I've seen enough advanced drivers have basic problems. The first one is tension, which I already talked about in the introduction general guidelines module. The second one is probably vision. It's just not having that active looking out for information and understanding what is going through your view as you go into the corner.

You can have fast drivers that look super far away. You can have fast drivers that look super close. The problem is just not having an active vision that scans out for information. Seeing like small changes in curves, small changes in elevation, or figuring out where the references are, just having a very useful view of what's ahead of you is very important.

Understanding Vision in Motorsports

Vision is the most underrated skill in motorsports. But the one that will make absolutely everything else from the next lessons more doable. Every decision you make in motorsports depends on where you're looking at. All of them.

The Problem with Inactive Vision

With a bad vision, and by bad vision, I mean an inactive vision. You just don't know what information is getting in because you're not actively looking for something. This causes several problems:

• You're going to lose precision

• You're going to get completely lost when battling for position, especially if you are on the inside towards the next corner off the racing line where you don't have access to that single point that you were using before when you were actually on the race line

• You're going to have too much variance in your turn end points

• You generally turn in too late for the corners because your vision is kind of taking a nap for a fraction of a second

• By the time you realize that you have to turn in, it's already too late and that forces you to turn in too fast

Turning in fast, 99% of the time is going to be bad. Even if you want to steer slowly, but you realize that you're missing the apex, your eyes go to the apex. It's like, oh, it's too late. I have to get the apex, right? Turn fast, boom, problem. We cause many car handling problems if we do that.

If you don't really know exactly what you're doing with your vision, you will actually spend a lot of energy inefficiently, increasing anxiety and stress and getting tired very early. When you know exactly what you want to absorb in terms of information, you're going to be more relaxed because you're just following the plan. But if you don't know exactly where you're looking at and what references you're using, then you actually get confused and that drains more energy from your focus, from your brain.

Types of Vision: Focus and Peripheral

We have two kinds of vision. We have the focus one and we have the peripheral one. Here's the most common example about vision, which is about racecraft:

You're behind a car and the car is very close to you. Do not ever look to that car with your focused vision. Never look directly to the car with your focused vision. You have to try to look around the car. You have to try to look at what you can use on the track around the car or even through the car to know where you am or how close to the next corner you are. If you look directly at the other car, you are in big trouble. Your reaction time and your decision making is really bad. Never look directly at the other car.

Benefits of Good Vision

With a good vision, you're going to make decisions in advance generally around half a second before the actual input. That's a very good reference because by the time you react to something, make a decision about it and actually act on it, that's a minimum five-tenths of a second, minimum, probably even more. But if you're very good in reaction time, it's probably half a second until you realize something happened. You think about what you're going to do and you actually do it: five-tenths.

With a good vision, you will have that five-tenths to make decisions. The benefits include:

• You're going to open up your field of view

• You're going to absorb a lot more information: bumps, curbs, dirt, elevation changes, trackside objects like trees, anything that can be used as a reference so you know where you are

• You're going to make better decisions when battling for a position, especially when offline

• You'll have enough time to make alternate plans based on the opponent's moves, instead of just mimicking what they're doing

• Be incredibly more consistent

• Be more confident

• Have more fun

• Experience less stress

• Spend less energy

• Be less frustrated

Vision is incredibly useful and you need to train your eyes to be efficient in gathering information that you will be using while driving.

Two Types of Vision: Planning and Assessment

Planning Vision

Planning vision is where you're looking forward, you're looking where you want to go. But that kind of vision depends heavily on where you are, right? You have to decide what's the next point, where's the B point, depending on the A point, where you are right now.

Assessment Vision

Assessment vision is knowing where you are right now. Sometimes we want to look close to where we are, a little bit like when we're braking right before a corner, and we want to use all the track, sometimes we look a little bit close, so we know exactly how close we are to the white line, or how close we are to the wall, and so on.

Assessment vision gives you information on positioning and angle. And that assessment vision can be very useful, even when you're looking super close to the car. Of course, you should not always look super close to the car, it's just a quick glance to know exactly where you are.

Your eyes kind of have to be a little bit nervous, you know, so they're always looking forward, but sometimes you go back to check something and then back, check something and then back, because you have to know where you are at all stages of the corner. Where you are when you start turning in, if you turn in a little bit too late, then you miss the crack, or the bump, or the changing color, a patch of concrete. The alignment of your car, according to that patch, then you know exactly where you are at each different stage of the corner.

So that's assessment vision. It's planning when it's far: okay, I want to be there. And then as soon as you start turning in, you're on the limit, right, so you're doing corrections. By the time you get there, then you look to know more or less where you are. So you're always assessing and planning. Of course, you want to plan a lot more, if you hit your lines right, then you just follow the plan.

