This lesson presents the top 5 tips that will serve as pillars for this entire course. To apply them correctly, you need to take that extra effort. These tips will be repeated in more detail in their own lessons to help you memorize everything and improve your racecraft more effectively. At the end of this lesson, you will have a small list with these tips that you can copy and paste so you can read them while analyzing your replays.

Do these five things and you will finish many more positions ahead every race compared to if you just don't do them. It's that important.

Tip One: Maximize Your Racing Line

Don't forget about your racing line when you're fighting for position. Stay close to the racing line. Stay close to the racing line. Stay close to the racing line. That's the number one priority.

You will only not do your racing line if something impedes you from doing it. If you don't have any clear plan into a corner, use all the track. If you're not sure about it, use all the track.

Importance During Race Starts

This is extremely important when race starts, where you can get overwhelmed and you end up just not using all the track even when you can. Just because there are two cars ahead, two cars behind and there's something and you just don't know what you're doing, you end up staying on the middle of the track.

That's the number one place to remind yourself: Can I go all the way on the outside entry? Can I go all the way on the inside? If yes, do it because you're going to have a better entry speed, better exit speed. In race starts, you can actually pick up two, three, four positions just by being aware of the places where you can benefit and carry more speed by using all the track.

If you have a very clear reason to stay on the inside, that's different. If the reason is not clear enough, stay in your racing line.

Key Principles for Using All the Track

• When you're on the outside, use all the way to the outside to improve your line

• Don't stay in the middle of the track without a clear purpose

• Create breathing room - either open and improve your line, or find gaps to stick your car

• Don't stay behind cars, especially when they're in the middle of the track, because that will make you hyper focus on them

• When there are two cars ahead fighting side by side, stay behind the outside car and do your optimal line - they will be slower than you because they're fighting and you have a whole track for yourself

Creating a Priority List in Muscle Memory

There is a muscle memory for racecraft as well - things that you automatically do. In most situations, your priority number one is to use all the track, to improve your lap times, to improve the time you spend on the corner, especially when there's two people ahead fighting. That's great for you, because you're definitely going to have a better exit than them.

To get a better exit, you can just pass them both or at least one of them. Try to always have a list of priorities, things to do, and the priority number one is to use all the track. If you don't know what to do, use all the track, and then there will be things like a second priority. If there's a car on the outside, then you can be on the inside. There's two cars ahead, use all the track and try to be on the inside with the exit and so on. For now, on the corner entry, it's just use all the track - that's going to help you create better decisions.

Tip Two: Never Look Directly at the Car Ahead

This is one of the most difficult to measure, but incredibly important and actually makes a difference. Never look directly to the car ahead.

Of course, because you can't see where you were looking at during the replay, you have to trust your own memory. What you can do is try watching a replay in cockpit mode and just see where you naturally look while kind of mimicking your own driving.

Why This Matters

If you're looking directly to the car ahead, you will copy their lines and breaking references and lose connection to your own programmed driving. Even more importantly, you will drive reactively. This sucks when driving close to someone else because if they end up breaking just a little bit earlier than you expect, you won't have enough time to react and it will cause a crash.

The Correct Approach

Process the correct information. Look through the cars, around the cars, never directly to them. Your peripheral vision is much more than enough to know that there's a car ahead of you and how far they are. Use your focused vision for more important things.

Tip Three: Don't Fight Unnecessarily

Choose the good fights for you. If you just attack everywhere or defend everywhere, you will most likely lose time, lose focus, get overwhelmed and most importantly, lose speed, fall back from the pack or never catch the pack ahead.

Not fighting for position will always be faster than fighting for position. If you want to overtake someone, do it when you know that it will make it stick fast and then keep on going.

There will be a lesson just about that, so for now, if you don't know exactly if your fights were good choices or not, don't worry. This is just letting you know that such thing as deciding what fights to take exists. Later down the road in this course, this will make all the difference.

Tip Four: Don't Be Too Cautious - Be Assertive

Not aggressive, assertive. Hesitation is your enemy.

The Importance of Commitment

You have to decide: I'm gonna make that move and you go for it or you don't at all. But if you decide to start dive bombing someone but then you decide to not go anymore, that's where the danger sits because if you don't commit, then you become more unpredictable, you have less control of your speed and that's where you cause the crashes.

You either go for it or you don't, and that's why it's so important to decide things before. If you take the decision two seconds before, you know that you're doing it and then you just go for it - perfect. But if you suddenly decide to go because the guy break a little bit earlier and you were reacting to him, that's where you have absolutely no plan and that's where you lose precision and people cause the most crashes.

How Hesitation Causes Crashes

Most crashes in real life happen because of hesitation. Driving wise, that hesitation is translated into just not breaking. If you're hesitating, you're afraid of breaking hard because breaking hard takes commitment. If you hesitate, you don't break hard enough, you carry a little bit more speed and then you end up maybe having way too much speed by the time you should turn in. So at that point, you're too fast. There's nothing you can do. The hesitation already has done damage to your driving.

That's why it's important to know what you're doing a second before and then committing to what you have decided to. When fighting for position is the same thing - if you're afraid of breaking, if you don't know exactly what you're doing, you end up just taking less second decisions that are not planned, that are not organized and you just end up putting yourself in situations you're not trained to deal with.

Tip Five: Understand the Psychology of Racing

Everyone is nervous. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone is thinking about themselves and most people are probably lacking confidence and anxious, possibly even more than you.

Using Psychology to Your Advantage

You can actually make them make the mistakes if you're getting in their heads more than they get in yours. Be aware of that and you will start picking up patterns and behaviors that you can use to your own advantage compared to unaware drivers.

Most drivers will be unaware that you can mess around with their focus on purpose. Like everything else on this list, there will be a lesson just about this.

The Foundation for Your Racecraft

What this first module is doing is trying to list the most important things because these are going to be the low hanging fruits. If you solve these things, if you have them in mind, then everything else in the course is going to make more sense.

You're going to see the most effective changes in your racecraft just by doing these things from this lesson, despite doing the exercises from the lesson before. They are going to make the pillars for you. And then the next lessons will be more and more and more technical so you can know exactly how to connect the dots and really, really make it work.