Driving Lessons: Dealing with S*#t
The best thing about racing is that there’s always another race.
I sometimes wonder how many people have ended their involvement in motorsport because of how much disappointment, how much s*#t they’ve experienced?
(Of course, I also wonder how many people would walk away from their involvement in motorsport if things always went perfectly according to plan, and there was never any disappointment? Would the lack of challenge get boring?)
Racing can be a brutally difficult sport, full of all sorts of things that are not fun at all. When I was racing Indy cars in the early 90s, I once calculated that I spent something like a thousand hours of work that I didn’t enjoy for every hour I spent behind the wheel of my Lola. But oh, that one hour of driving was worth it!
In the 1993 season alone, I experienced not qualifying for two races, one because of an engine misfire that had plagued us at three other events, even though the engine builder/provider had supposedly tested and fixed it three times (they hadn’t).
The other race I didn’t qualify for was a little 500-miler held every year in Indianapolis since 1911; a race I had dreamed of racing since I was seven years old; a race I had signed a contract with a sponsor to be in; a race that this sponsor had brought dozens of VIPs just to watch me in their car battle with the likes Andretti, Unser, Mears, Rahal, and others; a race for which I had taken out a six-figure personal loan to help pay for. Instead, I spent the first qualifying weekend in the Intensive Care unit of Methodist Hospital with burns on my face, neck, and hands after my car caught fire while I was driving between Turns Three and Four of the Speedway.
I get disappointment in motorsport.
I also get getting over disappointment in motorsport.
When s*#t happens, it’s what you do with it that matters, and real racers are good at dealing with it.
S*#t could be a crash, a series of “unlucky” incidents or events, it could be failure of one’s tow vehicle on the way to a club race, or simply just not having enough money to participate in the next event. Basically, any time that things just don’t work out well.
Unlike many sports where two teams or individuals are competing, the odds of winning are not 50/50. Usually, they’re more like 1 in 25, or 1 in 10. In a field of ten or twenty-five cars, only one wins. Racers live with these odds all the time.
The most successful racers have had more losses than wins. Roger Penske is known as perhaps the winningest race team owner in the history of motorsport, with 19 Indy 500 wins, 230 Indy car wins and 17 championships, 139 NASCAR wins, 88 sports car wins (IMSA and Australian V8 Supercars), and on and on (including one Formula One Grand Prix victory). In researching the number of losses Penske has had, that’s a number no one references. In talking to people who can best give a reasonable estimate, I heard numbers like close to 90 percent of the races entered did not end in victory lane. And that’s for the winningest team in history.
To some, that percentage would be depressing, and would result in them walking away from the sport. But not Roger Penske, nor practically every other successful (or unsuccessful) driver or team.
Racers have to be stupidly optimistic, to the point of being really good at putting the s*#t that happens behind them. Why? Because they so badly want the good stuff to happen. They know that the best thing about racing is there’s always another race. And that next race may just be the best one ever.
They also know that dwelling on the s*#t will not help. Sure, they take time to look at what they can learn from whatever happened, and do what they can to ensure that it never happens again. And then, snap, it’s behind them. Time to move on to the next one (whatever that “one” is).
When driving through a corner, if you make a mistake, turn in too late and end up missing the apex, you can’t go back and get it this lap. Instead, you learn to let it go, and do it better next lap. The best drivers apply this to when they’re on the track, but also to most other areas of their lives, including when things go wrong on the track.
To no one’s surprise, the best, most successful racers are extremely competitive (“extremely” is an understatement), and have a drive and commitment to being successful that has very little resemblance to how non-racers think. Winning is an obsession. And yet, they know the way to win is to continue to learn and improve, while being reasonable about the odds of everything going according to plan.
When I’m asked what separates the best from the rest, my answer is “the deep-down-inside burning desire to learn and improve, and ability to get over things that go wrong.” Most people expect me to talk about their competitiveness (or innate talent, quick reflexes, or something else), but their obsession with improving at the next event is most often stronger.
Watching Max Verstappen at the Singapore GP where, after the Red Bull team had won 15 F1 races in a row, with Max himself victorious in ten consecutive races, was an example of how the best think. Some have said that he was a bit of a poor sport about qualifying 11th and finishing 5th in the race, but that’s not right. His mopey, angry attitude showed that internal drive and not accepting anything but being the best. After the dominance he’d had over the F1 field this year, with an almost certain lock on the World Championship, you’d have thought he could have shrugged one poor race off. But no. While I don’t have personal insight into what he and the team did after that race, it was no surprise to see them on top the following race. I can almost guarantee that Verstappen and team were not focused on what happened on the previous race when they arrived in Japan. They had learned from it, then put it behind them, using it to drive them to do even better.
There is a fine line between not accepting losing and flipping it around and using it to drive oneself to learn and improve.
In my experience, when many non-racing people are faced with disappointment, they hang onto it for too long. Some don’t even bother looking at what happened as an opportunity to learn, but instead get mired down in the s*#t. Sorry for the yucky imagery here, but the s*#t sticks with them.
There are so many things that racers and high-performance drivers learn from our sport that apply to other areas in life, and learning how to deal with s*#t is one of them. No matter how bad a pile of s*#t one is dealing with, I like to think of it as a missed apex: I can only learn from it, and do better on the next lap.
Let it go, move on, next lap. Eyes up, look ahead.
This is my favourite subject in racing. I think it is what elevates motor racing above a mere 'sport'. It is like a life simulator, just way harder. It's more unfair, more brutal, more immoral and full of ugliness. That's why I think racers are a 'cut above', because they seek it out - like proper classical heroes.
If they could really understand that, maybe they'd relish it even more.... but alas!!
Sort of reminds me of a story about a father brought his twin sons into a room where toys, neatly stored in plastic bags, lined the walls on shelves. The father said to both sons, "You can have any one thing that you want in this room." One twin was thrilled and he clapped his hands and grinned in anticipation of his eventual choice. The 2nd twin had a very sad look on his face and his eyes began to well up with tears. So the father took the second twin to another room where there was nothing but a huge pile of s*#t in the middle of the room. The father asked his son, "Would you like to have what's in this room instead?" The second twin's face smiled broadly. He answered affirmatively while wringing his hands in anticipation. "But why would you want to play in a pile of s*#t?" his father asked. "Because I'll bet there's something of real value, that I'll have to work to uncover and its hidden under that pile of s*#t!"
Pros at the highest level in any sport, have an incredible ability to recover from mistakes. While once playing in a ProAm golf event, I played with Graham McDowell. I learned that professional golfers also occasionally hit bad shots way off of the fairway into the woods or into a penalty area...and it never seems to faze them. The pros seem to usually hit their next shot perfectly and will often par the hole. And if the pro doesn't end up with par and records a bogie on his scorecard, the odds are huge that he will birdie the next hole.
Recovery is everything!