Dealing with Blind Corners

Think of blind corners. It's useless to look forward and plan what you cannot see. In those cases, you're going to look as far as possible, but sometimes that, as far as possible, is actually very close to the car. So in these situations, I try to use the trackside objects, or on-track objects, to figure out where the car is and where it ends up after the blind bit, and then I use that as a reference for the next lap.

Example: Road Atlanta Turn Two

Let's talk about Road Atlanta turn two. You start turning in, you can't even see when you're turning up, right, so I'm looking at the cracks, some people look at the trees, and then as soon as I get on the curb on the left, the corner is to the right and then blind. I'm going to use this curb here as a reference, because that's going to give me all the information I need: how late I am, what angle the car is pointing, and how far to the right I am. So those are pretty much all the information that I need to set up very, very, very precise reference to turn into that corner and always hit it the same way.

Example: Laguna Seca, The Corkscrew

Another very good example is Laguna Seca, the Corkscrew. You brake, you're going all the way to the right, then you start turning in, you see the apex on the left, and nothing else. You can use the trees on the other side, two choices. You can use objects that are far away, you can use references like trees, or anything that is visible, that is not the track itself, like a cane described, or you can use objects that are very close to the track, like the curb itself.

In that case, what I use is actually the curb. In iRacing, you can use the last blue bit of that curb as a reference for both the positioning of the car and also the angle. So based on how my car is aligned to that curb, I already know where it's going to be positioned as soon as it jumps down the Corkscrew and hits the inside right of the second apex.

I only realized that after driving so many thousands of laps on that track, so you can use this course as an unfair advantage and already start developing that willingness to find references as quickly as possible and use them, so you're never guessing, especially on blind corners. Blind corners are the extreme example that can help you figure out more quickly how to find the ideal line on these corners, but you can also use this for corners that are not blind and always always always hit the same marks and place your car in the references that you make.

Building the Vision Habit

Initially, when you try these things, you have to spend a lot of energy, because if you're not used to it, it's going to feel weird. It's actually going to be very difficult to build the new muscular memory, the new habit of actively gathering information with your eyes and actually scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning.

The Guitar Hero Analogy

Imagine that you're playing Guitar Hero. If you look at the notes at the very bottom, there's no way you're going to hit them. The more notes you get, the more efficient you're going to have to be and the further up you're going to look to see the notes that are coming down all the way from the top and already planning the rhythm and the notes that you're going to hit.

You see the notes coming down and you have to hit them in the right rhythm. In this situation, you have to look further up, but that's the same thing. It's the same thing in driving. You have to look, analyze, plan, act.

A Practical Exercise: Visualizing the Correct Line

I figured out one very practical way to practice our vision skills in a coaching session with a student. He was always turning in a little bit too late and trying to build an arc that was much smaller than necessary for the corner. Then I realized something. He was just not imagining, visualizing the correct line for that corner because he was thinking too small.

Understanding Arc Size from Different Perspectives

When looking at the corner from the cockpit, he thought the racing line was tighter than it really needed to be. So as a solution for that, we tried the following:

Look at a corner from the cockpit view. Now, let's trace the straightest arc possible that fits the corner. Check where the turning point would be for that corner. Now, let's try exactly the same thing, but from a top down picture of the corner. Let's compare the turning points in both examples.

There's a big chance your turning point in the top down shot was way earlier than the one in the cockpit view. This is because it's actually difficult to visualize how big these arcs are when we are driving. It's very easy to understand when someone draws on a map, but when we're driving, we tend to think of smaller arcs.

If we properly bring the arcs we drew on the map to what we see from the cockpit view while keeping the same scale, they will actually look way bigger. And it's a lot more difficult to visualize these bigger arcs when you're driving inside the car in the cockpit view.

Diagnosing Your Vision Technique

If you try this yourself and analyze your own visualization of these lines, it's possible to know if your vision technique is good or not. If it's not good enough, if you have a near-sighted vision looking too close to the car, you won't be able to visualize those big lines and will make tighter arcs. Turning in later and more aggressively, decreasing drastically your speed and hurting your turning point precision. With that, you end up turning in too late and too fast.

The Solution: Imagine Big Lines

So what's the solution? Look forward. But not only that. Imagine those big lines as if they were painted on the track. Of course, please never turn on the racing lines. You have to do this with your own imagination, because that's the actual practical one that you can even apply in real life. And you can adjust these lines.

And remember to always, always, always be absorbing the information that's coming in. Get as many references as possible so you know where you are. You recognize the track objects. You recognize changes in color of the surface, the curbs and everything, everything, every object that can be useful to you in racing situations and in the hot-lapping situations as well.

Expanding Your Sensitivity to Detail

In this course, especially in the next few lessons, we are going to expand our sensitivity to detail. You're going to start noticing small changes in lines and characteristics of the track, of corners, of the curb height or camber that you never ever paid attention to. But they make a difference. So you're going to see that every track has millions of small details that you can use to your own advantage.