Grassroots Motorsports
Issue link: http://grassrootsmotorsports.epubxp.com/i/501675
Grassroots Motorsports 82 2. Do More Mental Practice Stretching the mind prior to action raises confdence: With your eyes closed, replay the course exactly as you intend to drive it. Imagine perfect laps until they become fuid. Mentally rotate the steering wheel, shift gears and brake at appropri- ate locations. Fine skills and complex techniques can be slowed down and ana- lyzed so that the scenes and actions become familiar. The brain makes little distinction between seen and imagined images. Building and continuously refning a mental track model is important for processing the abundance of real-time information gathered when increasing speed on track. The quality of your mental model is more important than your technical skills. 3. Practice Scanning Techniques Take a quick visual scan of the area in front of you. Start on your far left and scan across to your far right. Con- centrate on seeing everything between you and the outermost point. Briefy close your eyes and take a mental inventory of what you perceived. Repeat the scan. This time separate your scan into frames–mental snapshots. Compare the frst scan to the second, storyboarded images. Surprisingly, unnoticed details are now apparent. Practice behind the wheel of a street car, then in the track car at speed. Con- trasting track storyboarding with the familiar scenes in your mental model radically improves the odds of doing the right thing at the right time. 4. Point Your Eyes Farther Ahead Vision is your overwhelmingly domi- nant sense. Your eyes lead the way and control smoothness. Without proper visual perspective, lapping at high speeds can be like driving in a bank of fog, where planning ahead is unthink- able but critical. Looking ahead not only gets you where you need to be, it also focuses concentration. Of course, scanning at the point of emerging information is not enough. By the time you're aware of a mistake, it's too late to change it. Once it is accurately perceived and maintained, a well-internalized mental model of the track can be used to anticipate. Anticipation immunizes against accidents. FEATURE: DRIVING SELF-CRITIQUE headonphotos.net david s. wallens photos