![]() AiM Solo) or use a phone app with a 10Hz GPS antenna? Up to you, but using your phone without an antenna doesn’t give you enough resolution. If you have a modern car, your car is spitting out data for throttle position, brake pressure, wheel speeds, steering angle, etc. It’s one of the best investments you can make to improve your driving. GPS-based data loggers are not that expensive when you consider the costs of track time or car parts. Is the driver braking too much? Is the driver fighting understeer at the exit? You can ask and answer these questions and many more with a speed trace. At a bare minimum, you need to be able to understand what a speed trace is telling you. If you want to get out of suckville, you need to understand what driving data looks like. Racing is a complex activity because it involves optimizing the driver, the vehicle, and the interplay between the driver and vehicle. The good news is that you can be the fastest driver on track and still suck at racing! So how do you move from the lower levels to the higher levels of suckiness? You don’t have to be the best, just faster than the next driver. Racing isn’t usually measured against some absolute criterion. Since everyone sucks at racing, it doesn’t take much dedicated work to be better than average. Biking to work every day doesn’t prepare you for riding a half-pipe any more than driving to work prepares you for track driving. But driving is different from basketball because you drive to work every day, right? Not so much. If you’re a basketball player who plays h-o-r-s-e and shoots free throws a few weekends per year, you probably aren’t going to do very well in the neighborhood pickup game much less any kind of league play. How many of those hours feature coaching? Next to none. How many racers do you know that have even 1/10th of those hours on track? Very few. That’s 3000 hours, which includes some mixture of unstructured time, coaching, drills, and games. How many hours do you think it takes to become good at any of the major sports like basketball, tennis, football (either kind), etc? Playing 2 hours per day for 300 days per year for 5 years sounds like a good start. ![]() There simply isn’t enough money to get the track time to be really good at it. I want to follow that up in a series of posts on YSAR where I get into a little more depth on a few topics. I was recently interviewed on the Garage Heroes in Training podcast and they asked me a lot of really interesting questions. ![]()
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