Yesterday and this past weekend, was a real-life race weekend and while it was all in all, a very successful weekend, it was exhausting! So exhausting that last night (Sunday), I was sound asleep by 9pm and it when the alarm went off at 5am this morning, I just couldn’t do it.
So my racing for the day didn’t happen until this evening, after a full day of work, being a dad and before dinner. Being so tired and having to jump immediately back into my day job, I didn’t even have time to think about what my goal should be today. So I just decided to start driving and see if and what would translate from my weekend of real world diving.
Holy crap – new personal best!
It was kind of weird, I just started driving and almost automatically, everything felt “normal”. It is not like I feel overwhelmed with the speed of the Mercedes AMG GT3 car, even though I’ve never driven anything like that type of car in real life but with how hard we drive the PRo3 cars and how physically demanding Pacific Raceways is, driving the AMG GT3 felt not as stressful.
The first few laps felt good and I was immediately able to get into the mid-1:20.xxx lap times but then, boom – 1:19.908! I was so startled that I was able to find this pace so quickly that I dropped a tire on the exit of turn 12, so it technically didn’t count. On the following lap, I was able to brake lighter and carry so much more speed into turn 1, that I found myself .25x seconds faster than my personal lap and… I crapped my pants and proceeded to spin out as I carried too much speed into Turn 3.
Calm down, breathe and carry on
As I mentioned yesterday, my main focus of the weekend was to brake earlier, lighter and have reduce my brake to throttle transition times to as short as possible. Trail brake and… throttle! No wasted time! So, that’s what I think carried forward and I think, just having more seat time with a high volume of information coming at my at a fast rate.
So I had crashed, exited the car, took a few steps to calm down and said “ok, just relax – I can clearly do a sub 1:20.000 lap time but just focus on the basics.”
It took me a few false starts where I was too excited and got in trouble but finally, I was able to put together a stint of 7, mostly clean laps where the low 1:20’s and then… two, clean, 1:19.xxx laps came through. YES!!!!!! 1:19.758 – new personal best!!!!!!
How did this happen? The shoes?
I have to admit – before this session, during and after, I did not look at data at all. Whatever caused this to happen was some cumulative effect of my training over the past 10 days and the intense and positive, real-world experience in racing I had the last few days. My best guess is the cumulative effect of repetition and “chunking” learning experiences – I’ve not only had racing on my mind each day for the past 10 days in terms of actually doing, but I’ve been thinking about it regularly throughout the day, the things I am working on and learning but I’ve also forced myself to think about my experiences and learning differently because of these articles and the videos I’ve recorded.
Someone smart once said that a way to truly ensure you understand something is to not just practice that thing but to teach it to other people. That process of explaining it to others, with a variety of analogies or other techniques, forces a deeper level of understanding and I think that has been helping.
I’m planning to write a blog post just on the skill of learning, based on these experiences and some books I’ve been reading about learning but if that isn’t what caused the improvement, maybe it was the shoes?