Thank you for defining corollary #1. I've seen it time and again in data, and I don't like it as an engineer. I am one of those who think Fangio was simply way more skilled than anyone else on the grid at that time for the same reason.
Its harder today to be abusive in the same way, so it narrows the field quite a bit when computers do a lot in top series racing, but often you can still notice subtle things when you look at data.
At the very sharp end of it you have things like rate of brake pedal release that make a real difference in a close race, of course. But those differences usually add up to one second or less, not the immense gap envisioned by outsiders.
Anecdote that backs you up: One of my co-workers' father has been building race engines for karts and mini stock cars in central Virginia for ages. Twenty+ years ago he raced and built engines for some of the competitors. It was his hobby essentially. This was at the time that Denny Hamlin was coming up racing karts and mini stock cars in central Virginia. My coworker told me that at the time he was a name and people recognized him as a competent driver but he was nothing special in the race series. When other racers were trailering home to go to work and building their cars after hours, Denny's parents sold their family home to buy their kid the best of the best to push his career.
The "heroes" in racing excel because they have well-financed dedicated backers, whether corporate or parental, that gives them every advantage possible. They're nothing heroic in and of themselves. Strip them of the benefits of such backing and no surprise they rarely exceed a competent average Joe.
And that is exactly why the women of that dreadful W series who keep doing well will never graduate to a higher level is because of....
ding ding ding.... financial backing!
There are so many instances of this in motorsports that it is very overplayed by now. Yet, tons of people think guys or gals just get the short end of the stick for rides.
It's all about money. Always has been. I have yet to see a poor race driver in the current era. If they didn't have money, someone behind them did.
My oldest flirted with karting and fully agree. The dollars spent on 8 year olds chasing wins at New Castle Motorsports Park could easily operate a super-midsize jet. A bastard like me with no mechanical skill and an F-150 didn't have a chance.
And that's why you have to decide as a parent. Are you going to join the arms race? If not, don't even bother. If you are and you're anyone under the local rich guy, you literally have to find a rich guy to finance your kid.
The same is also true of MANY kids sports right now. It's a giant business. Makes my wife a little peeved that I don't want to encourage the kids to do any sports later on. I'd rather they just find something to be passionate about and learn to be happy with less. *shrug*
Can't wait for the day Jack gets into a real analysis of Formula One and the money structure there. So much to dive into. It's just all money all the time. There is no grass roots structure there.
Fully agree. I think we have just as much fun screwing around at K1 karting from time to time than we would trying (and likely failing) to compete in competitive karting, and the unspent money went towards their future so they can hopefully start adulthood debt-free.
I worked closely with a guy who had 3-7' tall sons, all of whom won D-I NCAA championships and went on to the NBA. He said repeatedly that there's no hope now of any semblance of a normal childhood for kids who want to play at an elite level, and so many of those who sacrifice childhood will have no hope of earning a living actually playing sports.
It is DISGUSTING the amount of time and money is spent on children to play sports and attempt to push them to an elite level when the KIDS DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THE SPORT.
Kids get one childhood.
Could be wrong, but perhaps that is why there is a prolonging of childhood after college amongst 20 somethings as the realization sets in that the adulthood they were told to embrace as an early teen isn't the one they ended up with?
It is a tough choice to make as a parent. Some kids need more pushing than others. Given that I don't think my parents or I had ever even heard of karting at the appropriate age for beginning participation, I can't fault them for that. However I do regret (my decision to quite) but them not pushing me more to keep going with (baseball in my case) when I turn 13 and tried to quit everything because I was slow to hit my growth spurt. I am under no impression I would have even been good enough to walk on D1, but I still would have had more fun than not playing.
Now my daughter is about the same age, going through her own stuff, and it is not easy to know how hard to push her.
I am sure you are thinking of the worst cases and excesses, but each choice on how to help is a slippery slope into those things. It is a struggle each day, so as much as I do despise those parents, I see how I could get there.
It’s true not just of this hobby but most professions. Those who are backed and pushed from a young age to a higher degree than others will near always have that advantage.
My friend who was d1 ROTY is like that. When you get the gold key you can focus it all on honing talent if not just letting the machine do the work. I know it’ll come
off a bit jealous but it was annoying to watch his success with the “corporate backed” c6 completely eating up kids with home brewed Nissan 240s etc.
It’s not that I wasn’t happy to see him to do well, but I’ve been on that underdog side before. Not being able to afford the “right” tools and fighting with less took me right back to HS and college - which always seems to have a life parallel somewhere.
