Applying Colin Chapman's ruthless "simplify and add lightness" to your driving
I wrote about this quote over a year ago, and it still haunts me. I think its the most badass principle that puts racing people right at the top of the human hierarchy.
It’s a justification for the near psychopathic obsession with being light and fast that Colin Chapman had. The idea that if your car doesn’t fall apart immediately after it crosses the finish line, then it was too heavy! It meant he dominated racing, but some incredible drivers died along the way - the cars were extremely fast and exquisitely delicate.
“If you start off by designing everything conservatively and nothing fails, there is no way that you are ever going to lighten your car. You can never lighten things under those conditions and therefore you don’t learn quickly enough.
If you start off light and it breaks, then you will in fact strengthen the pieces that break. An awful lot of bits that you might have thought would have broken, won’t break. And that is the only way of getting a light car.”
- Keith Duckworth
The principles here are ruthless, true, deadly and I think beautiful. It seems benign when he says ‘….and it breaks’ - but back then ‘it breaks’ was often a vital steering component leading to a 160mph crash in a car that was basically a petrol bomb on wheels!
Oh, and in case we need to make what Keith Duckworth said more impactful, he’s the man behind the Cosworth DFV - the engine that dominated F1 for nearly 20 years - which is utterly ridiculous!
The reason the Lotus principle he described haunts me is that it hits me in the gut, like ‘this is what life is meant to be about’. It seems to be just about designing race winning cars before all the rules made them safe - but I think its about how to live as a racing driver:
Be built for speed, no extra weight, crash and burn - if you don’t die fix what failed but nothing else. Go again, faster…
Now, as racing driver types, we can go along with the heroic idea here - the live fast die young kind of thing. But what haunts me about the Duckworth is how the hell do you apply it in reality?
I won’t be cutting off my pinkies and saying ‘don’t need them, that’s 400g saved!’.
So, if you get some kind of primal yearning from the combination of Chapmans elegant ‘simplify and add lightness’ with Duckworth’s brutally rational ‘If you start off light and it breaks, then you will in fact strengthen the pieces that break.’ like I do, then you’ll want to figure out what to do with it.
I have some ideas!
Applying the Ultimate Racing Driver Principle to the Real World
To apply the Lotus principles to the real world, I reckon we should start with driving and apply it to a clever driving methodology that is built around being minimalist to the extreme, and actually will make you bloody quick!
Chapman and Duckworth were both genius designers. They didn’t just deliberately build cars that will break because they are too light.
They created brilliant designs without compromise for excess weight. So we need to start with something that’s clever in the first place, and is all about being light and fast af.
The clever (maybe not genius) design I reckon will work is a super-stripped-to-the-bare-bones ‘looking ahead’ system.
Here’s the full fat version of looking ahead if you need to familiarise yourself with the principles.
Ultra Lightweight Looking Ahead System Lotus Style
The looking ahead way of driving is designed to force your instincts to do the driving without you having to think. That’s already lightweight because you are getting rid of the pollution in your mind, and running on raw instincts as much as possible. Instincts are fast, and since we can’t delete them, this is the lightest, leanest, most efficient way to put our brain into a kart and test the limits.
So far so good.
It is also a bit dicey! The first thing to be deleted from your driving design is braking points. With looking ahead you just rely on instinct to decide where to brake.
What if my instincts don’t know where to brake - maybe we crash!
See why this fits the Lotus principle already? It’s lightweight and I reckon it will work (I believe your instincts do know where to brake). But, we won’t know until we test it, but don’t add the weight of braking points as a safety measure.
I Accidently Added Weight Without Knowing - Delete the Exit Point
I’ve taught look ahead driving for a long while, and have become institutionalised by it. I’ve taught it myself, and then for a long time at iZone, where they have all the eye-tracking gear.
My first idea for running a stripped down version is to only look ahead for your apex point and exit point. No extras.
Now, I reckon if Colin Chapman looked this over he’d say ‘Exit point? what do you need that for fatty! Delete it’.
I reckon all we need for the super-light looking ahead system is apex points. Just look at your apex point and everything else will take care of itself.
So here we have a Lightweight design that forces fast instincts to do the driving. It should be fast af! You look for you apex, before you hit it look to the next one and assume your instincts will nail it
Here’s what it eliminates from your thinking
Where to brake
Where to turn in
How to turn in
Where to release the brakes
what is the best line
How to keep the kart loaded
Where to get on the power
What point to hit on the exit
Checking if I hit the apex visually
I bet there are a ton more of these, many of which I am guilty of loading drivers up with, but hey this is experimental cutting edge stuff here.
What Might Go Wrong and Cause a Fatal Error - Don’t Over React
From the list above we might discover than any one of them being missing causes you to go flying off the track, or just blowing the corner.
But anecdotes from Colin Chapman suggest that he wouldn’t immediately fix failures by making a part stronger and heavier. It seems that engineers had to fight tooth and nail with him to add anything to a car, even after problems.
The same applies here, just because you experienced a problem doesn’t mean that we need to add weight to your driving process. Go again and give your new system a chance to bed in.
If the Failure is Persistent Don’t just Add Weight
Let’s say you keep screwing up your braking. You are overshooting the corners over and over, and you feel like you simply must add braking points to your mind for every corner and make sure you spot them in advance. This takes the job away from your instincts and adds thought to the process.
It’s a heavyweight solution, I want to put everything on your instincts and keep your brain free and fast!
So, how about a super-lightweight solution that is one simple solution that fits all corners, rather than having braking points for every corner?
If you are braking too late everywhere, it means you have instinctive problem that makes you attack braking too hard. Probably you are being a bit greedy, overly optimistic, desperate, too aggressive or something along those lines. So I would suggest you carry a single thought about braking that means chill out, prioritise accuracy, get it right.
Don’t add weight to the process just yet!
Instead daydream intensely about driving with that mindset and retrain your instincts through that process.
We might be able to get away with re-training your instincts by visualising and getting a different feel for how you want to drive. That way we don’t need to add a damn thing to your process as you actually drive.
This way you just make adjustments to the instincts, avoid adding weight and we stay super-light.
That’s how we can apply the world’s most badass design philosophy to a living racing driver. And if you don’t fancy binning it going through the process, try it all on a sim!
The Lotus Principle for Racing Drivers: Key Takeaways
Start Ultra-Lightweight: Strip your approach down to absolute essentials (like focusing on just the apex). Let your instincts handle everything else.
Expect Failures: When you strip everything to bare essentials, some things will break. That's not a design flaw, it's the process.
Be Reluctant to Add Weight: When failures occur, don't immediately add mental processes. Give your lightweight system time to bed in.
Fix Only What Breaks: If something consistently fails, strengthen only that specific component with the lightest possible solution.
Retrain Instincts, Don't Override Them: Instead of adding conscious thought (weight), reprogram your instincts through visualization and emotional connection.