart? What's their secret?

Enter Will, a driver I used to work with closely. Will is good friends with my brother, and together, we spent countless hours at the track, trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of Will's kart. The thing about Will was that he never had the biggest budget. He was always struggling to scrape together the funds to keep racing, but he never let that hold him back.

Will had a unique skill, one that I believe he developed from his time on early racing simulators. He had an uncanny ability to recall his RPM at every single point on the track. This wasn't just remembering his max RPM on the straight – that's something a lot of drivers can do. No, Will could tell you his exact RPM at the exit of every corner.

The Power of Live Feedback

This ability to know and recall his RPMs was a game-changer. Will used this information to continuously refine his driving, making tiny adjustments based on the immediate, live feedback he was getting. If he made a change to his driving or the kart setup, he could tell you exactly how it affected his RPMs. "I'm hitting 12,800 coming off that corner," he'd say. "I know that change worked because before, I was getting 12,600 maximum."

And it worked. Will got really, really good. But you'd only know just how good he was if you knew what he was driving. There were times when I was the one bolting his kart together (sometimes cable ties where bolts should have been), so I knew exactly how knackered it was! And yet, Will would just go out there and make it work, finding time in a kart that had no business being that fast.

Will's story illustrates a powerful point: the secret to unlocking insane lap times is about being deliberate and methodical in your approach, about using every piece of information available to you to continuously refine and improve.

For drivers who start racing at a very young age, intuition and feel for the kart can develop naturally over time. But for those of us who started later like Will did, the "driving by numbers" technique offers a powerful shortcut.

How to Use Your Speed and RPM on the Dash to Force Extra Lap Time Performance

First make sure you have this technique nailed down so well, that you have spare mental capacity to add ‘driving by numbers’ to what you can handle.

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