Introduction to Racing Psychology

What makes you a fast driver? This lesson explores crucial concepts in racing psychology that will help you throughout your driving career. We will cover how to learn faster, understand the plateau phenomenon, explore the Almeida method, and discover how to make competitive driving feel and look easy.

How to Learn Faster

Let Go of Your Ego

Focus on the task, not on yourself. This principle requires careful examination because it's more subtle than it appears. When you complete a bad lap, you have two ways of thinking about it:

• "That lap was really bad"

• "I was really bad on that lap"

While these statements might sound the same, there's a huge mentality difference between them. If you say that the lap is bad, that means you can always go there and fix it. If you say you were bad, that makes it feel like you are the cause of it and that you are to blame, and therefore you're not competitive enough. Even though you can say you're going to improve after that, it's not the same thing.

This is a very delicate conversation, but it does affect the way you practice and the way you dedicate yourself towards a difficult task on the long term. Do not ever say "I'm a bad driver" because that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and you actually start driving worse because of that. You yourself believe in that. You have to always talk about the task, what needs to be done. If you convince yourself that you're capable of fixing that, you will fix that actually quicker and your brain will prime itself for you to learn quicker, meaning less lap times until you improve. This doesn't make a lot of sense on the short term, but on the long term, that's a big, big difference.

Stop Trying Too Hard

Just feel the experience of driving. By trying too hard, I mean a lot of physical effort. The way your mind is stressed when you're trying to hit better lap times can even affect your body, can even affect the way you tense up your shoulders and your arms. You start making faces and that is just a sign that you're trying too hard.

When I say trying too hard, I'm not talking about how much time you practice or how many laps you do. I'm talking about the actual corner. I'm talking about maybe trying and wanting so much that the car do the right thing, but the car doesn't care if you want it to go faster or not. The car will only blindly respond to your inputs.

Sometimes you're trying very hard, but if you're doing the wrong thing—if you're abusing the ABS, if you're abusing the steering—you can try as much as you want, it will not fix it. Sometimes the awareness of a solution to a problem actually takes a lot less effort than just trying the wrong thing very hard. This is why "stop trying too hard" is good advice because it invites you to think about easier solutions, to think outside the box and investigate the problem. Try maybe braking a little bit less with less ABS or turning less and being a little bit more scientific about the task, not physical and emotional about it.

Feel the experience of driving precisely by calmly absorbing all the experience of driving. You're not trying so hard. You're not directing your energy towards the car. You're letting the car tell you what is happening and you're just being a sponge. You're really just responding to everything and feeling what's happening with the force feedback, what's happening with the visuals and with the sounds. You're just having these micro aha moments instead of stress.

Be Exposed to High Quality Drivers and Coaches

Most importantly, be exposed to high quality drivers and coaches and videos and courses—anything that shows you how fast people do fast laps. This is the best way for you, with not a lot of effort, just watching what they do, to end up picking up things. The more you drive, the more experience you have, the more sensitivity you have to pick up on more and more details.

If you're a beginner, you're not going to really notice what they're doing with the trail braking or the engine braking because there's too many things happening, right? You're going to basically look at the line, where they brake. But the more you drive, the more you start realizing how much on the curb they are or when they turn in or what gear they use and stuff like that, even like throttle blips. The more you drive, the more you're capable of identifying small things that faster drivers do.

That is why instead of trying very hard, you just need to look and imitate and drive again calmly. You will absorb the experience, then you watch a faster driver, then you ask for advice: "Hey, can you see what I'm doing here? Can you give me some advice?" That is the way to learn as fast as possible without making it such a suffering experience.

Understanding the Plateau

What Is the Plateau?

A plateau represents your lap times when you're a super beginner and how it approaches the ideal lap time. If you're a total beginner who never drove ever before, on your first day you might be literally 40 seconds off the lap time in a two minute lap. Then over time, you quickly improve that, but the closer you get to the ideal lap time, the more slowly you will improve. There's less and less time and things that you can improve to find the perfect lap time. It gets more and more difficult over time as the years pass.

