Sometimes, The Orthodontists Are Faster

And other dirty secrets of worthless "pro" racers, on YouTube and at your local track

Google doesn’t have it, but maybe one of you will.

Way back in the days of the SPEEDVISION World Challenge, someone interviewed General Motors development engineer and multiple World Challenge series champion John Heinricy. At some point, the person doing the interview asked “Heinrocket” about his racing heroes. The conventionally acceptable thing to do in this situation is to name one F1 driver, one NASCAR driver, and one personal friend, but Heinricy had no patience for this bullshit so he promptly delivered a reasonably scathing reply along the lines of,

“I have no heroes in racing. We’re all about at the same capability level. I’m beating, or have beaten, all of them. There’s nobody who is much better than anyone else. Those days are long gone.”

I remember reading this and thinking whoa! But what about… uh, Wolf Henzler, who publicly beat everyone in World Challenge GT to death a few years before Sabine Schmidt came over and got thumped in the same series, by the same people? And isn’t half of Heinricy’s success due to GM’s ability to outspend the competition in terms of development?

The truth is, the “Heinrocket” was a lot more right than he was wrong. It wasn’t true seventy years ago, and it’s still not true in classes of cars where things happen quickly enough for one’s genetic predispositions in reflexes and vision come into play — that’s F1, Indycar, the fastest prototypes — but 99.9% of us can think of it as an ironclad fact. Let’s modify it to be amusing and call it Heinricy’s Law:

Anything your favorite pro can do, a trained orthodontist weekend warrior can also do, and sometimes better.

This is the secret shame of car racing, and it’s also why so many people flock to it late in life. It just isn’t that hard. Given a year of diligent effort, you too could be as fast around a track as “The Stig” or whatever jerkoff washed-up nobody you’re busy admiring on YouTube. This year’s LMP3 National Champion was trained by Ross Bentley. Thirty-six months ago, he’d never been on a racetrack.

There are things that the “pros” do better than the orthodontists, and I’ll discuss them below, but from your perspective they just aren’t important.

How do we know this? And why is it so, when it clearly wasn’t the case in the Fifties? The answer to both questions is the same: data.

My eyes were personally opened in 2009 when I went “pro” racing with Compass360 after just five years of casual track-rat time and three years running various shitboxes in NASA and LeMons. Compass believed in sharing all data, so the team coach compared my data with “the famous pro” of the team. I was the same or faster in every turn but the Climbing Esses. So we watched the pro’s in-car video, which showed that he was ignoring the team order not to hit curbs on said Climbing Esses. We had that team order because we’d broken control arms there, and that’s a stupid reason to retire from a race.

“Oh, damn him.” the owner said. “Well, he wants to be faster than his customer.” His customer was a young man who had inherited some money and wanted to be a Grand-Am champion with it. By the second half of the year, the student was quicker than the master, so the “pro” was looking for an unfair advantage to keep up.

Heinricy’s Corollary, First: When a pro is faster, he’s often abusing the car.

You can learn a lot from the data available in a modern racing car or via something like a Garmin Catalyst. It can show you exactly what you need to do. And if you’re not quite sure how to do it, there are a hundred good coaches out there who can show you. Sometimes, as in the case of Racers360, they can even do it via the Internet. My wife worked with Dion at Racers360 two years ago. Nowadays, she is blitzing her competition in SCCA and running more or less at the limit of the car. You have to be smart and dedicated to do it. But you can do it. At the age of thirty. Or forty. Or sixty.

Oh, and the “pro” in the above story? 13 years later, I see this same mook who was bashing up a Civic for extra time back then pretty much everywhere, including on the two dumbest corporate YouTube media channels currently operating. (One of those, of course, is Motor Trend.)

Last weekend, I watched another celebrated-but-barely-making-ends-meet “pro” win big in the GridLife Touring Car series. This guy has been winning all year, but after watching the race in person I could see why: his car was much faster between the corners. This is odd in a power-to-weight series like GridLife, isn’t it? The second-place driver posted something rueful on Instagram about needing to improve his “straight line handling”. Did I mention that I saw this same “pro” get penalized in World Challenge for fabricating parts and stamping them with Honda factory part numbers? I’m not sure he’s welcome in that sanction anymore, but he’s thriving in GridLife… driving a Honda.

Grassroots racing is positively infected by these self-promoting jerkoffs. They’re always offering to drive your car for you, always trying to get you to ride shotgun with them in a street car. It’s all about the grift. Everybody in the business wants to be the next Tom Long.

Who’s Tom Long? Why, only someone who was nothing but a decent autocrosser when he happened to run into a Florida lobbyist named Derek Whitis at a trackday. A few years later, they were Grand-Am champions together. Tom Long ended up working with Mazda in all sorts of professional capacities, all because of Derek and Derek’s ability to pay for a championship.

