morsini

Hire a coach in your car, or if it's an experience further away from, rent. Come out to CA and drive a Miata at MRLS or Sonoma. I can hook you up.
Oh, and as others have said, go racing if you really want to learn to go faster.

ProCoach

Rick, Bertil Roos’ program starts off at a higher level than the others, IIRC.

If a driver needs “a carrot” to transcend their own “limits,” then their course of study can be improved.

Every pro racer I know qualifies quicker than they race , unless the car spec is extremely tight or they don’t have enough time in the car.

Time trials, like autocross, is superb training for coming out of the box FAST! A skill that should be developed well, in every discipline.

Lastly, and the major reason I recommend a pro school for everyone that hasn’t gone to one, experienced or not, is the consistency of the curricula and solid reinforcement of the fundamentals. Coaches and instructors, in my experience, are highly variable. Professional schools? Far less so.

TXE36

Hmm, and I thought carrots or rabbits were good things. Perhaps not. Food for thought.

-Mike

audipwr1

+1 and usually on the 2nd or at most 3rd lap in said qualy

From racing in larger fields that is all you get so you need to come ready to rip it out

I've done a few schools - most fun are rally related schools - id also say it helps you develop Skills of what to do when you have stepped out over the limit. Watching lots of track day videos here most of the spins are recoverable ESP on street tires and rally school will give you the tools to enable that

Just my .0001 cents

Slakker

+1 on Bondurant. But why did they switch from Vipers to Challengers?

ProCoach

The manufacturer tie-up for most schools want current production models featured.

MarcD147

1) how do skills transfer across car (types)?

• eg I am going to race a 996 cup. how would doing a bertil roos school that uses Formula cars benefit me? would I benefit more from a school using miatas? hellcats? are there schools that use cars more similar to 996 cups?
• I remember reading that Patrick Dempsey really benefited from doing the dirtfish rally school ( but that was probably a custom program and on top of lots of other coaching/practice)

if I budget 5k for a season of driver improvement what is the best way or combination of ways to spend that?

• right seat coach (in my car)
• coaching using data (using my car's data)
• racing school in a different car

mpruden

Don't knock the Challengers. I was lucky enough to have Andy Lee as an instructor there. We did one lap in a Challenger at speed with him driving (at probably 7/10s). I think I blacked out.

SoCal RJ

Great information here as I recently asked the same question on the 997 forum. RJ

Frank 993 C4S

Really depends on how quickly you no longer need to think about driving your car fast and when it becomes natural so you can focus on everything else around you.

I think Rick already has thousands of laps in his car so it makes sense for him to try a different perspective in a different car.

For you I would recommend working with a coach on data. Not sure there are many that would ride right seat in a Cup anyway.

Veloce Raptor

I would. And routinely do.

LuigiVampa

You make an interesting counterpoint Peter. I'm thinking that the quicker pace of a pro racer in practice or qualifying is not the experience of most amateur racer. If you look at track records on Rennpoints about 2/3 of the records are set during a race, as opposed to practice or qualifying. There are some outliers, such as Lime Rock, where records appear to be evenly spaced for practice/qualifying versus race. I attribute that to the length of the track having some impact.

Accordingly, can we surmise from your comments that pro drivers are more disciplined, and thus have less of a need of the "carrot", while that is an area most amateur drivers need to work on? I think you are saying as much in your posts but just wanted to see if you agreed that there is a difference.

toddlamb

Do it. A racing school. ANY one. You’ll be amazed to learn the things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

Matt Romanowski

Andy is awesome! He's helped a ton of racers and drivers.

ProCoach

LV, first let me reinforce that I see little genetic or nascent talent differential between good ams and good pros. That means (nearly) every driver has potential to drive at the highest level...

Every driver bleeds red, they all put their pants on one leg at a time (except for Lally, that’s a JOKE!) and the reason why Stevan MacAleer, Trent Hindman, Corey Lewis or Andrew Davis (and folks like them) are so good and so fast is because they’ve focused on NOTHING else (there’s that discipline...) for most of their pre-teen, teen and adult lives.

Idon’t deify pros, for the simple reason that they are human, like the rest of us, and subject to the same variability, distractions and foibles as the rest of us, but their focus and discipline do allow them to transcend what they themselves even believe is possible. But that is a separate subject entirely...

In the most competitive series’, qualifying is a separate objective from racing. The goal is to optimize the car for a super short run, biased towards the lowest legal weight, least fuel load, best tires and tune it to stay there for a few laps. The goal for the driver is to summon the concentration to visualize and execute at the HIGHEST level for a very short time. If you set fastest lap in the race (barrIng anomalies like “a good tow”), then you’re doing something wrong.

So yes, I think there are many places Club and am drivers need the develop in order to get to that level, including qualifying optimization.

As an aside to both Rick and Marc’s development, the laws of physics don’t really know the difference (in the BIG picture) between cars, and when I see talented ams start developing into pro level drivers, this is one of the first explorations and skill building exercises they do (team o’ neil, dirtfish and other car control development programs).

My impression is that Rick is SO comfortable in his car, that he drives to a level and that’s it. Sure, his PB incrementally improves, and a coach could certainly help optimize that, but he is now at the stage where attending a pro school could give him a fresh perspective on how to incrementally push his OWN ideas and belief system forward to become even better, rather than fine tuning the same old thing.

For Marc, well, he just thinks too much! Seriously, just drive the car and look carefully at the data to benchmark performance. His “butt calibration” is fine, for now, and accumulating experience in the new car with critical feedback, backed up by an examination of how much is left in his performance metrics and how far apart what he thinks he’s doing in the car from what he is ACTUALLY doing in the car will keep him busy for a good while (at least this coming season).