This is a very optimistic assumption that you are never going to stop improving. But that is where the plateau shows up. A plateau is when you're improving, improving, improving, and then you suddenly get stuck somewhere. Let's say you get at five seconds off the pace and you just can't improve your lap times after that, even though you're driving for months and months and months—you're just five seconds off, no matter what you try. That's a plateau.

Realistic Plateau Patterns

It's not like everyone is going to have the same progression. Many things can change. The experience could be measured in years, but we can easily have someone who in way less time can catch up to someone, or we can have someone who plateaus and then some prodigy kid is going to quickly pass them in a matter of months. This is very possible. It depends a lot on your context, on your age, whether you have access to high quality references and coaches—maybe your dad is a racing driver and puts you on a go-kart when you're age one or something like that. Obviously, you're going to improve way quicker.

Normally what you're going to have is actually a series of plateaus. Realistically, someone can be very, very fast and then they plateau for a while. Then they find a team and they start practicing together—very quickly they find a lot of lap time by comparing telemetry, watching videos, asking for help. But then they stop practicing together and you can plateau again. Sometimes you might even drive a little bit too much without coaching. You can develop some bad habits. You can even go back a little bit. Then you get a coach and then you start improving a lot, then you plateau again, then improve more and so on.

Everyone is going to go through plateaus. It's a normal thing. You just want to minimize them. You don't want to have a lot of plateaus. You don't want to have a plateau very early and develop bad habits because the longer you spend on a plateau, the more difficult it will be for you to come up again. If you do experience a plateau right away, you want to really see what is happening because you don't want to solidify your bad habits.

Essentially, the plateau is when your learning speed is zero. Some people learn very fast. Some people get stuck for a long time. That is your learning speed. When it comes to zero, you are officially plateaued.

How to Break the Plateau

First of all, awareness. Again, it's not trying too hard. It's not a lot of effort. It's just awareness—literally awareness. An aha moment that you have when someone tells you something and you try it and it feels amazing—suddenly you find a lot of time. That probably wasn't too difficult, right? It actually is easier when you find out that if you do this or that, the car actually goes faster with less effort. So it's awareness. Now that you know it, you will not unknow it and you will improve way more.

Look for an aha moment. An aha moment happens when you seek for information. I know it's not that easy—it's way more fun to just drive. Sometimes having to actually stop to watch a lesson is not ideal. I do the same thing for everything: piano, drums, racing, languages. I'm learning a new language. I'm going to try some things on my own, but it's kind of boring to go have someone teach me. But it's definitely worth it because you're giving yourself the opportunity to be more aware about things that will make your task easier.

That is why awareness is the number one thing to break the plateau, which is why this course exists—to share everything so that everything you do feels easier and looks easier. When you're doing something and it looks easy, even feels easy, that is very difficult to someone else, it's because they are not aware of what you're doing. You are now aware of something that is completely transforming your experience with less effort.

The Almeida Method

Building on top of that, we have created the Almeida method. It's a philosophy of practice in the simulator that is based on a very simple phrase: If you can cause it, you can prevent it.

• If you're afraid of spinning, then go spin on purpose. See exactly what you need to do the most beautiful spin ever.

• If you are afraid of understeering, then try to understeer on purpose. See what things you need to do to make it worse and then just reverse it so you can learn how to prevent it.

This is a very, very useful method that will be discussed and implemented in pretty much all lessons in this online series.

How to Make Competitive Driving Feel and Look Easy

The Role of Muscle Memory Training

The answer is in muscle memory training. The answer is actually a lot of time. You have to really, really practice so much to the point you're doing the difficult things that at first you had to think a lot about without thinking about them anymore.

The Four Pillar Combination

You need this four pillar combination:

• Time: Sufficient practice duration

• Patience: To try new things without frustration

• Reference: High quality examples to emulate

• Repetition: Consistent practice to build muscle memory

You need time and patience to try the new things. You need to repeat and repeat and repeat so that you train your body to do those things and to gain precision. For example, precision on your left foot for braking one, two, three, four, five percent—you need to train your foot a lot for that precision. In the beginning, to brake one percent was impossible. Breaking 100 and then maybe 20 and 30, but then it would be like sometimes 40, sometimes 20. There was no precision. The car was behaving erratically. But with time, it became possible to really get to that one, five, and whatever pressure is needed nowadays.

