Coaching...?

[beez]

Been lurking for a week or so - nice place you guys have here...

I think everyone, including coaches can benefit from coaching... no matter who you are or how good you are, little things creep into your driving that generally only someone else can really pick out. Always good to get a second opinion.

Along with being a PCA DE instructor, I'm one of the lead instructors at the Ron Fellows performance driving school and the Advanced Driving and Racing School at Spring Mountain near Las Vegas. Yes, I do a lot of instructing in Corvettes. I also do a lot of one-on-one coaching from intermediates to professional full-time racers, often through the school, but I'm often asked to fly to other tracks to coach. I've coached in everything from street Corvettes and Porsches to full-race C6Rs and Porsche Cup cars, as well as sports racers like 4 and 8 cylinder Radical race cars.

I think coaching is best received by drivers who are at the point where they begin to know and understand what they don't know - usually in the advanced-intermediate, and advanced driving level. It does take a while to learn the basics, then reach that point of enlightenment. But, they need to be receptive to coaching. I was surprised (maybe you wouldn't be) at how many drivers have hired me to validate how good/fast they are, as opposed to wanting to learn something new, or get an honest evaluation from another party how they're doing. While it does make it easy if you tell them what they want to hear - "hey, you're great!" - and lucrative, it's not very fulfilling for the coach, at least it's not for me. What's also been a surprise to me is how many who would consider themselves advanced drivers don't have that "unconscious" mastery of some of the basics. I'd say close to 40% of the advanced drivers I've coached either don't know how to properly H&T, or they do it poorly... and quite a few don't have good visual scanning skills - they don't look up the track far enough or don't use their side windows to "look ahead" when necessary.

I think the use of data logging equipment for the review of the telemetry can be very valuable, but you also need to know what you're looking for. For coaching purposes, it's good to have empirical data to be able to compare the process from lap-to-lap - a great way to be able to judge consistency and incremental improvement, but it's only one tool in the tool box. Data can tell you lots of stuff, but there's also many things it can't... things that only a good coach in the right seat can see and feel... like visual scanning, smoothness, anticipation, H&T skills, braking (too early, too late, over slowing the car), carrying momentum through corners, and probably most important - car balance... how balanced is the car at turn in, apex and exit, and how does that effect the car's momentum on corner exit.