(To be fair, Tom is a very sound driver, and a nice guy. No kind of grifter whatsoever. It really happened in organic and natural fashion for him. But everybody else wants to make it happen by finding a rich mook in a Por-sha, putting stars in his eyes, and taking him racing.)

As far as I can tell, and this is based on fifteen years of reading data, talking to all the best coaches, and working with first-rank drivers myself, there is almost no difference between the dude winning regional Spec Miata and “The Stig”, whoever was playing him at the time. If you put “The Stig” in that Spec Miata, he’d get about the same results. He would likely be better at the actual racing part of it, making better passes and defending against other cars while losing less time on track, but his laptimes would be about the same.

Heinricy’s Corollary, Second: Racing is about more than lap time in the pro ranks, but these extra skills are usually meaningless in amateur racing or time trials.

When I discussed the above with a friend of mine who still races in the shitbox classes like LeMons and Champ/Chump, he said, “But… this dude comes in and goes five seconds faster in the cars, all the time!”

“Yes, because LeMons drivers are basically freeway traffic with no training,” I responded. I can put five seconds on a LeMons car easy. I put ten seconds on a LeMons car a few years ago, running 1:49 at MSR Houston when the rest of the team was doing 2:01. Doesn’t mean I’m great. It means they sucked.

If you don’t want to suck, you can fix that. Get a coach, buy a Garmin Catalyst, work with Dion at Racers360. By patiently working your data and improving in atomic, measurable, disciplined measures, you can get to the pace of your favorite YouTube pro. Or better. There’s no magic to it.

I’d say that the gap in laptime between a decent amateur with training and a “famous” pro in a normal “sedan” race car like a Civic, Mustang, or 911 is under a second. Sometimes the amateur is faster. You don’t need to waste any time respecting these so-called pro drivers. They’re no better than you are. Sometimes they are worse; when the late Sabine Schmidt came to Speed World Challenge after years of being widely feted as “Queen Of The Ring”, she finished in the back half or worse every time. She got beat by orthodontists and lawyers.

At the Ring? They’d no doubt struggle to keep up, and they wouldn’t have her track knowledge. But in a regular race, in more or less equal cars — I guarantee that she lost multiple times to someone with the name of his two-person suburban medical practice on the doors. Nothing against Sabine. She was great at her job, and a wonderful person besides. But there’s nothing magic about “pro” drivers, even if they are cute, charming, and famous.

Modern road racing is a lot like drag racing. It’s determined in the workshop, weeks ahead of time. There are a few drivers who are good at working traffic; I’m arrogant enough to think I’m one of them. I can make up positions everywhere from NASA to World Challenge. But I can’t hold those positions over a 30-lap race against a car with thirty more horsepower. That only happens in movies.

I’m not trying to be negative here. I’m trying to be positive. I want to encourage you to go out and be the best racer you can possibly be, without worrying that So-and-so is going to show up and make you look bad. If you’re prepared, all the embarrassment will be on his side.

Want another example? Sheena Monk is famous for a big Lamborghini Super Trofeo crash she had in her rookie year of racing. At that point, she had about a year’s worth of experience and so she made a big mistake.

Two years later, after working diligently with her coaches, she won an IMSA race. Fair and square. Ahead of every big name on YouTube or elsewhere — well, to be fair, most of the YouTube people are on YouTube because they can’t get work in IMSA or anywhere else. So she beat the pros who beat the YouTube pros, so to speak.

One last anecdote: In my last year at Road&Track they brought in J.D. Hildebrand to set the lap times for PCOTY. Who had set them before? Why, that was me. To put it mildly, I was worried. How bad would J.D. make me look? Turns out our data was about the same. I was better in some turns, he was better in others. In an IndyCar I wouldn’t be fit to shine his Pilotis but in a street car there was no magic to be had. Think of that. One of the greatest young drivers in American open-wheel competition against an old, fat cripple. And we were about the same. No magic.

Not because I’m great. Because we are all about the same.

Those of you who signed up for my “Paddock Club” membership here on Substack know you’re entitled to a coaching day as part of that. My first such day is happening in September. I know the fellow involved will improve. I guarantee it. And if he keeps working at it, he’ll eventually be just as fast as “The Stig”.

It can be hard to get the publicity and stupidity out of your mind. A former student of mine just told me via text that a certain “pro” is “a driver mod for sure”. Meaning he was worth a second or two in the car. I refrained from pointing out that my student had repeatedly set laps in NASA lately that were at or beyond the same level of what “the driver mod” was doing in the same car. I’d bet real money that my student could match or beat “the pro” in a race. But my student doesn’t realize that. He’d rather listen to hype than look at his own data, which is exemplary.

Kids. Let them have their heroes, right? But if you ever meet your heroes in sports car racing, I advise you to do the following: Kick their asses. You’ll be channeling the spirit of John Heinricy when you do that. Especially if you beat the “Heinrocket” himself, I'd say.