Your Own Home Driver Advancement Lab
Part 1 of a series on how to make yourself an elite driver from home - iRacing
For my money the ultimate racing driver considers themselves a living experiment in the development of driving excellence.
That means they are obsessed with finding speed in themselves continuously. They don’t just go racing and testing, or join a few sim races and trust in their current level of performance to do the business.
That’s boring
They seek to advance the art of peak driving performance by discovering new principles of driving at the limit.
To that end they systematically experiment, evaluate and refine in every possible way they can.
Now, there are a lot of professional coaching centres that understand this…
BUT, they don’t supply anything significantly more advanced than what you can do at home. They do have a major disadvantage though - they charge by the hour.
The driver committed to their own apotheosis needs days at a time of intense focus - not an hour or two a month. So the real-deal driver needs their own home racing driver lab.
Fortunately it’s totally possible to equip yourself with your own personal driving laboratory!
So, starting now I’m going to do a series of articles, on how to turn yourself into a living experiment in driving excellence, at home in your own fully equipped racing driver research facility.
You’ve got most of the gear already I bet!
Simulators - Brain training not messing around
Everyone else will use simulators for fun, sometimes serious fun, but essentially they are messing around. That’s how most real racing is done too, you get in the seat and you have a steering wheel - you go!
But in a driver’s home lab context, that’s basically pissing into the wind. You will be burning hours of time going through an extremely slow and inefficient learning process.
The temptation to get on a sim and ‘just drive’ is almost insurmountable - so be ready for that. If you get into your favourite driving software, set a time and get into the time-sink of trying to beat that time, you are dead in the water.
This whole approach is aimed at getting into serious self research, not playing around.
What the different simulator titles are actually good for when looking to make yourself an elite driver
This week I’ll start with iRacing.
iRacing - I think the iRacing driving is awful.
You can’t feel your way to the limit of the car, or go just beyond the limit and then dial back. It does my head in.
BUT…
That is the great strength of iRacing and why it’s worth the expense.
To be quick on iRacing you have to develop predictive instincts to be fast. You can’t just rely on your instincts to control the car. You have to KNOW what the car needs, prepare the car skilfully for corners and not upset it - or you will be off.
This makes iRacing invaluable for developing supreme understanding of driving:
You have to know what is going to happen, you can’t wing it and react to a car sliding, you have already blown it.
And that fact correlates very closely with a lot of real world motor-racing. There’s no time for feeling your way in, sliding around and enjoying a car. You have to be on it, correct and clean from the word go.
