Ask Ross/Speed Secrets: How to Get Joy Back
What to do when things aren’t going the way you want.
This is a combined Ask Ross Q&A, and a Speed Secrets tip/advice article. It was triggered by a question sent to me through the Chat tool here on Substack, and then I merged my response with another piece I had been working on.
Question: “I’m an experienced club racer, enduro karter, and budget endurance race (Champcar) driver. I’m a decent club racing driver and have had some success, and I’m okay with that. I do fewer races per year than I used to ten years ago, but enough to keep my hand in it. The trouble is, my head isn’t in the game and I’m having trouble getting through it. I’ve had several mechanical failures that have made for incomplete weekends, and last year I witnessed an incident that was really unpleasant (I’ve since been on-track three times). Race weekends make me anxious instead of giving me the joy I’ve had for so long. I love wheel-to-wheel racing and track driving, and in my work I also get to drive some really fast cars, so I want to continue to keep my skills sharp. How does someone get through this sort of thing, get focused, and most importantly, get back to really enjoying it?” – signed, “No Joy”
Answer/Tip/Advice/Thoughts:
“No Joy” — As I thought and wrote about your situation and question, five words came to mind:
Programming
Focus
Mindset
Challenge
Motivation
Programming
You do what you do because you’re programmed to do so; you sometimes don’t do what you want because you either don’t have the right programming, or you accessed the wrong mental program.
With that in mind (no pun intended), have you ever experienced joy at the track, racing, and driving fast? I’m sure I can answer that for you: Yes. That means you do have a mental program for having fun and feeling good doing those things. However, it seems that you also have a mental program for feeling anxious and not enjoying it.
So, you have two competing mental programs:
Joy – the one that you’ve developed and used for many years.
No Joy – the one that has crept into your mind more recently.
Using mental imagery (what is usually referred to as visualization - you can download a free eBook about using mental imagery here), I’d like you to refresh and strengthen your Joy programming. It’ll help focus your mind on your Joy program, not the No Joy program.
But first, take some time, sit down, and make a list of the things that you enjoy about racing, being at the track, and driving fast cars.
Because you’re human (I’m assuming!), while you’re writing this list, some of the things that you don’t enjoy will likely pop into your head. Go ahead and make note of them, too. There’s no point in trying to ignore them. Instead, accept them. It’s okay to have those thoughts and feelings. Just put them on the other side of your list — they’re there, but you’re not going to focus on them.
It’s important to spend time really thinking deeply about what it is you love about driving and racing. If you don’t, then you’ll only be reinforcing the No Joy programming. So go deeper than the surface level first responses, and really think about what it is that you enjoy so much about racing and driving.
With a bullet-pointed list of the things that bring you joy, take 15 minutes each evening for the next month or so to read them, then close your eyes and imagine yourself experiencing them in a variety of scenarios at the track. Yes, this takes imagination, but that’s okay because I know you have it!
The more you do this, really focusing on what you enjoy at the track — and even replaying some examples of when you’ve found that in the past — the easier it will be to get back there.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, 15 minutes every night for a month! This sounds like work,” yes, you’re right. But really, is it? Is it that difficult to replay enjoyable past experiences, and imagining new ones?
Focus
The next time you’re on track or doing any kind of high-performance driving, focus on very small, very specific parts of your driving. And not only work on practicing and improving them, but appreciate them for what they are. There are literally thousands of discrete skills and micro-skills that you perform (individually and combined with others in a matter of seconds and micro-seconds), over and over again, all in the course of just one lap of a track. And to have accomplished what you’ve done in the past whatever-number-of-years on numerous tracks is something to appreciate.
Quick story: I once talked with a gentleman driver who had played golf professionally, then went into the military, and ultimately into business, where he took a company from a tens of millions to a billion-dollar business in a decade. Then he went racing, and told me that it was the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. That kinda puts race driving into perspective.
Appreciate what you’ve done already.
When you’re thinking about the big picture, it can get overwhelming, to the point where you might not be aware of how much fun it is to simply have your car at or near the edge of grip in the brake zone, the car dancing on the limit; what the g-loads feel like as you transition off the brakes and turn into a corner, knowing that you got a near-perfect blend of longitudinal to lateral grip; how the car moves around from understeer to oversteer to understeer to oversteer… through a turn; and that feeling you get as you feed in the throttle and the car eats up track toward the exit curbing. All this time, you’re hyper-aware of what’s going on around you, where other cars are, positioning yourself to set up or defend a pass.
Take just a small part of that — let’s use my favorite part of driving, the timing and rate of release of the brakes as you blend that with turning into a corner as an example — and just focus on being a tiny bit better, a little bit smoother, just a titch different so that your car rotates exactly the way you want and you know that you’re using all of the tires’ grip; your car is on the limit entering the corner with just a couple more MPH than ever before, and yet you’re able to use that rotation to aim the car past the apex and feed in the throttle so you squirt out of the corner.
Ahhhh, doesn’t that feel awesome?! Replay that in your mind. And again. And again. And again….
Then, pick some other aspect of driving/racing and imagine doing that over and over again, and falling in love with that feeling again. Think about the start of a race, car/karts all around you, rolling up to the green flag, engines revving to the point where you can barely hear your own. Green, green, green! Flat on the throttle, upshift, move right to set up for Turn 1, blocked now, ease back to the left, opening on the inside, wait to brake, wait, now, dive down inside of the red car, begin to ease off the brakes, turn in and go, open up and use the track, go, go, go! Yes, gained three spots!
How much fun was that?!
Mindset
For whatever reason, most people find it’s easier to focus on what’s not right, on the negative, than it is on what’s going right. Seeing the good is a practiced skill or trait. It’s something that takes deliberate effort… until it doesn’t, and then it’s become your go-to mental program.
I recently saw a neon sign in the window of a coffee shop that simply said, “What if it’s all good?” That seems like a good reminder.