Chapter 1
Perhaps surprisingly, professional drivers are often lousy coaches. First, they usually hate riding with people, and second, many truly can’t remember why they are fast! It’s a funny thing, but when you do it for so long and have had every step in the process ingrained for what seems like your whole life, you really genuinely have trouble remembering what you do while you’re driving. You see this in interviews some times when they are asked about some move or moment in the race, and they really have no recall of that defining moment, because it was all done subconsciously. These drivers start getting a bit paranoid after a while, and you can see it manifest in superstitions. Some top drivers are very superstitious.
That makes the whole driver training game quite tricky from the students’ perspective, because the actual teaching ability of a driver has little to do with their track record. Make no mistake, you want a pro-level driver to teach you, even from day one, but they have to be as adept and accomplished at teaching as at driving to really be worth their sometimes very high daily rates. That means that while it’s great to have your driving ingrained to a subconscious level (and we will spend a great deal of time on this very topic), you also need a driver/coach who maintains a high level of awareness during their driving so they can articulate what they do and relate that to what you are currently doing.
With my positions at the racing schools, I have been right in the middle of it all and have had a lot of experience with this for many years now, I’ve had to take these drivers. assess them on their teaching and driving ability, and design and facilitate instructor training sessions for them. Huge fun, racing drivers are if anything really fun people. We realize we have been gifted a really lucky existence; yes, we’d rather be in an F1 car right now, but still, compared to most this life is still a dream come true.
So how many are there? Well, in the U.S. I have contact info for about 400 pro drivers that also at least dabble in coaching. I would say 150 do it for a living to supplement their racing, and about 40 are really gifted drivers and teachers. Not coincidently, we are all pretty close friends off the track (but fierce competitors on the track). The two things that differentiate the good ones are caring about the individual student progressing and knowing what qualities and processes made them fast in the first place. Now, this may seem like an obvious trait of any good teacher in any field, but due to the ridiculously competitive combative environment on and off the track, racecar drivers tend to be very self-centered, even slightly paranoid people, especially from the middle of the pro ranks, which is where most of us spend nearly our entire careers. Once they are on top, some manage to relax a little. The rest of the time you are fighting tooth and nail for the finite number of seats available. Not a very conducive environment for openness about one’s technique. So, in most cases, racing drivers don’t naturally make great instructors, which creates high demand for the few who are driving coaches.
This is all just basic human nature born out of the racing environment. In my travels as a coach, I have had the pleasure of dealing with many people from other industries, and they all behave exactly the same way (again, human nature being what it is); from Hollywood to military Special Forces to pro athletes to captains of industry, the same exact behavioral patterns emerge. If you think about it, the very (human) nature of competition does not have “sharing” very high up on the priorities list. In general, professional motorsports, while seemingly friendly on the outside, are nothing short of a fierce battleground in reality.
I’ll be honest, most pro racers are driving instructors because they have no other way of making a living with their oddball skill set – maybe becoming a getaway driver is the other option? They are not instructors because they love to teach but because they have to teach to pay the bills. It is unfortunately just a job to those guys, and they obviously won’t make good coaches. So, you might think on the other hand you could go with the super enthusiastic club racing and amateur racing driver/instructor. They are so happy to have the honor of being club instructor and being thought of in that exalted light; the problem is the level of training is all over the map with these guys and is at best usually just mediocre. The truth is, if they were really great drivers (and make no mistake, you want to be taught by a great driver), they would not be there in the first place, they would have naturally graduated into the pro ranks. I have probably made myself a bit unpopular with this paragraph, but the truth needs to see the light of day here. (Truth: it’s kind of’ the theme of the book!)
A question I hear quite a bit is, “Should I spend the money and go to a pro racing school or just go to a club school for initial training?” The thought is that you can get the initial stuff out of the way more cheaply with the club guys, get in some lapping days, maybe do a few club races to assess, and get your feet wet, THEN go to the pro school to refine your technique.
Let me be very clear here, those people are the worst, most difficult students at the pro school. In the perhaps short time they have been on the track, they have developed a pro+ level ego, along with more bad habits than you can ever hope to be rid of in a lifetime, let alone in the three days you have them at the pro school (even if they could put their ego aside). Again, this is not a slam at any well-meaning groups. This is the reality of my 20+ years of experience in the industry. The clubs can’t really help it. They simply are victims of the natural order of things. Anytime a real talent emerges at the club level (and it does happen), they quickly want to see how they compare with the big boys and they head for pro racing, it’s the natural order. That means that some very well-meaning, nice folks that have fun driving, racing, coaching, and creating a really nice environment are left behind. If you like, it’s a little automotive Disneyland, a great place to spend a weekend with like-minded people who love a brand of car and using it on the track etc.
The club folk relative to the pro ranks remind me of the Olympics. You watch the opening ceremonies and see the countries proudly march into the stadium with their flags, and the differences are striking between the contingents from the large countries to those from the small. You have these tiny countries that show up with their basketball team, for example. Their most exalted national heroes, the best of the best in their tiny country.
In round one, due to the seeding they face the U.S.A. and the Dream Team and get slaughtered. I mean, we all love an underdog, and in the Olympics, it can happen, and it’s amazing when it does. I like “Cool Runnings” as much as the next person, but the reality is more predictable and tends to follow the natural order of things. The order of things and the empathy, precision, and nuance that is required to take a student on day one and move them forward, with the instructor able to read, react, and anticipate exactly what the student needs next, not too much and not too little, in a language they understand with verbiage they can relate to… that is what it takes to make sure you as a student are fully engaged in the process… captivated is a good word. You will find the right people at a true pro school such as Jim Russell (now called Simraceway), Skip Barber, Bob Bondurant, etc. If you really ask around, you can also find independent professional coaches that meet the necessary strict criteria detailed above.
As an example, I was hired by some guys who had hired a much more accomplished and expensive driver as their dream celebrity coach before coming to me. They brought me in because he had crushed all of them by telling them that they were terrible and giving no instruction and/or coaching. He would actually take out the owner’s manual to their cars and start reading them when they’d go out on the track to figure out if he wanted to buy one of their cars next (they all were quite wealthy and had very desirable cars), and then instead of feedback at the end of the session, he’d ask them about their cars! All of those guys were pretty darn good by the way.
If at the end of your journey you end up club racing, that’s fine. It feels plenty good being on the best team in a little country, but this book is not about that level, it is about striving for greatness; it is about sometimes having to be uncomfortably blunt with you because your time is precious. This field is hard enough without going down a wrong