Karters Must Be Fully Switched On All Day

Being a bit disengaged between sessions is not how the quickest drivers work - they are on it all day - are you?

The drivers I’ve worked with that went on to get paid drives or got scooped up into those F1 academies (through being impressive) all have one thing in common:

They don't leave you alone for a second between runs.

They are constantly switched on, looking for more speed. And as someone who always answers ‘yes’ to the question ‘can I be faster’ they never left me alone.

This means constantly going over data with them at the track, OR phone calls at random times during the week with ‘I reckon there’s a quicker line through the chicane’.

If there was an hour, or even two hours between races or practice sessions, we never really completed the investigation into what more can be done to go faster. There is never enough time between sessions with a special driver, because they are always expanding on what can be found.

Days fly by with drivers who are wired all day, you get into a kind of flow state and before you know it the day is finished, you are top of the time sheets yet still wound up that there are 2 tenths missing from what you feel can be done.

That’s the ideal. The driver is fully engaged in the process of finding more speed and using everyone around them to drag even more time out of the kart and themselves.

Notice, its the driver doing the ‘using’, i.e. it’s the driver driving the process.

It also depends on the people around the driver believing there is potential in the driver, and the will to manifest it. Occasionally I’ve seen those kinds of drivers wilt in the wrong atmosphere, but that’s another story (that ends with find another team!).

The opposite to this is where a driver is having to be geed up all the time by the team, family or mechanic. Instead of the driver’s enthusiasm and obsession with finding time and pestering everyone around them, the team is asking them questions.

If the team is having to ask you questions about the kart BEFORE you start talking about the kart in detail, or the team finds something in the data and has to come find you to show you, then you are on the back foot.

In this scenario, your team is having to inject energy into the process of going faster, and they will run out of energy pretty quickly. The result is all round mediocrity.

So if you are on your phone slouched in a camping chair, either happy that the kart is good enough or that someone else will sort the problem for you, and just waiting for the next run (which describes the vast majority of the grid, then you will be fairly mediocre.

If you want to excel then you need to find a way out of this kind of slump. That’s harder than ever because everyone is doing the same - i.e. looking at their phone all day - so you won’t be surrounded by great examples of intense focus and all day long striving for speed.

How to get yourself keyed-up and hyper-focussed between sessions