Balance Your Focus on the Lap Time / Predicted Time

Eliminate the time deficit to trigger flow.

When I ask drivers to describe what being in the flow feels like, one of the key factors they mention is how their perception of time changes (not lap time, but life time). It slows down for most racers. It's as if they have all the time in the world to do what needs to be done. On the other hand, when a driver isn’t performing well, they feel rushed, as if they’re running out of time.

Is this shift in our perception of time — what flow researchers call "time dilation" — a result of entering the zone, or is it a trigger for it?

Steven Kotler, who wrote the book The Rise of Superman (a great read that explores how extreme athletes get into flow), suggests that time can be both a trigger and a result.

Think back to a time in your life when you faced a task, let’s say a work project, fixing a kart, a car, or setting up a simulator. You got deeply into it, with no specific time frame in mind, but thought you’d finish in an hour or so. Instead, four hours later, your growling stomach reminded you that you were fully immersed in the task — you lost yourself in it, completely forgetting about time.

Now, if right before you dived into this project, someone told you that you only had thirty minutes to finish it, and by the way, “Do it right!”, would you have gotten lost in the task? Would you have entered the flow? Or would you have been checking the time, thinking about whether the outcome — “doing it right” — was achievable?

I suspect you’re thinking the same as I am: without strict time constraints and the pressure to achieve a “perfect” result, you’re actually more likely to perform at your best and enter the flow.

So why do we pay so much attention to lap time when we’re trying to perform at our best behind the wheel? I know, I know, racing is all about competition, even if it’s just competing with ourselves to beat our own personal best lap time. And that’s where the delicate balance of driving comes into play. We think controlling the kart is the biggest challenge in racing, but no. There’s also our desire to win (against other racers, the stopwatch, ourselves). If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

If time can negatively impact our ability to get into the flow and isn’t just a result, should we eliminate it from our mindset? Hey, maybe we should tell ourselves that we have the whole day to complete just one lap! Maybe that would trigger the zonal performance, and in the process, we’d end up driving so well that we’d complete the lap faster than ever before.

As Kotler says, "I bet neurobiologically, this triggers a drop in cortisol and adrenaline levels. It reduces stress, allowing us to zoom out on the task at hand and handle it better. In short, the availability of time helps us find a balance between challenge and skill.”

Lap time is an after-the-fact result. It’s not the goal.

If letting go of time leads to better results through better performance, how can I explain this to a driver who seems to be doing everything they can to chase another car? Isn’t that goal-oriented?

I’d argue that a well-performing driver chasing another car isn’t focused on the competition or the result. I’d say the driver is focused on what’s happening right here and now, in the moment. They’re hyper-focused on where they’re going, not on the result. In fact, less attention is given to mechanical/analytical thinking like “do this now, then this next, and turn here, throttle here...” and more on “just do it.” As we evolve, more processes happen automatically, and our attention can be focused on something more important — what exactly? This is something to understand and develop at the right stage in your career because it will be much harder to retrain yourself later.

Of course, some drivers, while chasing another car, think too much about what the other driver is doing, and this is just as harmful to performance as overthinking.

I wish there were an easy, identifiable procedure for balancing these competing factors, but there isn’t. To complicate things further, the balance tilts slightly one way or the other depending on who you are and what works best for you. In other words, it’s a bit different for every driver, as we are all unique individuals.

So when you’re driving at the limit of your ability, how do you balance focusing on lap times or results with what’s needed to get into the flow zone? Do you think about lap time or your position? Are you aware of them? Do you completely push them out of your mind until the event/session is over? Is time a trigger for your zone performances, its result, or neither?

If it’s something you haven’t thought about, I encourage you to make a few consistent comparisons of your driving/racing while focusing on your lap and predicted time, and at other times when you completely ignore them. See what works best for you. And the next time you need to do a telemetry run, let the person who usually beats you on lap time drive, and before you start your session, imagine a number one-tenth faster, picture it clearly in front of you, and say to yourself — I WILL GO FASTER — see it vividly in your mind, and just drive. The time will come naturally.

Balance Challenge and Confidence to Trigger Flow

Balance the difficulty of driving with your belief, and you’ll have a better chance of entering the zone.

Without a doubt, sim racing and kart racing are tough. And this can be a trigger for the state of mind we naturally seek as humans.

In his groundbreaking book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains what drives us into the state of flow or “the zone.” Csikszentmihalyi, considered the father of this topic, knows what he’s talking about, as he’s spent most of his adult life researching what makes a person enter this state.

Being in the flow is something almost everyone has experienced at some point in their lives, whether through sports, music, driving, business, parenting, public speaking, or a hobby. For some — the superstars of activity — it’s almost a way of life. For others, it’s a fleeting experience that vanishes in an instant. But once you’ve experienced it, you crave it again and again. Racing offers us the chance to flirt with flow — it’s accessible, unlike many other activities we spend time on. Where else can we challenge ourselves as much as a race car on track at speed allows us to?

The key factor that Csikszentmihalyi claims will trigger flow is a balanced sense of challenge and belief (confidence). If you face a task that isn’t challenging but you don’t believe you can handle it, you likely feel ambivalent about doing it. You probably don’t even want to do it, and it’s unlikely you’ll enter flow while doing it. If you feel you’re facing a significant challenge but don’t believe in your ability to handle it, you’re likely to experience anxiety and won’t perform at your best. If the task ahead of you seems easy, and you’re very confident in your ability to handle it, it will likely feel almost boring — this also won’t trigger flow performance.

