Karting and Marginal Gains - Boring Secret to Crushing the Opposition
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The ‘accumulation of marginal gains’ is two things:
Where driving at the limit becomes a discipline and quite frankly, boring!
The reason why some drivers look like they’re cheating like f*** when they aren’t.
What are marginal gains in karting, and what accumulates exactly?
A driver able to accumulate marginal gains is not just trying to take corners fast and accurately, they are finding tiny bits of time in 10 ways for each corner.
The key is, when they find a tiny gain, they notice and lock it in.
Each time they find a tiny improvement they are able to keep repeating it. They then find another tiny improvement and keep repeating both.
For example a driver would say:
‘There’s a tiny bump before the apex, when I hit that right it tucks the front in for me and I can get on the power and the kart takes it’
Now, this gain is too small for the data to pick up, it’s like a hundredth of a second. Other drivers listening in are thinking ‘what bloody bump???’.
In the same corner, the driver also found that when the kart tucked in like that and they got on the power earlier, they were also straightening the wheel earlier. That’s another fraction of a second.
They lock those in.
Every lap they hit that bump, kart tucks in, earlier on power, straighten wheel earlier.
Total gain, half a tenth.
But that’s one corner of 12.
If they find those kinds of details on 4 more corners - they are two tenths down the road EVERY SINGLE LAP.
They are on another level. Nobody can see why. So their engine builder makes another 50 grand a year because it must be that!!
So, quick reiteration.
These tiny gains accumulate not because the driver has magic hands. It is because they:
Notice the effect of hitting that bump just right (kart tucks in).
Exploit it (get on power early).
Remember what happened.
Can repeat it forever onward.
Most drivers instead will hit that bump, and maybe make the gain - but just on that lap.
But they forget why it happened and just think:
Oh that was a good lap… I’m great!
And that’s it, the moment that caused the improvement is lost forever.
Whilst the ‘accumulation of marginal gains’ driver is burying everyone, because each gain stays and gets repeated. The gains keep adding slowly, building up this terrific pressure, under which the regular driver is crushed!
And remember, each gain is tiny - something stupid like a bump nobody else even feels. But they hit 20 or 30 of these micro-gains every lap. If they told you exactly what they found, you probably wouldn’t have a clue what they are on about.
How to get your marginal gains - two approaches - choose one or combine!
I know of two ways where drivers have successfully created this impossible to beat system.
**Warning - This can take driving from sheer pleasure, to sheer self-torture with occasional elation. It’s hardcore discipline really :(
Natural instinct driven marginal gains
Don’t be fooled by the words instinct and natural - they don’t mean easy and it all happens by itself. I say that because I’m lazy and would immediately be drawn to this approach thinking it’s a silver bullet, but it’s not, it’s a real headache!
For some drivers the detailed analysis of every lump and bump of the track doesn’t quite align with them. Instead you have to get really serious about triggering and guiding your instincts to focus. And you also need to bring your memory into play every corner.
Stage 1. Create Trigger words or images for every corner
Start by understanding the character of every corner on the track. You need to create a word that reminds you before you hit that corner what the key is to nailing it.
Already you will be frowning, running the corner through your mind. Most drivers who are honest would shrug with something like ‘get the braking right, late apex’ none of which they particularly recall behind the wheel. They just enjoy driving.
That’s not specific enough, at all. You need to be able to write an essay on that corner, then think of a word that triggers the essence of that whole essay.
When on the track, you tell yourself that magic word, then you should FEEL exactly how to run that corner.
That’s the start - not the end of it! See what I mean that it’s a headache?. All we did so far was establish a base.
In the example earlier, the corner depended on hitting a particular bump correct. There’s detail about it, but I bet if you say the word bump in your head, you automatically know the rest.
So you have a trigger word BUMP. That must be said every damn lap, so you have it locked in.
Stage 2. Make marginal gains by error elimination
Oh god, errors…. Here we go. I don’t make errors.
I bet you do!
Almost all small errors through a corner get ignored. You notice them in the moment, maybe make a small internal complaint then forget it.
These errors are random, and are different every lap but they average out to about the same every lap. You can be super-consistent by the clock, but those errors come up on the data in different places.
When you begin to eliminate these multiple small errors, you start to go quicker. It looks like you are finding time when really you are just fixing the leaks from where you were losing time before.
But who cares!?!
So, what’s the process to eliminate tiny errors.
Back to the bump. If the word bump is doing its job you won’t have to think too much about this corner. You should be executing it quite well instinctively.
Running by instinct frees up some of your attention for noticing little annoyances. If when you get on the power early, which was your bump benefit, sometimes you might feel you got on too early - you got too greedy.
The kart slides a tiny bit, and you correct the slide and the corner looks perfect from the outside, but you know it wasn’t perfect.
That could be a quarter of a tenth down the drain.
It won’t be every lap, but there will be these errors somewhere every lap. Let’s kill this one.
So far we know - the bump works for you - it’s quick
You occasionally go early in the power, lose a bit of traction.
You want to keep everything and eliminate that micro-slide
Quick recap… Remember that the bump and the benefits of the bump are normally forgotten. Now we are adding this micro-slide that is almost always put down to ‘no big deal’ and forgotten, then repeated! This is the rather boring step-by-step drudgery of ‘accumulating marginal gains’.
Modify the trigger word to keep the bump-benefits, and eliminate the micro-slide
You have all this information in your head now about how to get the corner good, plus things that go a tiny bit wrong. You need that information to be live, guiding your instincts in anger, i.e. when actually driving.
So, create a new trigger word that is a short-cut to what you know has to be right.
Something like BUMP-TRACTION.
We both know exactly what that means. You bring up that word before the corner, it makes you alert to exactly what to get right.
You are now running that one corner better every lap than ever before. All you did was keep what was good once - the bump - and eliminate what was bad, a tiny slide.
You are in the process of ‘accumulating marginal gains’
No changes to the kart, no style changes. This is all stuff you have been doing but pissing it down the drain.
Multiply this effect by the number of corners on the track.
Then understand that each time you eliminate one tiny error, you find 3 new, but smaller ones.
It goes on forever like this
Ever and ever more frustrating, as you become tormented and tyrannised by these little errors that come to take over all your thought!
The upside - If you have good kit you are down the road, very hard to beat. If you don’t have the gear, you might be tangling with big spenders and becoming a far better pilot!
Next week: Approach 2. Marginal gains the brutal way!
Thanks for reading
Terence