Here are two important skills that you need to improve in order to improve your racecraft and how you can develop them. These are skills, not techniques. Techniques learned in this course will help you develop these skills. At the same time, you developing these skills will make the techniques you learn easier to do. So one thing helps the other.

Vision Skills and Awareness

If you have the moderation checklist online course about car handling, you know that when driving alone on track, you can use your vision in two ways. Receiving the visual information of where the car is and where it's going and also mentally planning where you want to go. Imagine a few seconds into the future. You spend hours and hours practicing how to make the fastest lap. And with that, you end up training your eyes to that environment. No cars around. You memorize braking points, your eyes follow the apex and the exit, following a pattern lap after lap.

Now imagine trying to do all that with a car right in front of you, bumper to bumper, blocking your view. What do you do? This is when you have to free your eyes from the car ahead. The cars are big enough so the peripheral vision can do the trick for you. Use your focused vision to look for track information. You need to see where you are or at least estimate where you are by looking around the car ahead. Looking directly at the other cars for even more than one second is already dangerous.

That is exactly the same thing when there's a car on your side. They'll be big enough that you know that they're there through your peripheral vision. If you try to directly look to the side, for example, in some reason you can even like use the little button to look right or left. If you do that, you have to do it for a fraction of a second and then back to where you want to go. If you focus directly on the car on your side for one second, you will be completely lost, especially if it's during the corner.

Practical Tips for Vision

Here are some tips that might be very useful when thinking about the vision:

• When you can't see the car on your side at all, and that should be very useful to single screen drivers, if possible, try to increase the field of view of your virtual mirror. This can make the mirror a little bit distorted, but at least you will be able to see the back of your opponent's car, even when you're side by side, which will allow you to think ahead and make better decisions.

• If you know they're there, but you still don't see them at all, just make sure you're giving at least one car space on their side. For safety, give a little bit more than one car space at first, unless you know your opponent. We'll talk about how much space you should give in another lesson in the future.

• Our eyes are quite fast. You can look around very quickly and get the information you need. So try training your eyes to look at something, but then quickly look back to the track to develop your vision skills while racing.

Developing Your Vision Skills

When you're doing paid parties or practicing racecraft with your teammates, make sure you spend some time close behind other cars to practice your vision, to practice not looking directly at their cars and staying super close to them. The longer you can do that, the better.

Awareness and Early Decision Making

How far you can look ahead, how aware you can be of your environment will lead to better decision making. If you're looking straight at the brake lights of your car ahead, there's no way you're going to make good decisions because you don't know what's happening. You're going to be driving reactively and you won't get the information that you need to make decisions in advance. So improving your vision will lead to better decision making.

And here's the magic. This is where most of you guys bought this course because you're stressed, right? You're overwhelmed, you feel anxiety while racing. And the main reason—of course knowing the technical bits that we're going to talk about later in the course will help—but the main reason is because you don't give yourself the time to make the decision and you don't make the decisions and you race with no strategy. You race not knowing what's going to happen in the next half second.

So good vision, not looking directly at the cars, will lead to better decision making. And better decision making will make you calmer, patient, and will allow you to race while being a little bit more relaxed. This is where the magic happens. Vision, early decision making, peace of mind. I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. That's what you should chase the most.

Patience and Relaxation

If you want to perform well, you have to be in a state that allows your skills to flow continuously. You have to keep yourself in a state where everything you do feels and even looks easy. You won't magically do better if you just try harder without having proper experience in preparation. You will do better the more times you experience a given situation each time learning a little bit more the details of it. It actually gets easier and easier with practice. Literally.

So while developing your skills and gathering experience in your racecraft, focus on always maintaining a physical state where you can be able to do that more and more for hours. And that comes with relaxation, both physical as we talked in my first course, but also mental even in the race. So proper breathing control will benefit both. And that's why this is so important.

The Importance of Breathing

Holding your breath no matter what you're doing in racing creates more tension, both mental and physical and will make you tired much more quickly than a driver that breathes continuously and calmly looks forward even in the most intense situations.

When I started driving in real life, I was testing and my engineer noticed that I was too tense. His way to help me was incredibly simple. He just told me to breathe in, breathe out and relax my hands. Then he told me to remember the feeling that I had when I was breathing out. Finally, he asked me to remember and reach for that feeling while driving as fast as possible.

So it was crazy because I was getting a little bit faster and then I would feel that tension coming and I would remind myself relax. And you can apply the same thing while racing. If you remind yourself to relax while racing, that's gonna make a big, big, big difference. So I was trying that. And at the end of the next session, just a few minutes later, I improved my lap time by one, four, second. Nothing else was discussed between the sessions. Like he didn't tell me anything, anything technical. He just told me to relax and to breathe in, breathe out and relax my hands. And that like spilled over my entire technique and allowed my skills to flow better through my brain as I was driving the car as fast as possible.

Why Proper Breathing Works

The same thing works for racecraft. Why does it work? Because when you're breathing properly, you open up your body and mind for more sensations, for more feelings. And that allows you to communicate with the car at a higher rate of perception, which means you can make quicker and smaller corrections at a given corner, allowing you to stay on the limit for longer and carrying speed into the corner, even when fighting for position.

This is definitely not easy to apply if you have created the bad habit of tensing up too much while racing. Of course, there are drivers who tense up while trying to drive fast and drivers who can even be relaxed while driving alone, but tense up a lot when they fight for position, where they get nervous because of the race itself. Some drivers will do like weird and funny faces bite their lips or move their jaws around or like trying to fight. And this means you're expressing your racing tension or your driving tension through the muscles in your face. The funny faces are not too big of a problem, at least not as much as holding your breath though. Holding your breath is the big beast you have to get rid of.

Developing Better Breathing Habits

So here's how you're going to develop better breathing habits. All you need to do is think about it. Literally remind yourself of it by putting a little sticker written breathe and practice breathing correctly, specifically when fighting for position. Just having proper breathing control allows you to learn more quickly and to keep yourself in the right state of mind to win battles for position more quickly.

Homework Assignment

This lesson has a homework and make sure you really do it if you want to get the value from the money you paid for this course. It's very simple:

• Get some pieces of paper and write down patience, breathe and don't look at the cars

• Stick them somewhere you can see while racing. Maybe the bottom of the monitor, maybe the steering wheel

• Just glancing at those notes while racing will remind you to ask yourself if you're doing it or not

You have to do this because it's very easy to get over focused on the race and then get back to your bad habits. So just do it, trust me. And like if you guys can take a picture of that, take a picture of the paper in the steering wheel, share it on Discord so you can you know inspire everyone else who's also taking the course to do it because it works.

You don't necessarily have to have all three papers at the same time. You can have one, do one race or two and then you switch to a different paper and then you on the straight, you look at that specific paper and then you switch papers on the next race and so on. Experiment, see if it helps. Seriously, do it. You have no idea how this is going to help you.