Taking a different approach to practice in STL!

The Art of Racing: Insights from a Driver's Perspective

As I get back into third gear and really get into the power band up here, I hope that shortening the ratio will give me a boost quicker and then we won't have this lazy spot with the car maybe riding limiter a little bit more. But I think the car will feel much better. Recently, we realized that we had nitrous, so that last lap I had it gripped up a bit more, and I was shocked. It's almost like holy crap, this thing's moving! Making similar mistakes as I did last year when following Osbo and getting lost in the smoke in transition too early is something I'm going to work on in the next set of practice laps.

Counting is one of the things I need to work on if I'm completely blind; I know when to transition because it's very difficult to know. The last thing you want to do is plow into the door to someone because you're transitioning too late. So, either I gotta look for that visual point, like the inner curve and transition then, or just kind of count and then remember my marker voice. That way if that scenario happens, I'll be prepared.

Overall, I'm happy that I'm taking a different approach to practice and trying to get more "jslaps" in because usually I'm just so worried about qualifying high that I don't get chase practice, and then I make a dumb mistake. So, hopefully we can work all that out, and I'll drive better because of it.

You're out of control; look at this guy! Hey, hey, we're just sneaking into you want anything? Really consistent? No, so going over some of the data and watching some of the footage, the car seems pretty on par. It's a little bit slow over the track, so we're gonna add more grip to it. But the biggest issue is digging out of the hole; the shift is just taking way too long going from second to third. For the next lap, I'm gonna try to leave it in third and see if I can get the wheel speed up fast enough.

I think that'll solve a lot of issues and make my line smoother and cause me to not get gapped as much. So give it a shot; see how she feels in this run. I'm going to leave it in third gear after the hairpin, which is one of my favorite lead runs from the night. Leaning in third really helped get rid of that shift point, and I felt really good about all the zones and stuff here, and the car was moving. We had a little bit of grip at nighttime; I felt really good about this chase run.

I've been struggling with the transition, though. For that last corner, he did overcook it a little bit, and I kind of saw that happening. But it's very difficult to avoid hitting that wall when you're in the chase position if you don't allow enough room in that area on this run with Gucci. I was a little bit delayed on my transition timing, uh right around that like right before they entered and when you are a little bit too slow to get back on throttle there you end up getting gapped on that straight because the difference gets exaggerated a little bit.

Better on that last transition, but still something I want to work on. This one following Castro, though; I was pretty feeling good about it. It definitely could have used a little more proximity, but overall, all the transition points and zones I had kind of spot on. I just needed to push a little bit harder either with more grip or just not really left by breaking or bleeding off throttle as much as I was.

Ah, is oh; it's tight man feel it! Overall, uh definitely took a different approach to this practice; not my best tandem runs ever, but you know I never get to have this much fun driving FD because I get so worried about my qualifying runs and this time I got to have some good practice. And there's a lot of dumb mistakes that I'm making that I'm glad I'm making now versus in battle. So tomorrow, I think we get two more practice runs before we go to qualifying; don't really care how I qualify as long as I qualify, we'll be good.

And then we'll have another warm-up full competition. But you guys will see that in the next video. So, I hope you enjoyed this one; I tried to be analytical after runs, and hope you guys can see that we also tried overlaying the runs. Let us know if you like that or if you don't like that sometimes it's repetitive to see like the in-car than the out-of-car but sometimes I like to see it as a driver. Um but I can understand that for like 10 runs, I might get repetitive.

So anyway, give us some feedback; hope you enjoyed this one! I know it's a quick one, but uh oh!