It was a warm, sunny day at the Canadian Tire Motorsport Park Driver Development Track (CTMP DDT) located in Bowmanville, Ontario. I put on my helmet and turned on the engine to line up for the next session. It had been a day filled with struggle to find lap times as I pushed my old tires to its limit. For the last session of the day, I decided to take it easy, enjoy the ride, and bring the car back home in one piece. While I was going through the motions, something mysterious happened. I was putting in my best lap times of the day – lap after lap. I could feel that I was using every bit of grip and every inch of the track. In the end, I went a full second faster than my previous fastest lap. How did this happen?
Mental model of the driving task
As unusual as this might seem, this phenomenon has happened to me on multiple occasions. Let’s start from the beginning and examine how a novice driver would learn to drive on a track. If you have never tracked before, I highly recommend signing up to a lapping day organized by groups like SPDA (for folks in the GTA) or driving schools that offer coaches. The coaches will tell you about basic physics of tire grip, driving etiquette, and the racing line1. Once on track, the novice driver will spend all their attention on following the basic rulebook of braking and turn-in points.
Over time, drivers will be able to spend less attention on the basic tasks of tackling one corner at a time and divert their attention to other tasks like being aware of other drivers on track, analyzing their driving, and understanding the car’s performance. The progression is nicely laid out a series of articles2 by Warren Chamberlain that sparked this topic. The specifics of analyzing and improving your driving is a separate topic I may tackle at a future date. ‘The Perfect Corner'3 and its companion books are an excellent read if you’re interested in learning about the physics of driving fast.
The intuitive driver
How do fast drivers think about braking points, turn-in points, heel-and-toe downshifts, changing track conditions, tire degradation, adjusting to subtle mistakes in corner entry, tire slip, understeer/oversteer, and other drivers on track - all at the same time? The answer is System 1 thinking. As described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow4, System 1 is fast, intuitive, unconscious thought. Through experience and simulated experience, the brain is able to model and automate the task of track driving. It is able to take in large amounts of data and react quickly to incoming information.
This skill is not limited to the best drivers in the world. Driving on an empty road is a task where most people are not actively thinking about controlling the steering wheel or the pedal inputs. The car becomes an extension of your body and you are on auto-pilot. For expert track drivers, this is what it feels like to drive on track – except you are on the edge of grip pulling over 1.3 lateral Gs for road cars on sticky tires or up to 6 G in a Formula One car.
Beyond quick reactions, skilled drivers are able to confidently predict the car’s behaviour faster than novice drivers. As I coached novice drivers from the passenger seat, I have been in situations where they carried too much or too little speed into the corner, risking our safety or worse – losing lap times. It is not uncommon for me to be aware of what’s about to happen 1-2 seconds before the driver is but I couldn’t explain to you exactly why I knew – I just did.
System 1 vs. System 2
Chamberlain points out that some activities like hard braking are very sensitive to timing which require conscious effort. At race speeds, you may miss the apex if you braked one hundredth of a second too late5. There are other aspects of track driving such as awareness of other drivers on the track and driving analysis that also require conscious thought. However, System 1 and 2 cannot be active at the same time.
This means that drivers need to switch between the intuitive and focused modes to leverage them when needed. Chamberlain asserts that expert drivers are able to use the focused/analytical (System 2) only when it’s absolutely needed (e.g. hard braking and primary turn-in) and it’s a gradual shift to using less and less System 2. I disagree with Chamberlain that the journey is monotonic. My journey for finding speed involved me going too far on the intuitive-analytical spectrum.
Since my early days of track driving, I had little trouble letting my System 1 take the reigns. However, I had (and still have) issues timing the hard braking and turn-in points because I’m on auto-pilot. Perhaps I’m a rare breed (empirical data seems to support this) but some people may be predisposed to running one system over the other. To Chamberlain’s point, I believe that the fastest drivers are able to effectively switch between the two Systems when needed.
The 85% rule
During his Tim Ferriss podcast episode6, Hugh Jackman explained that
“If you tell most […] A-type athletes to run at their 85 percent capacity, they will run faster than if you tell them to run 100 because it’s more about relaxation and form and optimizing the muscles in the right way.”I believe a similar approach is needed for track driving. If you are trying too hard to set the fastest lap times, you will often overdrive the car and end up going slower. Relaxing will allow your System 1 to step in easier and make the driving much smoother. And as all racing drivers will tell you, smooth is fast.
1Warren Chamberlain. “Learning Stages”. Speed Craft, http://www.intuitivespeed.com/learning/learning-stages/, accessed November 11, 2020
2The racing line is the fastest path for a car to take around a track
3Brouillard, A. The Perfect Corner: A Driver's Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Their Own Optimal Line Through the Physics of Racing. Paradigm Shift Motorsport Books, 2016.
4Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
5Even at moderate corner entry speeds of 150 km/h, you will be nearly half a meter further along if you brake one hundredth of a second later. This is about a mile off for track drivers.
6Tim Ferriss. The Tim Ferriss Show, https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, accessed November 16, 2020