How to Get Yourself Accused of Cheating
Stirling Moss said this after driving for the first time, post-coma, which led to him deciding he should quit. Later he questioned the validity of the reasoning…
.. and another thing, I used to look at the rev counter without taking my eyes off the road, not only that, I could see the rev counter and the road and a friend waving to me, all at the same time... I‘ve lost that.
Sir Stirling Moss - My Cars, My Career
Now I think we all relate to the bit where he notices his friend waving, but not so much how he looks at the rev counter without really looking at it - ‘without taking my eyes off the road’.
That part seems super-human to me!
Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I’m going to be asking you to do.
Personally when I first read that I thought ‘I bet I can do that too’. But when I raced karts there was no rev counter, not for me anyway! I also found that when I first drove a car, I couldn’t really watch the revs and drive with any accuracy.
BUT
There’s a difference between trying to casually observe your revs whilst driving, and desperately needing to observe you revs when driving.
When you really need to see your revs, because you have a drive in you that demands you meet a target, suddenly you find the ability.
So, I’m confident you can do what Moss considered an ability that separated him from the crowd, if you are convinced that you need to.
Why?
This week is part 2 of the boring marginal gains stuff. That’s not in the title because it seems statistically, the word boring in the title puts people off!
Reading your RPM, or speed live, is going to open up so many small gains through corners, that the cumulative effect will become impossible to beat.
It is the cornerstone of the more brutal, numbers driven, approach to marginal gains. Last week was the more ‘holistic’ approach - this week is about:
Pounding the track with sheer force of numbers
Here’s 3 numbers to know, that you can use to little-by-little crush the resistance any race track has against you smashing lap records.
Apex speed/rpm
Exit speed/rpm
Top speed/rpm - where you reach it - earlier the better
Knowing those numbers can set you off chipping away at multiple tiny improvements every lap. It’s like slowly but relentlessly tightening a vice, the pressure gently builds until it crushes the object - or the vice breaks!
Apex speed. This is the big one, increase it and you will produce a faster lap.
…so long as your exit speed is still the same OR faster. If not then you cheated your apex speed at the cost of getting the corner right.
Top speed is a vanity number yes, but we like it! But it’s also objectively valuable as confirmation of improvement from cornering when you hit it ten metres earlier.
I reckon currently you probably only know two numbers for your whole session, which you might look at on your dash, you might not bother.
You’ll know the maximum rpm for the whole run, and you might know your minimum rpm for the whole run. this might be a very rough guide to what gearing changes you need.
But that’s not anything like the level of detail needed to hammer the resistance out of a track.
