Something very unexpected happened with the generation of students who took the first online course about car handling. Students improved their car handling skills in a disproportionate way to their RaceCraft skills. Many drivers became way too fast on track but did not know how to benefit or manage that speed in complicated racing situations because they lacked the RaceCraft skills.

Everyone wants to drive a car fast. Everyone wants to know how to hot lap. It's fun, you get in the flow, you forget about everything. Being on the limit during the entire corner and tiptoeing your inputs requires a lot of focus already. There are many little things to work on and perfect to finally extract what the car is capable of doing. Now, imagine all this plus the fact that another driver close to you wants to stay ahead of you or pass you. Now imagine 30 cars. That's a lot to think about, but there is a way to get good at it.

Just like driving technique, all your RaceCraft skills require practice, awareness, intelligence, and patience. This course has been made in a way that maximizes the learning and effectiveness of your time. If you have any questions regarding any lesson or example, leave a comment in the discord chat to discuss right away.

We will go through concepts, rules, and RaceCraft skills regarding attack, defense, multi-class and more complicated situations in racing. Take your time to try all these techniques with teammates or other drivers during practice. You need to spend 2% of your time learning new things but 98% of the time fighting them to practice. If you just watch the entire course and go on with your life, you won't benefit as much from it.

Also, remember to be aggressive while practicing with your teammates if you're doing it in a simulator or in a racing game. Practicing in the sim is the place to make all the mistakes. This course will be based on a ton of examples, as there's no better way to teach RaceCraft than showing it in action.

What is RaceCraft?

There are lots of descriptions about what RaceCraft looks like in practice, and you can see it in action all the time when there are multiple cars on track racing against each other. As much as it's fun to drive fast by yourself, there's some real fun and enjoyment from racing others all the time. The excitement and joy of passing another car for the win or driving your way through the field for a good finish are occasions when RaceCraft is at work, even if you don't know it.

A lot of drivers, coaches and experts make RaceCraft sound nebulous and difficult to understand. There are different elements to RaceCraft that we'll go through in this course, but 90% of it is basically this expression: If you position yourself correctly, you will have more control over your circumstances. If you position yourself incorrectly, circumstances will have more control over you. RaceCraft is decision making. RaceCraft is taking control.

In this course, you will learn how to set up and execute proper overtakes. The principles and skills for attacking, defending and for multi-class overtaking. But most importantly, you will engage with the art and finesse involved with racing in a way you likely haven't ever before. The bottom line is that completing this course will make you a better and more successful racer.

What is Good RaceCraft?

A driver with good RaceCraft generally gains more positions during the race. A driver with bad RaceCraft generally loses more positions during the race. As simple as that.

You will hear this many times throughout the course: RaceCraft is decision making and good RaceCraft consists of early decision making with logic combined with committed execution.

If you have good RaceCraft, you will position your car correctly in a way that will:

• Maximize your advantages

• Minimize your opponents' advantages

• Minimize your own disadvantages

• Maximize your opponents' disadvantages

So you will make it better for you and worse for them.

Example: Passing on the Straight

The most simple way to pass someone on the straight can be done by:

• Maximizing your opponent's disadvantage by putting them in a bad position, like forcing them to defend into a corner before a long straight, resulting in a bad exit for them

• Maximizing your advantage by having a precise corner entry from the ideal line, focusing on a good exit

And that is what is going to make the pass happen.

Thinking Ahead and Planning

A driver with good RaceCraft will think of all of these things in real time, and will continually evaluate their opponents to identify areas of weaknesses and strength. All of this information can be used in planning your moves. Thinking ahead will allow you to make better decisions and to easily predict the outcome.

Without planning ahead, a driver will be consistently reacting to the moments and be probably very tense. While a driver that plans racing moves far in advance will be executing planned and anticipated maneuvers, and will be much calmer in the racecar because they know what they are doing in advance.

RaceCraft as an Art

This might make it look easy for you to set up for advantages, but the problem is when two drivers with good RaceCraft battle together. Because both of them will want to place the car in a specific place, and will be exploiting every advantage possible for themselves. And that's where the RaceCraft skills become an art.

Understanding the Rules

Remember that to maximize RaceCraft, a driver must adjust their approach based on the specific rulebook for the platform, series, or championship that they are competing in. Some series will have different rules about overtaking, contact, and track limits while fighting, and you have to explore the rules while also exploiting them.

For example, in some series, weaving down the straight to break the draft to following cars is illegal, and shall never be a part of your RaceCraft toolbox. However, weaving to break the draft is allowed in some cases, so a high level racer would recognize these slightly differences in rulebooks and adjust their rules of engagement accordingly. And if you are allowed to do something in a certain series, and it will give you an advantage, you should always exploit that advantage as much as possible.

How to Develop Good RaceCraft

You will feel overwhelmed at first. It should be overwhelming. The idea here is for you to be always a little bit uncomfortable, but you will eventually get used to all the lessons and all the techniques, and you will end up doing all these techniques without even thinking of it. It's not going to be fast, but it's not hard. You just need to stay out of your comfort zone consistently, and in just a couple of months, your RaceCraft will be unrecognizable.

The Foundation: Experience and Track Time

Let's make some reverse engineering of the concepts we've been talking about so far:

• RaceCraft is decision making

• Thinking ahead allows you to make better decisions

• What allows you to think ahead? Experience and track time

You can't guess what's going to happen without having experienced something similar before, without having experience. You have to find yourself in complicated RaceCraft situations, more and more until they become more understandable and predictable, and then you will be able to know what to do and how to plan your moves.

With enough experience, you can start predicting complicated outcomes in a way that you would never imagine right now. Think about doing a race at Nordschleife, one of the biggest race tracks in the world, and planning decisions on the last lap that will allow you to win the race several minutes later. This is the kind of decision making that requires thinking ahead, and you will probably learn all these things when someone that's more experienced shows you the way by beating you.

So you have to lose first, you have to lose positions. Other drivers have to do some tricks on you until you start learning and implementing these skills in your own RaceCraft vocabulary.

Practice Methods

The best way to develop your RaceCraft is actually fighting for position. If you're only practicing alone and you only get to practice your RaceCraft in an actual race, you will learn much more slowly than your rival that keeps practicing battling for position in practice with other drivers.

Look for a team, and most importantly, look for a team with a faster or more experienced driver, and battle with them for position on track in practice.

Pit Parties

Pit Party is a great way to do this. You invite three or four friends to leave the pit at the same time, and you start fighting right away as if you just started a race. Pit Parties are incredibly fun, and at the same time, they make you grow as a driver more than almost anything else you can do in your career. It's almost like cheating really.

So look for more experience in RaceCraft. Try whatever you can try, and if you're in the simulator doing Pit Parties, try stupid things, make mistakes, send your own teammates to the wall so you can find your own limits and build your RaceCraft maturity over time.

Racing Against AI

Another good way to practice your RaceCraft is racing against AI, but treating them like they're humans. It's a very common thing to just try too aggressively when you're racing robots and just push them off, but then you won't really learn the finesse of RaceCraft by doing that. So treat them like actual competitors and pass them properly. This way, you can apply that experience when you're racing real humans.

Three Things to Improve Your RaceCraft Drastically

1. Watch this course and ask yourself if you really learned it. Understanding the message is not enough. Implementing the technique in each lesson in your own racing vocabulary is how you get better.

2. After your races, always, always watch your replays and ask yourself what you could have done better in your RaceCraft.

3. Always try to do Pit Parties and race AI to practice RaceCraft instead of only practicing your RaceCraft during the race itself.

These three things alone will transform your racing skills.