Jacks comment of races won in the garage/shop is pretty spot on. I obviously get into more drag racey type stuff merely due to cost and time restraints. Its a HUGE commitment to run open track. Even as a weekend warrior or some sort of annual semi annual warrior like my dumb ass was/is.
At any rate, the ability to “hot rod” can offset money but only to a point. In the straightline business the fastest way to the top is through your wallet. Even the fastest home brew just isn’t consistent enough or reliable enough to go rounds without substantial parts investment.
As of late our little weekend warrior “team” has been cleaning up the stick shift no-prep stuff for almost 2yrs now. Sounds cool, but the classes are smaller and rich friend likes to funnel in the money. Mindset doesn’t change though. We’ve been seeing growth and the attraction brings out other pockets. You can guess which ones are competitive.
So in closing I mostly just need a backer so I can stop working so much and concentrate on being as fast as the others 😁
Until then I’ll clutch my bronze star outlook of “impressive for what it is!” - be that vehicle or personal talent 🤪
We get to go out there. Weekend after weekend. And just... just go for it.
We get to spend our only fuckin' lives, while the rest of our cohort is jerking off to anime, binging TV, and reading Tweets, or whatever - out there living. Racing. Training. Traveling. Living. Making decisions that have immediate, permanent consequences.
The stick's short on both ends, but between choosing this life and "knowing a lot about which IPAs are good" - I'll break every bone, bleed every drop of blood, set every dollar on fire, and go blind looking for every last tenth.
The thrill of agony. The glory of defeat. Long live racing.
On a semi-related note: what in your opinion is the most difficult task in motorsports? My guess is winning on an Indy car street circuit from any starting position outside the top five. The "track" is a bumpy public street, the cars make a ton of downforce and have minimal suspension travel, and there's a concrete barrier at each corner with no margin for error, so every attempted pass is a near-collision while you're trying to brake and turn with a tire or two in the air and the car beating the living hell out of you.
Those Speedvision touring car races were some of the most entertaining I’ve still seen to this day. Saw one in person at Texas Motor Speedway, and loved the aggression of the drivers and how they just let ‘em race.
The nerd in me loves all of the data acquisition going on in modern racing. The spectator in me kind of hates it.
A few years ago, I started following Supercross/Motocross pretty heavily after a ~15 year absence. It still surprises me how far behind they are with regards to this kind of technology. In a way, it's almost impossible to collect quality data because the track itself changes so frequently.
I'm not 100% certain that digital racing is like real racing, but I do know much of the theory applies across the two.
In the course of 7-8 years worth of Forza Motorsport racing in a club(yeah, yeah... I'm that lame guy), I went from being potentially the worst racer to one of the upper tier guys. On a good day with a weird car I can get into the top 10 times in the world for hotlapping.
How did I do it? I broke down every track and just did tons of analysis just like Jack said. I researched and visualized and ground out tens of thousands of miles worth of digital laps. When I got bored, I practiced things I needed to improve like being tailed for laps. Now I'm fast enough to overtake and the set of skills I need to place higher in races is completely different. Work ethic almost matters as much as pure talent.
Attitude and wanting to learn is more than half the battle. The rest is the need for large amounts of time or money. Which, the more that I think of it is why my window is closed... for now.
I don't think you're lame at all, for two reasons.
First, as you note, real-world racing requires a lot of time and money, which not all of us have. If online racing provides something approaching the same level of excitement and enjoyment, great! Embrace it!
Second, as the hardware and software involved in esports motor racing grows more sophisticated, I think we'll see more crossover from the digital realm to the physical one. Online racing can't replicate the physical and mental demands of a real car, but I do think it can provide a foundation by honing the attitude and some of the fundamentals.
That’s true. I use a nice rig and parts of having a good race is having good muscle memory too. That does translate somewhat. Gotta stay sharp somehow, right?
Does this also apply to mountain bike racing, or this is specific in car racing because the car itself is doing so much of the work? Can a weekend warrior hope to compete with the men who spend hours a day practicing physical strength and endurance?
I’d say not at a pro level. It’s so physical that you need to eat/sleep/breathe training to compete at a top level, and also be young. No dude in his 40’s is going to be able to train for a year or two and compete in World Cup.
Look at the Eastern States Cup enduro series. They have a Pro class, and the amateur classes are split up in 10-year age brackets.
One could definitely spend a year training and doing focused DH training rides on the weekends and be at the pointy end of their amateur class.
