Today I raced at OCRC again, and a couple of things crossed my mind. You see this coming week is the last week of practice before Reedy, so I want to get some good laps under my belt before the race, with both cars. I mounted up new tyres for both cars so I have a few sets for the coming week. The thing is, new tyres suck! They take a while to break in, which makes racing them tough. So here is what I was thinking about.
The importance of tyres in any racing is huge, but I feel like in 10th offroad it’s more noticeable than in 8th scale. If your tyres are a bit off, your lap time could be 0.2s off. Over a run, that will be about 3-4 seconds. At the pace and consistency we are racing now, that’s really hard to make up. So if your tyres aren’t right, and you can’t compensate for it with car setup, to gain that traction back, you will be a bit off your best pace. This week I will actually be testing to see how to compensate for the lack of traction, while maintaining the same balanced handling. Anyway, this leads to another problem.
When you are racing and you feel good but you are losing time to drivers you feel like you should be beating, it’s the perfect scenario for a mental meltdown to happen. This means you start pushing too hard, and making mistakes. You get frustrated because you aren’t as fast as you think you should be, and you start making mistakes. What you need to do is actually slow down a bit. Calm down, focus even more, and only on your car. Don’t care about anything or anyone else, ok maybe you are out of the race for your win. Deal with what you have, focus on your car, and turning perfect clean laps, and salvage what you can. Normally if you can do this, you will still get a decent result. Maybe you don’t win, but you could still be 2nd or 3rd, instead of blowing out and finishing at the back.
This is something that I need to keep in mind at Reedy, because I just had the GREAT news that I made it into the invitational class, along with Barry Baker. I guess its ON now, I can’t let that guy beat me, I will never hear the end of it. I need to maximise my own performance regardless of what happens in the race. If I get a front row start and get taken out (likelihood of this approximately 100%), I need to be able to remain calm, not blow a gasket, and salvage whatever I can, instead of thinking about what could have been, and crashing 17 times because I’m not focusing on my driving.
Barry Baker was so happy after his epic win at Sunday Night Showdown at OCRC that he organised his tool box. Then we had the great news that we both made it into the Reedy Invitational class. What a day, I think Barry will be smiling all day at work tomorrow.
THEQuagraine 