I learned so much about driving yesterday at the Porsche Club of America’s High Performance Driver’s Education track day at the Portland International Raceway!
Many thanks to my instructor for the day, Joseph Gilmore. (Not to mention the two photographers prowling around who captured these shots.) The number of things I need to improve is pretty much limitless, but highlights include working on improving the smoothness of my inputs (all of ’em: steering but especially throttle & brake) and squaring the corners (meaning late apexes plus tracking out).
I’m reading a good book called “Mental Strategies to Maximize Your Racing Performance” by Russ Benton & Ronn Langford, which includes this pertinent quote from Stirling Moss: “Motor racing is an art, although not recognized as such by the followers of ballet, music and so on. Nevertheless, to me, watching Fangio drifting round a corner is as exhilarating as seeing a Pavlova executing a graceful pirouette. Being an art one can never finish learning. It may be possible to reach the maximum speed round a given corner in a given car, but there are thousands of corners and many cars, as well as varying surfaces and conditions. This impossibility of reaching perfection gives one much scope for improvement. I always feel that motor racing is rather like chasing the rainbow’s end, for the more one learns or the nearer one gets to the end, the further it draws away. It is this ever-disappearing goal which one strives for that makes it the most fascinating of all sports.”
Being my only sport these days, I heartily concur! Please let me know if you want to try it out for yourself, & I’ll see what I can do to help get you started.
You are so awesome.
Moss was a thinking person’s driver — beautiful to watch and to listen to. Fangio was incredible — in his day and when my Dad and I saw him do several solo commemoration laps at speed at Laguna Seca in the early ’90s when Fangio was in his 80s — thundering in the straightaways and doing his signature drifts in a very big and very loud Mercedes Museum Rennsport of some kind from about the late ’30s. There’s a great picture of Moss and Fangio competing in the ’50s, at http://www.tamsoldracecarsite.net/MercedesBenzatLagunaSeca.html
Squaring the corners is a funny way to look at it, but maybe it makes sense to you the way it somehow did to me. Geometrically, the line is about maximizing the radius of your overall turn. But you have to squarely define your definition of the turn.