Just a few thoughts on driving faster.

I was doing a sick #2 in the restroom at the office earlier today, and I started to daydream about some ideas. Firstly, I want to note that I don’t mean to come off high-and-mighty, since these are just ideas and nothing more.

Driving faster, to me, means driving your car to its maximum potential. Taking that into consideration, there are a lot of variables in the equation of “fastest driving.” There’s the car and of course, there’s you, and then there’s the method. But the best method is going to depend in a lot of things.

Not all cars are the same. Maybe I should take it a step further and say that no car is the same. Everyone puts their own parts onto it, and they personalize it, and basically everything is different from car to car. So, your car has its best characteristics and it has one way to be driven to its maximum potential. Let me be a little bit more clear. Should the car be trail braked? Should the throttle be opened up as soon as possible? Is steering correction ok if acceleration is maintained or is it better to gain stability, THEN accelerate? I think there are a lot of things that tend to be generalized when teaching driving. But I think the true reality is that a car will have the way that it wants to be driven to go as fast as it can. (of course, there’s mods to change that “best way” into a different “best way,” but I want to mention that later.)

Ok, so we’ve talked a bit about the car. The next variable is the driver. The truth is that there are different ways to drive a car– different lines, different braking points, and so on and so forth. Person-A may be most comfortable braking in a straight line, whereas person-B may feel better by trailing the brakes into corners. Let’s say person-B gets a better lap time than person-A. So, person-A notices this and tries changing the way he brakes to person-B’s style, something he’s not comfortable with, and his lap times actually get worse than before. What I’m getting at is this — is it better to nurture your person style or is it better to ditch it and do something else that other people are using? Honestly, I feel like person-A should keep nurturing his style until he’s an expert at it, and then learn a bit about person-B’s style so he knows how to defeat it. And so, you get people who have different driving styles, experts at their respective style. I think you run into problems when you try to force everyone to drive one way. Nurturing your style while learning about different things; I think that’s the best way.

Okay, so we’ve talked about the car and the way it wants to be driven. And we’ve talked about the driver and the driving style that he or she is best at. The last thing are mods. I think the purpose of mods is to bring those 2 variables closer together, so that the car and driver have a style that agrees with one another. That’s harmony. Or you meet somewhere inbetween, bringing the car’s style a bit closer to the way the driver works and evolving your driving style a little bit to become closer to what the car wants. That gives you the driving style that the car likes and one that you feel most comfortable with. And comfort is important– comfort is the confidence to push limits.

At least, that’s just what I think.
So, what do you think?