Shatter Your Lap-times Obsession: Why Your Fastest Lap is Misleading You

Welcome to a free edition of Terence Dove on Racing Drivers. I strongly recommend you listen to the audio version - I don’t just read through the article but flesh it out a lot!

Here’s what you get from this weeks article:

1. Why you should learn to ignore how good or bad your single fastest lap makes you feel.

2. The fastest way to perform a ‘Full run assessment’ on your actual driving performance.

3. How not to get caught out by the ‘I was fastest on Friday’ disaster

Everybody loves the thrill of chasing faster lap times, constantly glancing at the Mychron, seeking that validation of improvement.

It's an easy habit to fall into (I do it too often), and frankly, it's misleading.

This reliance on a single measure from a single lap is giving you a skewed perception of your performance. It's a sort of delusion - making you think you're doing better than you actually are or the opposite; unnecessarily denting your confidence when the times don't accurately reflect your actual driving.

The Real Measure - You Have to Hit Hundreds of Marks Perfect Every Session

Running a perfect race is about hitting hundreds, if not thousands, of precise marks every single session. Take the corner below for instance. There’s a lot more than just nailing the braking point and the apex; it's a complex sequence of actions.

You've got to get the braking intensity right, accurately time when to ease off the brake, perfect your turn-in point, apply the right amount of steering lock, and then there’s the exit strategy – when to get back on the power, when to go full throttle, and where to release the steering. It’s not just one or two things; you’re looking at maybe five to ten crucial points in a single corner.

Typical corner notes - this one has 15 points to get right!

Multiply this complexity by the number of corners on the track, and then again by the number of laps you run. You’re now dealing with hundreds, potentially thousands of decisions and actions that need to be spot on for a truly perfect race.

That’s your real measure. Your aim should be to maximize this hit rate OVER THE WHOLE SESSION.

How many, out of a thousand marks, did you hit?

Now, you could watch the whole session on a go-pro and grade every corner, for every point you needed to get right….

But obviously, ain’t nobody got time for that!

The Fast Way to Properly Measure How Good You Were on a Run. ‘Full Run Assessment’

Here's what you need to do:

1. After your session, find a quiet spot away from distractions and influences.

2. Reflect on your run. Ask yourself, "How accurate was I?"

3. Think generally about the session as a whole . Were you hitting your marks? Were you ‘on it’?

Score yourself out of ten for how quality your driving was. Be brutally honest - it will take you a few seconds.

Ignore whether or not you posted a decent lap time. It's easy to get carried away or be overly critical based on that one number. Do it by how you honestly feel about how you actually drove.

When you ask yourself to score you own driving, you will immediately know the truth. If you shut out all opinions on the matter, ignore lap times and isolate just how you drove from everything else, your score will be brutally honest.

Once you have your score out of ten, naturally you’ll be conjuring up in your mind exactly why you didn’t score ten. Playing the important moments in your mind of where you feel you weren’t perfect is where the real work is done.

Here’s what you should be thinking:

1. I screwed up the chicane way too many times

2. I couldn’t get my braking perfect for the hairpin more than 1 in 3

3. Every time I miss the kerb coming on to the straight I lose 3 mph!

Now, I bet that going through this process will sort out 75% of your problems just from the increased attention you give to the problem corners that popped into your mind when you created your score.

Annoyance is the Emotional Fuel that Drives You to Perfection

Those memories will stick, because when you replay those moments in your mind you’ll feel the sting of disappointment that goes with them.

Having an emotional reaction to missing an apex here and there is EXACTLY what you need.

The next time you go to the grid, you need to be carrying that feeling of annoyance, while picturing in your mind how you will hit those marks 100% this time. The emotion will generate the focus and intensity required to hit all 1000 points on track, stretched over the whole 10 minute run.

Walking to the grid with these things in your mind is far more powerful than:

“Yay, I got a good lap last run, lets see if we can do it again”

With this kind of attitude your are very likely to hit a lot more very fast lap times…

So please don’t let yourself fall into the following trap:

DANGER - The Quickest on Friday Trap: A False Sense of Security

Beware the trap of being the fastest on Friday. This is a classic karting cliché where drivers get a false sense of security from their practice day times.

You might think, "Great, I'm quick today, the job's done."

Complacency creeps in, and you start to lose the edge because you are allowing lap times to tell you to relax.

This is where relentless use of your ‘Full Run Assessment’ becomes crucial. You need to push beyond the euphoria of being fastest, and dissect your performance.

Go through the exact same process for the whole run. Keep identifying where you need to focus to get 1000 strikes in a row, and you’ll continue to get stronger.

If you build this into how you go about preparing for your next run, you’ll become too strong to catch.

Quickest on Friday? Let’s not start ‘patting each other on the back’ just yet

Thanks for reading

Terence