That's pretty logical. Emotionally, I want to believe there is some fixed set of balance drills and braking drills to do and become more or less as good as the pros. (Contrasted with something like track and field sprinting, which is almost entirely raw power and reaction time.)
But "get stronger and lose weight" is probably more beneficial to riding fast, which I supposed can't be faked.
Yeah the difference between the pace of an Amaury Pierron and a fast 20 something am is less like the difference between me and Alonso in the same car and more like the difference between Alonso in his V10 WDC cars and me in a 911GT3.
It does NOT apply to any form of cycling. BMX and MTB demand fitness, learned skill, and a fair amount of genetic predisposition. Road racing demands infinite effort, genetic predisposition, and (sadly) a bent doctor to get your blood up to spec.
If you didn't start jumping a bike seriously before puberty was over, you'll never make a dent in those disciplines. Everybody in mountain biking knows a story of a super fit and motivated 25 year old who is now a quad because they fucked up a jump that my son will deliberately land in a nose wheelie.
>Everybody in mountain biking knows a story of a super fit and motivated 25 year old who is now a quad
Wait, what? That's horrifying. Why isn't jumping some kind of skill you can develop like anything else..? Yes, I remember the post you wrote about tiny Baruth Jr. jumping that gap that shattered the Colombian BMX racer's collarbone when he attempted it. But... Really? You can't develop the jump-y skills the same way a teenager did on his trampoline with a welded BMX frame?
Agreed. I came to mtb racing later in life and excelled at endurance XC racing because it was much more dependent upon conditioning (which anybody can develop with sufficient dedication & training) vs technique. I’m not ashamed to admit that every race I won was by dropping competitors on long, grinding climbs with enough margin to stay ahead on the descents.
When I was riding seriously (20 miles/day commuting + long Sunday rides) I'd sometimes go on group rides that included club racers from the Wolverine sports club (which has produced world champions in cycling and speed skating) and it was quite obvious that no matter how low I'd get my BMI and no matter how hard I'd train, with my stubby legs there was no way I'd ever be a competitive cyclist. When it'd be my turn to pull at the front the speed would drop 2 or 3 mph, though the serious riders were cool about it as long as I took my turn. It doesn't matter, I still enjoy cycling.
Qualifying is about speed. Racing is about position. And to your point, yes, if you narrow the parameters. But there's so, so much more to it than just laying down a smoking lap.
I do have a few racing heroes, in no particular order...
1. Jesse Lazare, both for agreeing to drive in an AER endurance race and for doing so after having been given a quick lesson in driving a three-pedal manual because he'd only ever driven paddle-shifted cars.
2. DangerGirl, because she's taken to racing in such magnificent fashion. She is an inspiration to me and especially to my wife.
3. Kimi Raikkonen, both for his general attitude ("Leave me alone, I know what I'm doing," deciding to eat ice cream after a DNF, telling Martin Brundle he was "having a shit" when asked why he missed Schumacher's celebration after his last race, etc.) and because he always struck me as being someone who only ever wanted to race and had no time for or interest in any other part of F1. I always got the sense that if Kimi hadn't been paid to drive, he'd have been racing for pinkslips somewhere.
4. The team that spent the *entire* weekend of an AER endurance race at Mid-Ohio combining the best parts two engines (after having bought a parts car from a junkyard) to get their glorious E30 shitbox running again and finished with just enough time to complete one full lap before the checkered flag.
I've never raced, beyond a NASCAR PC video game, but came to the same conclusion about drivers being "about the same" when I noted so many family members racing in NASCAR. I reasoned that if you had to be truly gifted, as opposed to well-trained, it would be unlikely that a driver's kids or sibling would ALSO be able to compete at that level. I mean, what are the odds, right?
I’d draw exactly the opposite conclusion from that data set. To whatever degree that genetic predisposition affects one’s success in racing, one would expect that the children of successful racing drivers would have an advantage.
There are several dynasties in Major League Baseball as another example.
Those kids are also likely to be exposed to motor sports at a very tender age as well, which certainly can’t hurt.
Are do geniuses run in families? Are there example of that? Remember, we're talking about truly "gifted" drivers. I'm more inclined to think that racing runs in families because of the "connections" and training they receive because of their exposure to it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
We’ll not soon solve the question of nature vs nurture. My personal sense is that both are required for success at a high level.
As to your question, do you mean genius-level intellects? If so, I’m not sure how to even trace such a thing. Intelligence testing is only a few generations old now, and results aren’t generally revealed publicly.
