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.

[Skypalace]

Originally Posted by beez

...
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.

I agree with most but not all of this, many of these things CAN be seen with data, for example braking, momentum, and car balance can be easily seen with data. With wheelspeed data (most current cars with data connected with CAN have independent wheelspeed from all four corners), and then (optionally) adding steering wheel angle sensor, you can chart yaw.

Add syncrhonized video, and you can see exactly what the data is showing you (or vice versa, see something on the video and you can go see what this 'does' to the data).

Sure it's easy for a coach to spot this stuff, esp. if there are significant issues, but a ridealong coach isn't always possible for various reasons, and there are always sessions where you will be running solo.

Data has been the first mod I made to my first two race cars (Pi in my RS America and Motec in my 996 Cup), and my 997 Cup came with Motec, so I've had data in all three of my race cars. I have synchronized Chasecam in both the Cups.

Since I don't have a right seat, the vast majority of coaching I get from others is from analysis of video and data. Mostly video - they'll watch the video and point things out etc. I'll then go look at the data to make sure I fully understand exactly what's going on etc. I of course do much more self-analysis of data than I get in third-party analysis also.

Sometimes I'm lucky enough to be able to get video and/or data from a top pro driver in a similar car at the same track, so being able to analyze properly is very helpful.

Data does take a while to understand and to be able to fully use. Just like I never pass up an opportunity for someone to watch my video/data and give me tips, I never pass up an opportunity to see how someone else uses data.

I'm apparently different from Mooty - he wants to know how to go faster without needing to know all the details. I'm the opposite, I want to know all the gory details about what's going on with the car. Someone can say 'ease off the brakes earlier in turn 2', and I'll immediately want to go look at brake and longitudinal G traces to see what's happening under braking in 2 versus other corners, look at the synced video to see where exactly I'm easing off, etc.

Data allows me to do lots of self-coaching. I usually know exactly where that last little bit of time is, and it's usually not in technique. I usually know intellectually where I can carry more speed, but my foot doesn't always agree, and sometimes insists on lifting even when I'm telling it to stay planted :-) Or carries the brakes a little long even when I go I can carry a little more speed into that super-fast corner :-)

My rule #1 on data is to have it working reliably, along with video, and record every session, always. When I don't have a lot of time, the first thing I'll do is look at a trace of my fast lap of a session, versus my previous fast lap at that track (sometimes I'm faster, sometimes I'm slower) and look to see where the differences are (in Motec this is 'Show Variance'). If I'm picking up time somewhere, this tells me I made a good change, and to keep doing it. If I'm losing time somewhere, it tells me that I used to be better than I am now. I'll then look at other laps from the session compared to the fast lap, to see if there are common places where I often (but not always) lose time. This shows where I CAN be fast, but am not always as consistent as I need to be.

Of course, I'm at a different place than many, I'm usually looking for tenths of a second. I'm racing not DE, and I'm naturally both competitive and analytical. I like to be on pole, and if I'm not on pole I'm not far off, so I'm likely not making significant mistakes or driving errors.

One other thing that data does is let me quickly see that the car is working properly. Fuel pressure and battery voltage and fuel usage and speed at the end of the straight etc. etc. all let me see that I'm not starting to have fuel system or electrical or engine power problems that might become more severe. Also very helpful in diagnosis - I had a flakey fuel system problem and data let me 'prove' to the shop that wanted to replace some particular parts that it couldn't possibly have been those parts (I had two separate fuel pumps, and data showed that I had a problem on one side and not another, so common systems could not have been the problem). Turned out to be a collapsing hose between the cell and one of the pumps, after some swapping of pieces and data analysis discounted any other reasonable hypothesis.