I was replaying my runs from today's event in my head awhile ago, and came up
with an interesting (to me) observation that I thought I'd throw out here.
For those of you who haven't been keeping score, I'm co-driving Kevin Lahey's
1999 Miata for the slush series - I don't have much/any experience with them, so
it's an interesting opportunity.
Consistently today, I felt that I wasn't getting a good line with early full
throttle out of the slalom and onto the back straight. I felt that so much
after my first run that I intentionally charged it harder my second and almost
took out the whole back straight. My last run and two fun runs were better, and
I was using the whole width of the course, but they still didn't feel right,
especially in comparison to his Laheyness' runs.
In retrospect, I don't think I was trusting the car enough to aggressively drive
it all the way to the outside of the course. Instead, I was constraining my
line to maybe a couple of feet inside the cones, while leaving room to catch the
car if it got sideways. Well, of course with that constrained line it DID get
sideways to various degrees, I caught it, and everything looked heroic. But
that self-fulfilling prophecy was slowing me down noticeably from what a full
commitment to the proper line would have been.
As Josh Sirota so incisively puts it:
"Don't LET the car do anything. YOU control the car."
Mea culpa.
KeS
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