However, when you feel challenged, but deep down you believe in your ability to handle it, that’s when you’re most likely to perform in flow. A sense of challenge balanced with confidence leads to performing in the zone.

What do races do? They challenge you. And most successful drivers have a fairly strong sense of belief in themselves (or they work on building that belief, especially when they’re well-prepared and constantly improving). This often triggers flow. And we’re drawn to this state. In fact, we’re more than just drawn to it. It’s a basic human need. We want it, and we want more of it! The essence of being human is endless expansion and growth — it’s in our nature, otherwise, we get bored, fall into despair, and simply wither away.

Racing does this. It gives us the opportunity to experience flow by triggering all sorts of "reward chemicals" in our brains. Like dopamine. Flow triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, just like certain drugs. So driving in flow is more than a drug, it is a drug! Though it’s doubtful it’s cheaper than a drug habit, it’s definitely healthier and more legal! ))

The mental and physical training that comes from karting or sim racing is thrilling. Just like a runner’s high, the driver’s high is triggered by the release of chemicals in our brains. Message me privately, let me know if you agree with this and whether you feel something similar in those moments? Do you miss racing? Or maybe we should take a break and not race for two weeks to see if some understanding comes to you?

So, what to do with this information? Turn your sim races and real races into a challenge you believe you can handle. When you head into your next race, if you think, “This will be easy,” you’ll likely perform worse; if you think, “I can’t keep up, I can’t handle this,” you also won’t be racing at your best. But, to some degree, it’s a matter of how you choose to view what you’re facing, like your next race. Think of it as a tough challenge, but one that you can overcome thanks to all the effort you put into learning and improving. This way, you’ll increase your chances of success in the flow state.

It’s not instant success. It might take some time. But now is the best time to start. The sooner you do this, the sooner you’ll see yourself performing in the zone, in flow, more often. And you’ll always love it!

Stay in the moment

A real story about one driver in the race: He was competing in a real endurance race, and a couple of hours before the finish, the team radioed him and said, “Keep it up. At this pace, we might make it to the podium.” A few turns later, while pushing the car through the Esses at COTA, the thought flashed in his head: “We could get the podium.” And he messed up the entire section of corners, almost wrecking the car. The same happened with Ayrton Senna in Monaco. He crashed when he was leading one lap.

The lesson is simple: focus on the process of driving, and the likelihood of achieving the desired result will increase. Stay in the present, focused on driving. Because when you start thinking about the result or anything else, you’re not performing as well as you can, or as well as you need to in order to reach the podium.

Of course, this is easier said than done.

Staying in the moment sounds Zen, but it’s simply a challenge. In reality, for many people, it’s easier not to stay in the moment. We spend so much time thinking about what happened in the past — what someone said, how a car cut me off on the track, where I was a week ago — or about the future — what I’ll say to my boss, where we’re going on vacation this year. During sim races, these thoughts are often like: “I keep braking too early at the first corner, I should’ve adjusted the settings before this session, this jerk keeps blocking me, this lap feels faster than 43.5, or it’ll be amazing to be on the podium.”

Using the famous Steve McQueen line from Le Mans, “Racing is life. Everything else is just waiting,” as a starting point, what if we used life as a tool to improve our racing results? If you spend most of your life in the present, focusing on what’s here and now, and what you can control, you’ll spend more time in the moment during races too. One leads to the other. Practice being in the moment.

I suspect you’re human, which means you’ll pop out of the moment from time to time. That’s something we all do, because we’ve practiced it many times! The issue isn’t leaving the moment; it’s how quickly you can get back into the present. Practice returning to the moment.

One way to do this is to make staying in the present your goal for a practice session. Don’t worry about lap times, results, or what others think. Just spend the entire session focused on being in the moment. That is, the act of driving. And then, if you start thinking about something from the past or future, tell yourself “Moment” and return to the process of driving — your braking points, when and how you release the brakes, where and how you turn the wheel, where you’re looking, the transition between braking and getting back on the throttle, how smoothly or quickly you start to accelerate, where you’re back at full speed, your shifting points, any reference marks, and so on. Use “Moment” as a trigger to refocus on driving.

I’m not suggesting you think about every step on a conscious level. Everything happens too fast to follow a checklist, and you can overthink the driving process. But if you are aware of where your attention is focused, over time it will reinforce the mental programming of handling the moment on a subconscious level. Developing the skill to stay in the flow of driving and refocusing on the process of driving is like any other skill — it takes practice, repetition. For example, you could take the chicane before the curve in the clockwise layout faster by 4-6 km/h, maintaining an effective exit from the corner, but you won’t understand it until you feel the speed and load and realize that the limit in that corner hasn’t been reached yet.

I think we all need to spend more time in the present moment (myself included, of course!), and when we do, we’ll drive better in karts and cars during races. And the more time you spend on the track, the more time you’ll be doing this in your life as well. It’s Yin and Yang, all very Zen!

Go to a park, find a quiet spot, and feel the grass you’re sitting on, the wind, and the sounds of the birds, and let go of everything else — just be…

I always lose to myself when I start thinking before start and when I drive...