The Accuracy Paradox

Driving and checking that you hit your apexes simultaneously, screws you up

Welcome to a paid subscriber edition of Terence Dove on Racing Drivers.

This week I have created a video to show you all about where to look, and when to switch your focus in a corner from apex to exit…. (hint: it’s early!)

Here’s what you will learn in this edition:

1. You can’t be accurate with your driving AND check you were accurate at the same time.

2. Where you should look as you drive to make sure you are accurate.

3. Exactly when to shift your focus from apex to exits points, leaving your instincts to handle the rest.

I used to have a terrible habit of watching my front wheel hit apexes, because I really wanted to know that I was getting apexes just right. I had to verify it to myself.

That’s fine…

Except that because I was so busy focussing on the first half of the corner, I was doing absolutely nothing to prepare the kart to perfect the second half of the corner. I was was running the exits half blind!

I was trying to drive accurately, and verify that I was accurate using the same pair of eyes…

And it couldn’t be done - I was stuck in the ‘accuracy paradox’:

How can you be accurate and verify it, with only one pair of eyes that need to be focussed on the next mark? You can’t.

Nigel Mansell’s massive visor sticker forced me to Look up and ahead

One day in the nineties I noticed Nigel Mansell had such a massive visor sticker, that he barely had a couple of centimetres to peer through.

So I decided it would be a cool idea to paste a massive sticker on my own visor, so that I too couldn’t see where I was going - but hopefully look more cool!

And bloody hell, it utterly transformed my driving, completely by fluke…

The visor forced me to keep my head up and look way ahead along the track

I simply could not look down and check if I had hit an apex, because if I did the visor sticker completely blocked my view and I was entirely blinded.

Magically I went a lot quicker, because I was forced to focus way ahead intead of looking down at what was immediately in front of me.

At the time I thought Mansell was using the sticker to force himself to look ahead too, so I really got into the the art of looking ahead and I started to hit the front of races. Whether Mansell did it for that reason I’ll never know.

Video - Here I am driving with a fancy VR headset that shows when I switch my eyes from apex to exit.

I’ve written all about looking ahead before:

Commanding your eyes in karting: The Worrier vs. The Warrior

But you really need a video with head movement to get a feel for it… So here it is!

I talk through when to switch targets from apex to exit, and you’ll notice my head moves and takes quite an extreme angle. You might also notice a couple of times I screw it up - old habits die hard!!