One of the numerous self help authors (I forget which one) once said that your goals need to be achievable and realistic else they tend to cause anxiety and depression. The depression I guess is owing to the continual missing of said unrealistic goals.
I tend to have many small goals that get modified as things change or they are achieved. One such goal was to have brakes that were up to the demands of racing. A goal that was recently achieved by Craig. A second goals was to not arrive at the next race meeting with untested brakes. Another one that was recently achieved.
A third goals was to go faster. We are talking lap times here, not outright speed. This too was recently achieved.
Bit of a bumper week when it comes to achieving goals you might say.
Here's what happened.
Craig, been the jolly nice chap that he is, offered to spread some of his considerable racing skill and experience around by taking us on track for one on one training sessions in our cars. The plan was to book the track for a couple of hours. He would then set a bench mark time in our cars with us as passengers. We would watch closely the lines and driving style during the benchmarking and then spend some time trying to emulate this on our own. He would later check back with us, this time as a passenger, to see how we were progressing.
I was first up. My brakes had finally been sorted and this would be the first real speed test. We strapped in and Craig caressed and slid my car around the track to yield a number of 1:24 laps culminating in a 1:23.646. A time that would have car and driver bumped up to Class C had this been a race day. Luckily in race conditions one seldom has the entire track to oneself and times like these are unlikely...hopefully. Anyway, it was Craig driving not me, so I was worried little.
Now it was my turn. I had been furiously taking mental notes as I watched Craig driving. First off, he was braking much later than I had been. I put this down to the now much improved brakes. Possibly more telling was that he was driving the entire track in a higher gear than I usually do. Where I had been hooking third to take corners, he was staying in fourth. This resulted in less gear changes and, significantly, less power induced oversteer out of corners. The torque of the V8 combined with the relative lightness of the car made this approach both smooth and quick.
I was keen to try.
It took a couple of laps to get used to not changing gears as I had before and then a few more laps to get used to the fact that the brakes now actually stopped the car pretty well. I was braking later and later into the scary turn 5 at the end of the back straight. It was time to push the limits.
Pushing the limits in a race car results in a somewhat predictable outcome. You tend to spin. Craig had told us to find the limit then dial it back to 99.95%. Percentages have never been my strong suite.
I did manage to find the limit, three times actually. Twice in turn 1 and once in the notoriously difficult (for me anyway) turn 2. This is all part of the process, however.
It was the best fun I had had in the car to date. I could dive into corners with confidence and slide the car out the other side with ease now that I was not over powering the rear wheels with too low a gear. The laps were feeling quick, if maybe a bit inconsistent.
Pulling into the pits to let driver and car cool down a bit produced an opportunity to check the laps times. I have a nice little bit of software that runs on my phone and connects to a high accuracy external GPS mounted on the roll bar. You start the software up and put the phone in your pocket. It then times each lap as well as eleven sectors I have setup around the track. It's very accurate, coming to within one hundredth of a second of the official lap timing transponders we use on race day.
My times proved to be both surprising and erratic. The erratic part was understandable given all the "finding the limits" I was doing. The surprising bit was, well, surprising. Amongst the 1:30's and other assorted spin induced slow laps were a number of 1:24's. I was suitably chuffed. But then there was one that stood out. The software actually highlights it in green so that you don't miss it. It was a 1:23.493. Faster than the bench mark Craig had set.
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| Results of training day |
Which kind of brings us to the whole goal thing again. One of the goals that was achieved on the day was the going faster one. I had a goal of doing 1:25's in the car by the end of the season. I had maybe underestimated the car's abilities somewhat. A 1:23 was pretty much a shattering of said goal.
Of course, this kind of goal is an ongoing one and needs to be re-calibrated when its met. But what was next?
Well, this was made fairly easy by my nifty bit of software. It has a feature that calculates a best theoretical lap by adding together all the best sector times from all the laps to create a "perfect" lap from the session.
This time is displayed with a T next to it. If you have not already glanced up at the screen shot above, I can tell you that the next goal in the "going faster" category is 1:21.401.
To put this in perspective, that's near the top end of Class C. A somewhat rarified space normally populated by racing machinery of german descent.
That's a little scary, but testimony to the level of car that Craig has built.
Of course this is all much easier to achieve when one has the racetrack all to oneself and lots of laps at hand. Our races are only ten laps and are pretty busy in the Class D bit of the field.
We race on the 5th May. Tune in thereafter to see if any of this transfers to the actual race environment. I'm really hoping it will, but then I don't really want to break out of Class D just yet. Fine line? Maybe, maybe not. At least I now know where the problem lies if I fail to achieve this particular goal.
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