Imagine what you’d think if you walked into the gym one day and a personal trainer said, “What I want you to do is grab the dumbbells, that barbell, and sit in the leg press machine and lift and push all the weight you can with them all at once. Just one time. Okay, maybe two or three times, but then you’re done.”
That’s not much different from me telling you to close your eyes and imagine driving the entire track, in detail, all at one time. Just one lap. Okay, maybe two or three laps, but then you’re done.
Silly, right?
Most advice for using mental imagery, typically referred to as visualization, are basically just this. The goal seems to be to imagine driving the entire lap, all at one time. Hey, even I sometimes challenge drivers to mentally drive a lap, time it, and compare it to an actual lap time.
I have learned in my coaching career to break things down into the smallest pieces, then practice those things in isolation, over and over again, with the number of repetitions being most important.
For example, when driving a car as close to the limit as possible, we rely on three senses: vision, kinesthetic (feel, motion, etc.), and auditory. And we use these senses constantly throughout the lap, over and over again. One of the most effective coaching “tools” I use are Sensory Input Sessions, where the driver only focuses on one sense at a time, for a very intense and focused on-track session. By doing so, the driver is tuning up that one specific sense. Then, they move onto the next sense, and then the last one (in no particular order). This, according to Dr. Anders Ericsson is known as “deliberate practice” I stumbled onto this well before reading about it; itʻs the key to skill development. It kind of made sense to me, I tried it, and it worked – extremely well. So, I’ve kept using it.
The other key coaching tool I use and recommend to drivers is the use of mental imagery. But, silly me, it’s only been fairly recently that I’ve applied the same approach to it that I use with Sensory Input Sessions. For years, my focus was on having drivers imagine an entire lap, and even multiple laps. I now apologize to all of the drivers I’ve bullied into this approach!
Instead, I now recommend that drivers only do mental imagery of specific corners or sections of the track, and then do many reps of this. Fortunately for many drivers who struggle to stay focused when attempting to do mental imagery of full laps, this is actually easier because there’s a bit of a reset in between reps. Not easy, but easier.
There’s another piece of the deliberate practice approach you should consider and use: focus on the difficult stuff. Yes, the parts of the track you find most challenging are the parts you should spend your time on. While this seems fairly obvious, for many drivers it’s not what they focus on. Instead, they mentally drive through the corners that they can, and then when they either can’t imagine a certain corner or they’ve lost concentration, they stop (and maybe start over with the easy sections again, getting better at only those areas). So, here’s what you should do in this case: start with that corner or section of track that you find most difficult to play in your head, and do many reps of that short section. By only imagining that short section, and not the entire track (or even a part of the track before and after it), you make that difficult part easier. By making that section of track easier, you can do more repetition, and it’s the number of reps that make the biggest difference.
Now that you’ve broken your driving of the entire track down into a manageable – but still difficult – task, work on the specifics of making what needs to happen, happen. Sure, imagine what it looks like, and even what it feels and sounds like driving through this section of track, but what do you need to do to make that happen?
Think about and play in your head all of the various techniques you want to use to get through that section of track. Where are you looking, and how are you moving your vision? Where’s your mental focus? Is this a late braking corner, or one that rewards an earlier and lighter brake? How about the timing and rate of release of the brakes? Are you looking to rotate the car early in the corner, or track through on a relatively consistent arc? What are you going to do with the throttle, ease into it or be a bit patient and then more aggressive with its application? How are you going to respond to any handling issues, and your car sliding?
As you can see, it’s not just where the track goes and where you want your car to be placed, but also how you’re going to make that happen. It’s also the timing and rate of how you use your controls. Don’t be afraid to even just focus on one part of the corner. For example, you may just want to imagine how you’re going to apply the brakes from BoB (Begin of Braking) to EoB (End of Braking), or how you’re going to respond when your car begins to understeer in the middle of the corner.
Then, what’s your mental mindset? Are you calm and relaxed, or “up on the wheel”? Are you focused on learning, pushing past other cars, warming up and familiarizing yourself with the track, being patient, or maximizing the lap time? How are you going to respond, mindset-wise, to any mistakes you make? Imagine that.
Do me – and yourself – a favor tonight: Put at least ten minutes aside to give this approach to mental imagery a try. Make yourself comfortable in a chair, close your eyes, breathe slowly and calmly, and feel your body and mind relax. After doing this for a minute or so, imagine driving just one corner on a track you know well, and really focus in on the details of what you see, feel and hear – and especially, what techniques and mindset you’re using to make happen what you want to happen.
This section is likely to only last five to twenty seconds, so repeat it as many times as you can in the ten minutes you’ve set aside. Remember, like building endurance strength in your muscles, it’s the repetition that makes the difference.
Of course, like weight lifting, the goal is to make it a little more difficult over time. So, tomorrow pick another section of track that you may not know as well, or you find much more challenging, and do the same thing. Continue to increase the number of reps, as well.
Pay attention to your form, too, like you do when physically exercising. Be sure to relax your mind and body prior to starting (your mind is much more receptive to mental programming in that state), but also add more and more detail to your mental imagery.
Is this hard to do? I hope so! If you only ever practice the easy stuff, you’re only going to get better at the easy stuff. And I’m pretty sure there is some hard stuff to do when driving on track. The more you practice this hard stuff, the easier it gets, and even the easy stuff gets easier. Wow, that’s a lot of stuff getting easier!
I’m not saying that you should never do mental imagery of an entire lap, or multiple laps. You should. But that’s not all that you should do. Break a lap down into the smallest pieces, and practice them in your mind, too. Many times, doing as many reps as you can.
Let your mental training turn you into an elite-level weight-lifter (for your mind).
Ross, you don't need to apologize for not telling us to spend more time visualizing the specifics over the whole. You've already taught us enough self-coaching, that we were probably already adapting that to our individual learning styles!
Andrew Huberman’s popular podcast just had a 2 hour episode on the power of mental visualization to learning. The tl;dr is get a good night sleep!