Mind Games
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 11:27AM
Bit late with the blog today, lots of interesting stuff going on, and hopefully one day I will get to design and build a track! Singapore is still alive, Arizona has a life of its own and has since it surfaced, and San Antonio is still trying to work out how to get the cost right. Had an e-mail out of the blue this morning for an interview about the Adelaide F1 track! I'll let you know when that is going to be published, but it is the best motor sport magazine and a rare honor. Seems like I am a 25 year overnight success!
Mark Webber has signed a one year extension to his Red Bull contract as expected, so it looks like the music has stopped and the seats are full for next year, in the top teams at least. I talked about Mark's mental strength and how that is the difference between any Champion and just plain talent. I love motor racing in particular, as I found even at the level I competed at it teaches you so much about yourself and how the mind works. I have said here before, there is a huge difference between racing and driving fast, and that is all in the mind and how you can divorce the driving from the strategy.
Now we all should know we have two sides to our brain, creative/imaginative and the rational, and how we balance those makes us who we are I guess. When racing I found out that both sides work at the same time and a "conversation" is going on while some other piece is doing the actual driving. When you get to a particularly difficult looking piece of the track your imaginative side is telling you to slow down, don't like the look of this, too fast. The rational is saying "now look, we went round here at 3500 revs last time, so let's try 3600." Or on a bad blind crest I remember the logical part saying to the other "turn left, it turned left last time dummy, so turn left." Your right foot is oscillating between the two, "make your mind up." Fascinating. This is only part of it of course, there is also the way the brain learns to cope with increasing speed, the ability to process data, sights and sounds, learn braking and turn in points, who is quick where and where are you quicker, how to get a run on them etc.
There was a nice piece in Autosport a few weeks ago prior to the Monaco GP on how to master the place. Of course it included reference to Senna's famous "out of body" experience during practice, lapping 1.5 seconds quicker than Prost in the same car. Mind games of course, but not to be dismissed. I am no Senna, but my best win came at Winton, a great club track in Australia, on a day the rain fell from the sky and never stopped. I told myself to drive the car as fast as I could, and if someone was able to go quicker then so be it. I resigned myself to being totally wet and ignored the rain. I qualified on the front row, the flag fell and I never saw anyone again all race except to lap. I do not know if it was what Senna was feeling, but the track was terrible, standing water everywhere, and I felt as if a part of me was being projected through the eye slot in my full face helmet and "feeling" the road in front so I knew what the grip level would be. Spooky eh?
Several other F1 drivers in the article talk about special races like that. I guess it is an ability to achieve a level of concentration so utterly complete that nothing else matters, not even your concious self. What if we could capture that in our life more often, what could we achieve?
On a completely different note, now you all think Barnard has lost it, the IRL must be using the same PR agency as Red Bull and BP Oil. After the total debacle trying to rescue the driver and put out a fire during last weekend's IRL race from Texas, and if you have not seen it go on YouTube, you would think they would come out and say "sorry about that but we will totally review our emergency planning, rewrite our response procedures, recheck all our equipment, and retrain all of our response team to ensure this never happens again." But no, we got "we will check that hose to find out why it did not work, and we have the best response teams in the business." Really? Well we all saw how "world class" they were for ourselves.
Mark Webber has signed a one year extension to his Red Bull contract as expected, so it looks like the music has stopped and the seats are full for next year, in the top teams at least. I talked about Mark's mental strength and how that is the difference between any Champion and just plain talent. I love motor racing in particular, as I found even at the level I competed at it teaches you so much about yourself and how the mind works. I have said here before, there is a huge difference between racing and driving fast, and that is all in the mind and how you can divorce the driving from the strategy.
Now we all should know we have two sides to our brain, creative/imaginative and the rational, and how we balance those makes us who we are I guess. When racing I found out that both sides work at the same time and a "conversation" is going on while some other piece is doing the actual driving. When you get to a particularly difficult looking piece of the track your imaginative side is telling you to slow down, don't like the look of this, too fast. The rational is saying "now look, we went round here at 3500 revs last time, so let's try 3600." Or on a bad blind crest I remember the logical part saying to the other "turn left, it turned left last time dummy, so turn left." Your right foot is oscillating between the two, "make your mind up." Fascinating. This is only part of it of course, there is also the way the brain learns to cope with increasing speed, the ability to process data, sights and sounds, learn braking and turn in points, who is quick where and where are you quicker, how to get a run on them etc.
There was a nice piece in Autosport a few weeks ago prior to the Monaco GP on how to master the place. Of course it included reference to Senna's famous "out of body" experience during practice, lapping 1.5 seconds quicker than Prost in the same car. Mind games of course, but not to be dismissed. I am no Senna, but my best win came at Winton, a great club track in Australia, on a day the rain fell from the sky and never stopped. I told myself to drive the car as fast as I could, and if someone was able to go quicker then so be it. I resigned myself to being totally wet and ignored the rain. I qualified on the front row, the flag fell and I never saw anyone again all race except to lap. I do not know if it was what Senna was feeling, but the track was terrible, standing water everywhere, and I felt as if a part of me was being projected through the eye slot in my full face helmet and "feeling" the road in front so I knew what the grip level would be. Spooky eh?
Several other F1 drivers in the article talk about special races like that. I guess it is an ability to achieve a level of concentration so utterly complete that nothing else matters, not even your concious self. What if we could capture that in our life more often, what could we achieve?
On a completely different note, now you all think Barnard has lost it, the IRL must be using the same PR agency as Red Bull and BP Oil. After the total debacle trying to rescue the driver and put out a fire during last weekend's IRL race from Texas, and if you have not seen it go on YouTube, you would think they would come out and say "sorry about that but we will totally review our emergency planning, rewrite our response procedures, recheck all our equipment, and retrain all of our response team to ensure this never happens again." But no, we got "we will check that hose to find out why it did not work, and we have the best response teams in the business." Really? Well we all saw how "world class" they were for ourselves.
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