Spiral to Speed Overview

What is the Spiral to Speed?

The spiral to speed is my attempt to identify and explain the CORE skills of intuitive driving.

I believe that there are only five CORE skills, which you can think of as either:

• Two primarily mental skills, one hybrid mental & physical/driving skill, and two primarily physical/driving skills
  OR
• One “support column’ skill and four ‘step’ skills

The following five CORE skills make up the spiral to speed:

1. Reducing the Sensation of Speed – mental skill (The spiral to speed’s central column)
   (Drivers who have not mastered this skill may be 8 to 10 seconds, or more, off the pace.)
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2. Increasing Sensitivity (to energy flow, loads, traction, and forces) – mental skill
   (Drivers who have not mastered this skill may be 6 to 8 seconds, or more, off the pace.)
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3. Getting the Tires on a Plane – hybrid mental & physical/driving skill
   (Drivers who have not mastered this skill may be 4 to 6 seconds, or more, off the pace.)
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4. Controlling the Polar Shift – physical/driving skill
   (Drivers who have not mastered this skill may be 2 to 4 seconds, or more, off the pace.)
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5. Driving a Trajectory on a Line – physical/driving skill
   (Drivers who have not mastered this skill may be 1 to 2 seconds, or more, off the pace.)

Of course, the lap time impact information is just a guess (based on observing drivers at ‘school’ races who all drive the equal equipment), but I’ve included it just to give you an idea of the ‘relative importance’ for each CORE skill.

I call it the spiral to speed because the learning process for racing is not a simple ‘learning curve’; it’s a much more complex spiral where the CORE skills are dependent upon each other and interact with each other. That is, instead of learning something and then moving beyond it (on up the learning curve), you will continually revisit all of the CORE skills; using things you have learned while advancing one CORE skill to refine and/or advance the other CORE skills.

There are also spirals within a spiral going on because there may be various sub-skills within a CORE skill that also behave like spirals. Examples of the sub-skills for CORE skill #2 Increasing Sensitivity include:

• Sensitivity to energy flow
• Sensitivity to tire loads
• Sensitivity to traction
• Sensitivity to forces acting on the car
• The ability to detect slip angles
• The ability to filter noise from sensory input
• The ability to anticipate any/all of these based on trends

For example, a sub-spiral might work like this. Let’s say you are reasonably good at sensing traction, and may have developed ‘quick hands’ that allow you to recover when the traction limit is exceeded. However, perhaps you are relatively less good at sensing energy flow or tire loading. Since these two are the precursors to traction (both are required to generate traction), further developing your sensitivity to them would allow you to predict when the traction limit is approaching. So instead of needing quick hands to recover, you will be able to defuse the situation by proactively managing the load on the tire that is approaching the limit.

CORE Skill #1 – Reducing the Sensation of Speed (SoS) is the most critical skill for ALL drivers because if a driver is experiencing an elevated SoS, then the other skills (even if they are well developed) will be severely impaired, or will not be available for use at all.

Therefore, you can think of the spiral to speed as a spiral staircase, with CORE Skill #1 as the central column that supports both the whole structure, and the steps that are used to climb the spiral (CORE Skills #2 – 5). However, no matter how advanced the other CORE skills may be, it’s the level (height if you will) of the central column that defines your spiral’s maximum height and therefore your maximum performance potential at any given time.

So, each time you advance an individual ‘step’ skill you must return to the “support column’ and refine/stretch it so that is can support further advancement for the ‘step’ skills. Also, as with all learning, the payoff of advancing up the spiral (improved performance / reduced lap times) become smaller and smaller; big advancements come early, while tiny incremental advancements continue forever (hopefully).

So, where did these five CORE skills come from?

Throughout my brief racing ‘career’ I had empirically learned lessons from my experience, and I had used those flashes of intuitive understanding to progress up the learning spiral. However, at the time, there was no way that I could have articulated what I had learned, and there was no way I could have identified the common threads running through the lessons. In short, I quickly became fast and consistent, but I was ignorant as to how or why.

After my unusual experiences provided the insights I needed to try and reverse engineer the core capabilities and systems of my brain (as they apply to racing), then I took that knowledge and revisited my most significant lessons in hopes of more clearly understanding what I had learned so that I could share that information.

I wanted to dig deep, to find the common threads, to strip away the noise and eliminate all of the techniques and methods that I might have used to get around the track, but that were not actually CORE skills.

Once the mental hacking and slashing was done, and the dust had settled in my brain, I was left with the five CORE skills. Even though the CORE skills came to me pretty quickly once I started looking for them in the mid 80s, I have revisited them many times over the past 30 years (after gaining additional racing experience and/or just as a general sanity check) to ensure that they are still relevant, and to verify that I haven’t missed anything critical. Other than minor tweaking, they remain today as I identified them in the mid 80s. I know that they are correct for me, and I believe that every fast (intuitive) driver has mastered these CORE skills either consciously or, more likely, unconsciously; but who knows… I could also be full of crap.

While I believe that the five CORE skills are the foundation of intuitive driving, they are just skills, nothing more or less, they only exist so that drivers can use them (combine them with his own creativity) to craft his own unique way of accomplish the paramount objective; getting around the track as quickly and consistently as possible.

Another important point is that while I am presenting the five CORE skills as discrete items, that’s only because in 30 years of trying, my tiny brain has been unable to discern any other way of presenting the information. However, know this, the skills are far from discrete; they overlap, interact and are interdependent. Also, mastering them will likely require knowledge that explains or supports the CORE skill, but is not necessarily itself a CORE skill. For example to effectively learn to reduce the sensation of speed, you may first need information about how the brain functions when processing information, or to learn how to control polar rotation in certain situations, you may need to know how camber changes affect traction, etc.

For each CORE skill, I will attempt to:

1. Describe what it is, how it feels, and why it’s important.
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2. Describe the skill’s relationships and interdependencies with, other CORE Skills.
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3. Describe the consequences of not improving a weakness in the skill.
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4. Describe, as clearly and accurately as possible how I perform the skill; including references to supplemental information when needed.