For the third and final installment of the Winter Warm-Up, we’re focusing on lap times. Or, more accurately, how you should NOT be focusing on your lap times!
As you work on your driving skills, you’ll start to see an improvement in your lap times. Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted by that, using it as the measure of your success. If you focus only on your lap times, you will forget to focus on building good habits and begin to overdrive in an effort to bring down your lap time. Instead, you should be focused on how the car is behaving, your confidence, and your general speed increase. If you measure your success by those factors, then the lower lap times will come.
Rather than worrying about a complete lap, you can break down the track into sectors during your data review. Focus on a particular sector and establish improvement there, then move on to the next sector. Then, when you add it all up, you’ll have your lower lap time. This way, you tackle things in small portions, so it’s easier to make improvement. You can focus on attainable goals that will create consistency in your driving.
Focus on the process – not the end result! If you focus on the process, you will create a repeatable system for achieving consistently lower lap times. You want to build good habits.
It is always fun at the end of an event to see how much you’ve improved your lap times – and for me, it’s great to see my clients’ improvements after a weekend of coaching. Ultimately, though, it comes back to remembering what you did to get to that lap time and focusing on those things.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this trio of Winter Warm-Up driving tips over the past month! Tweet or comment on Facebook with any questions or comments you might have about these tips. I’m already looking forward to the upcoming season, and if you’re looking for more insight into your own driving skills, contact me about trackside coaching in 2016.