What's the secret? There's no magic trick. Just repetition. Just patience and kept practicing, kept practicing. Never giving up or telling yourself "Oh, I'm a bad trail breaker." Never saying that. Instead: "Oh, currently my trail braking is still bad, but I'm working on the precision." That's way better.

Obviously, you need the reference. You need someone who's actually doing it right so that you can have the idea of what you're going to do in the future when you improve your precision and what's your target, what's your goal. That is how to develop trail braking precision, for example. But this applies to absolutely everything.

What You Don't Need

What you don't need at all is effort, tension, and blind laps. You do not need to apply a lot of effort in it. When I say effort, I'm talking about short term effort of actual tension and this crazy willpower or this crazy optimism—let's call it toxic positivity, where you're like "I am going to do my best because I want to be the best driver." You don't need that. You can just very calmly go and drive and have fun. You might actually get better than someone who's trying to tell everyone that they're going to be a Formula One driver because they want it so much—that is actually not going to help you become a better driver.

Tension is just the physical expression of the effort, the mental effort that was just discussed. And blind laps is essentially just driving and driving and driving and driving without ever getting reference, without ever getting access to high quality drivers, teammates, leagues or competitions. If you're just driving against AI alone all the time and doing 200 laps without actually improving, you're not going to magically improve. You need awareness. We're in 2025. We have access to a plethora of information and you need to read those books and watch those videos and try to talk to faster people if you want to speed up your development by getting better access to reference.

Memory Retention and Course Structure

Memory retention is an important concept that influences the structure of this course. When you first learn something, your memory retention decreases very fast. In a typical pattern, you go from 100% to 80% memory retention in only one day. But if you get re-exposed to the same information the next day, it will take you two days to go back to 80%, whereas in two days before, you would actually go back to 69%.

The second time, it's going to take you three days to lose 20% of the information, of the quality and detail of the information that you learned. The more you get re-exposed to it, the less you're going to forget and the more natural it's going to be. That is why it's so important to be re-exposed to a lot of content.

The course uses this technique throughout for trail braking, for light hands technique, for spirals, for a lot of cornering things, and for inducing understeer to such a specific level. Information is transferred from level one to level two, three, four, just making it a little bit more precise so that you can really, really benefit from this effect.

The Dunning Kruger Effect Curve

The Dunning Kruger Effect Curve is a correlation between how confident you are in something versus how much experience you have in it. Many people in the community have already placed themselves at different points on this curve, realizing how their perception changed as they progressed through learning.

The Journey Through the Curve

At first, you're super optimistic. You think "Oh, I'm pretty good at this. I've been driving for five years in the city. I'm pretty sure I can be a good racing driver." So you're climbing, and then you start driving, you start actually winning some races in the beginning because of a bunch of rookies, and you do well. You very quickly get to the peak of Mount Stupid.

What is that? You don't know a lot yet, you had a good start, and you think that you know everything, and that feels great until you get a little bit more experience. You start getting actual iRating and start getting into, say, a top split or something. Then you realize that everyone there is way faster than you, and you realize that you don't know anything.

This is the Valley of Despair—when you realize that you thought you knew things, but now you are aware that you don't know a lot of things and that you have a lot to learn. The Valley of Despair is the worst because you were on a high before, you were very happy, and now you're just realizing that you know what, you were not all that great, and you need to really climb a little bit more experience and slowly learn the details, slowly learn the technique.

You then get into the slope of enlightenment where you realize that you're starting to compete with the fast guys. Only after a lot of years, probably, you will get to a point where you know a lot indeed, and you will have exactly the same level of confidence that you had when you were at the peak of Mount Stupid.

Tracking Your Progress

This is a useful exercise: If you're doing this course right now, you can actually take a screenshot of where you think you are and post it on Discord and leave it there. Maybe in two, three months after you finish everything, go back and see where you are after you finish it.