Drivers Who Listen, Drivers Who Don't
(24 February 2011)
In any sport that a potential competitor wishes to take part in on a long-term and possibly career basis, the first sensible move is to employ a coach. The latter's task is to teach their client the techniques required to allow that person to make maximum use of their own personal physical potential and ability, and also those of any tools that they are required to use.
In most sports, this has always been seen as an automatic necessity, but in motor racing the attitude has always been rather different in that it is so often regarded as an embarrassment.
Coaching a race driver, as a journalist once described it, is more akin to ego management. In my experience this attitude is not entirely the fault of the driver, since it permeates through the whole sport in the shape of many team owners and engineers. I know of one famous F1 team principal who is alleged to have said that he would never employ a driver who had been coached. Nevertheless, he had in fact had four very talented drivers over the years who had taken advice from me.
There are few other sports in which a competitor has to compete with such a complicated piece of machinery as a modern racing car. The problem is that even in the top echelons of motor sport, while the ability of the designers, engineers, mechanics, and every member of the staff is of the highest possible calibre, the driver in my experience can be the one variable and unreliable part of the equation in terms of technical knowledge, ability and performance.
The main driver support at the moment appears to be an army of earnest young men poring over lap tops and telemetry information (see previous column, Telemetry And The Race Driver). The trouble is that if there is a problem, one can only compare it with telemetry from another driver who also might not be employing the best technique. Of course it can tell you what the car is doing, but unfortunately it can’t tell you why.
The only way is to spend time on a circuit with a driver working on his technique. If one knows what to do, it is very easy to get an immediate result. I have recently seen a very impressive-looking new coaching system which covers over thirty different disciplines. At whatever level the driver, I would have thought that, with regard to maximising the driver's performance, five would be quite enough.
So let us see how coaching works out in practice and the problems one can encounter by comparing the progress of four drivers, three at the same circuit.
Driver 1, who raced in Formula 3, had had instruction before I met him, allegedly from a coach who stood at different parts of the circuit to watch him through the corners. This was apparently the preferred method by his team. I spent a day with him and found that he had no real idea how to work out the lines on a circuit, presumably because his previous "coach" had similar limitations.
We spent the day working on his technique and then the racing lines, using a front-wheel drive car. At the beginning of the day I first asked him to take the lines that he had been taught before once he was used to the car. By the end of the day he was 8.2 seconds faster, which was normally what I would have expected.
However, he did not improve at all at the race the following weekend. As he told me afterwards, his team told him that the coaching I had given was completely wrong, as were the lines. I looked at his results for the next year, and he was still running at the back end of the field.
Driver 2 raced in Formula Palmer Audi, using a very similar type of racing car to the Formula 3 one. We spent only half a day at the same circuit, again with a fwd saloon car, and in addition three other circuits. At the same time I also did an afternoon's coaching with a friend of his, Driver 3, at the same track and who was also in the same championship, by using a large front-wheel drive estate car, in exactly the same manner.
At the race meeting they both broke the lap record, Driver 2 being the faster of the two and also the race winner. Later I coached Driver 2 at three more circuits, where he had two more wins and two more lap records.
I was asked to coach Driver 4 on the Silverstone GP circuit in preparation for a Formula 3000 race at the same track. He had been dropped from his team in the same class the year before for lack of results.
We spent a morning at Silverstone in an old Ford Mondeo. In the race I was told he qualified on pole on his first flying lap, and won the race by 5 seconds. I never worked with him again, and he never achieved the same result in the Formula. I was also asked to assist his team-mate, a young driver of 18, who the team told me had never qualified higher than 27th. He was sixth in qualifying for the race, and finished eighth.
