Optimum Drive. Paul F. Gerrard

much more concerned with everything because they have to take the time to rationalize and mitigate the risk along the way to progress. No “leaps of faith” here. Not very exciting, especially in the formative years, but they steadily grow and can end up being as fast (and seeming as “fearless”) as anyone else. They have crashed a lot less cars along the way, but have had a hard time getting sponsorship, so they were probably self-funded for the long ride to the top (as a paid pro). Most don’t have the financial wherewithal to make it to the top, and many more actually can’t get over the fear to be able to be truly fast. In other words, it’s tough for anyone, there is no defined and set path; we are all unique in our struggle for greatness.

      Then there are the select few that become true greats. A level above the best that somehow goes above what the very best 10% or 90% could ever achieve, what would that take? Obviously, it is incredibly rare, this is Bernt Rosemeyer, Tazio Nuvolari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Sterling Moss, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Jimmy Clark, Dan Gurney, AJ Foyt, Mario Andretti, Jackie Stewart, Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Michael Shumacher, Sebastian Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Loeb, and on a motorcycle, Valentino Rossi.

      As you might imagine, they have somehow fully developed the positive traits of both the “brave” camp and the “methodical” camp and become analytical adrenaline junkies. They started one way by nature but developed skills that were at first unnatural to them. They became complete drivers. They don’t just climb out of the car, throw their helmet to the ground, and proclaim “the car is sheet!” (a foreign accent really helps here!) and they never waste precious laps getting up to speed. They are confidently “on it” and hyper aware at all times in the car or in the paddock. The point is, no matter how good you become as a natural 10% or 90% driver, you can never be great without building step by agonizing step the same level of proficiency on the other side.

      For example, let’s say someone is the worlds’ best 10% person but never developed the methodical thinking side. That would mean speed comes relatively easy, and therefore that person may not naturally be very hard working in a relative sense. It’s like someone who is good at visualizing math, so they can skip doing the homework and still get B’s. They wouldn’t develop the mindset to analyze and to learn the car so that they understand speed from the team engineer’s perspective. They think the car’s speed is not their problem; it becomes an unproductively polarized us vs. them atmosphere within their team. No one wins.

      The real defining characteristic of a championship effort is efficient communication between the team engineers and the driver. You can buy the best car and have the best mechanics, engineers, and drivers, but if those entities that make up “a team” don’t take action or communicate efficiently, then they simply will not be able to win consistently or perhaps at all. No joke, almost all pro teams even up to F1 have some form of this dysfunction, it is everywhere. It takes humbleness, intelligence, patience, money, and a large dose of serendipity to put the magic combination together, yet if it is ever achieved, it is unstoppable because it is likely that they are the only team operating at that efficiency level in the entire paddock.

      This holistic approach really works, whether you’re a one-person operation club racing or auto crossing or driving F1. On every level of Motorsports greatness can and does exist; this is a very reassuring truth. Don’t worry, I’m not contradicting myself, it does occur in club racing, it just doesn’t usually stay, as I earlier stated.

      You might ask yourself, “why doesn’t every driver strive to become more complete?” This all seems like common sense, right? Well, again, it falls back to human nature. We don’t really associate being more complete with the goal, we strive to be better. They are two distinct paradigms. Let me explain…

      It comes from us and other people throughout our lives trying to continuously categorize us, we end up telling ourselves, “I’m good at this” and “I’m not very good at that” throughout our whole lives. We usually do this quite superficially without much real analysis. Think… a whole life of this.

      A fun aside to this is how wrong we can be about our REAL strengths and weaknesses: because we don’t really think about all the reasons why this “thing” rubbed us the wrong way. An easy example could be from school, you might be the next Albert Einstein, but because you had a string of bad teachers in math and physics you never developed that love for something that unbeknownst to you, you could have been brilliant at. You’ll go your whole life intentionally avoiding anything that even mildly sounds anything like science, always steering away from it. If anyone asks, you genuinely believe you’re not good at it, and as you say that you believe that, you make it true (perception is reality) … and you’re completely wrong.

      So, we end up with two columns, stuff we think we’re good at and stuff we think we’re not good at. It’s not quite as black and white as that, but for the sake of making a point, let’s pretend it’s absolute. So, we have two lists, and what our ego does next is discard/bury the negative list so we can feel good about ourselves. Now we want to make ourselves “better”; what do you think we work on? We should go straight to the top of our weakness list, but we don’t – we can’t even find it! – we go straight to our strengths, making us even more out of balance as a driver. We hate dealing with our weaknesses and would rather spend time hanging out where our fragile precious egos are happy (stay positive right?) …keep building those strengths and watch how you plateau as a driver no matter how hard you try. This relates to what I mentioned earlier as a warning about how we naturally filter what we are learning to emphasize what our egos find acceptable. All of it done without a single conscious thought.

      We all have to work if we want to be great, and working hard and having gritty determination means we are willing to charge at full speed headfirst at our grimmest, most buried fears. If we spend our time focused on eradicating weaknesses, we get amazing efficient return on our time. If we keep hammering at our strengths, we only eke out tiny gains, due to the law of diminishing returns. We think that it for us, I’ve reached my potential because I’ve gone as far as I can with my strengths and developed my best possible work-arounds for my weaknesses… that’s as good as I can ever be, right? Do you see how flawed our natural logic is?

      You see, “great” driving is not consistently sustainable, just like great anything else. Everybody has slumps due to the complexity of greatness. You are dealing with so many factors, from team dynamics to how good the car is that year to your own house being in order. Each of these items individually is fantastically complex on its own; having them all in order is rare, but when you manage to align them…wow. The drivers listed above managed to consistently slip into greatness, which takes amazing composure and complete dedication. They are the type of people who would excel at anything they had tried, because they had nailed down the process of greatness to such an extent that it all became second nature to them; then the puzzle was solved, the mystery revealed.