Before You Get On a New Track

The Value of Track Time

Let's assume a few things here: motorsports is extremely expensive. We can spend up to hundreds of dollars per lap driving on track. Even if money is not a problem, track time is extremely limited on track versus the simulator. Unless you have a spare car, one big mistake can potentially mean the end of the weekend for you.

So if you're stopping your life to travel, get hotels and spend days prepping for a race weekend and event, then these tips before you get on track are essential. Your track time is valuable, so anything you can do before to help you better use that time will help.

The Competitive Advantage of Preparation

Say you have two hours of track time—you don't want to waste one hour of that just driving super slowly and trying to memorize a track or anything like that. If your competitors have done the homework outlined here, you're going to start the weekend already behind them because they might be effectively hours of track time ahead of you by doing the right preparation before.

Key principle: Anything you do on track that could have been done off track should be done off track.

Pre-Event Preparation Resources

Make sure you really really really memorize a track before the event. Nowadays we have the internet, we have thousands of onboard videos, we have the simulator, we have track maps with track guides and so on. This can jumpstart your first hour of track time and get you ahead of your competition.

Available resources include:

• Onboard videos

• Simulator practice

• Track maps with track guides

• Internet resources

Real-World Example: Laguna Seca 2024

Imagine yourself in this situation: In 2024, I raced at Laguna Seca with the radical North America Cup, and because I was fighting for the championship, every second of track time mattered for me to find performance before the races. But my car broke and we couldn't find the solution until race one.

That means I couldn't drive in:

• Practice one

• Practice two

• Practice three

• Qualifying

I started the race at the back of the pack with zero laps. The thing is, I had already over 10,000 laps in the simulator at that track and I already knew my car very well from the previous events. I had also studied onboards from my teammates while my car was being fixed and I tried just visualizing my driving as much as possible.

On that race one, I went from last to P3 and those points were crucial for me to become champion that year. Had I not prepared for the event before the weekend, I would have been completely lost trying to learn the track and I would have zero chance of making positions and finishing at the podium.

Building Your Visualization Skills

The more you practice at the simulator, the easier it gets to understand these track guides and onboard videos before you drive, and the easier it gets for you to visualize your driving before getting on track.

Important Considerations for Braking References

Just remember that the braking references will not exactly be the same, so don't blindly memorize them in the simulator. Don't try to immediately replicate your braking references from the simulator or track guides to real life. Follow the same grip testing approach from this course to assess the grip of a race car with the conditions of that specific day and tires.

That being said, the final braking references will actually be quite similar in both simulator practice and real life if the cars are identical.

Maximizing Your Track Time

Again, real life track time is valuable and the objective of simulator practice and pre-event prep is to make sure you use every minute of that track time properly. Spending way too much time under the limit and not having a process or clear objectives for each session will make you just waste time and money.

By the way, most people do this mistake of not properly preparing for an event, so just by spending some energy in what we talked about in this lesson, you will already be ahead of half of the grid.