The Basics of Driving A Race Car Fast
After spending a lifetime driving as fast as possible for a living as well as operating a racing school for the past several years, I guess I am qualified to provide my opinion on this.
Technique
We spend a lot of time in our school ensuring that our drivers learn the importance of technique in all aspects of driving the car. Like most other sporting endeavors, if you don’t acquire the fundamental skills right away you will develop bad habits that will be harder to change later on. However drivers that come to our schools have already learned the basic skills, it is our job to improve upon those, identifying and assist in breaking any bad habits that have already occurred.
One thing that I have noted is how some drivers methodically try to learn the techniques that we teach, however later in the programs when they want to drive fast they forget all of the basics that we’ve been teaching and simply try to go fast. Obviously this strategy is usually short-lived as the car usually ends up stopped and facing backwards on the racetrack!
Lesson One: Never forget to implement the basic skills that we teach (such as rev matching) when you are trying to go fast! Work on DRIVING WELL – not driving fast. Learning how to make the racecar do the work properly is the ONLY way that you will ever go fast.