Certainly, there are a multitude of families that have shown high achievement over generations.
First, since you mention the Stig, I would love to see a unified theory of Top Gear, in the version we all think of, and its influence on how we think about cars and reviews, its skewering of traditional magazines, traditional masculinity as oft discussed on this blog, and how car culture can admire (I do) what it was but move on to something new.
Second, the common thread for the racing you mentioned with pros and dentists being equal would appear to be mechanical grip, where series with an emphasis on aero grip were mentioned as places where those differences in talent still matter. Is it because of the differences between those things inherently, or simply because those aero dependent series have cars operating at such high energy levels that small differences in talent are magnified?
Would it be beneficial to create and amateur series that is aero dependent to highlight those talent differences, but uses some other rules constraint to limit the kinetic energy of the cars for safety reasons? Off the top of my head aero elements with insane amounts of drag, high downforce levels at more moderate speeds and small displacement engines with rev limits?
Aero has a big part to play, but there's also the speed at which the car operates. An E36 M3 converted to racing duty is like a truck compared to my Radical. I can't imagine spinning a converted street car in a race. You have so much time to fix your mistakes.
Thank you for this and confirming my decision to up for the Trackday subscription. Now I just hope this 47-year-old can fulfill these corollaries come September at Mid-Ohio…
So obvious now… I knew it was a dumb question. But I’m whole again now that I know so thank you. Wow again I can’t believe I didn’t put those two together, I’m gonna go sit in a corner now
How the sausage is made indeed. Awesome article Jack.
Thank you for defining corollary #1. I've seen it time and again in data, and I don't like it as an engineer. I am one of those who think Fangio was simply way more skilled than anyone else on the grid at that time for the same reason.
Its harder today to be abusive in the same way, so it narrows the field quite a bit when computers do a lot in top series racing, but often you can still notice subtle things when you look at data.
At the very sharp end of it you have things like rate of brake pedal release that make a real difference in a close race, of course. But those differences usually add up to one second or less, not the immense gap envisioned by outsiders.
Anecdote that backs you up: One of my co-workers' father has been building race engines for karts and mini stock cars in central Virginia for ages. Twenty+ years ago he raced and built engines for some of the competitors. It was his hobby essentially. This was at the time that Denny Hamlin was coming up racing karts and mini stock cars in central Virginia. My coworker told me that at the time he was a name and people recognized him as a competent driver but he was nothing special in the race series. When other racers were trailering home to go to work and building their cars after hours, Denny's parents sold their family home to buy their kid the best of the best to push his career.
The "heroes" in racing excel because they have well-financed dedicated backers, whether corporate or parental, that gives them every advantage possible. They're nothing heroic in and of themselves. Strip them of the benefits of such backing and no surprise they rarely exceed a competent average Joe.
And that is exactly why the women of that dreadful W series who keep doing well will never graduate to a higher level is because of....
ding ding ding.... financial backing!
There are so many instances of this in motorsports that it is very overplayed by now. Yet, tons of people think guys or gals just get the short end of the stick for rides.
It's all about money. Always has been. I have yet to see a poor race driver in the current era. If they didn't have money, someone behind them did.
My oldest flirted with karting and fully agree. The dollars spent on 8 year olds chasing wins at New Castle Motorsports Park could easily operate a super-midsize jet. A bastard like me with no mechanical skill and an F-150 didn't have a chance.
And that's why you have to decide as a parent. Are you going to join the arms race? If not, don't even bother. If you are and you're anyone under the local rich guy, you literally have to find a rich guy to finance your kid.
The same is also true of MANY kids sports right now. It's a giant business. Makes my wife a little peeved that I don't want to encourage the kids to do any sports later on. I'd rather they just find something to be passionate about and learn to be happy with less. *shrug*
Can't wait for the day Jack gets into a real analysis of Formula One and the money structure there. So much to dive into. It's just all money all the time. There is no grass roots structure there.
Fully agree. I think we have just as much fun screwing around at K1 karting from time to time than we would trying (and likely failing) to compete in competitive karting, and the unspent money went towards their future so they can hopefully start adulthood debt-free.
I worked closely with a guy who had 3-7' tall sons, all of whom won D-I NCAA championships and went on to the NBA. He said repeatedly that there's no hope now of any semblance of a normal childhood for kids who want to play at an elite level, and so many of those who sacrifice childhood will have no hope of earning a living actually playing sports.
It is DISGUSTING the amount of time and money is spent on children to play sports and attempt to push them to an elite level when the KIDS DON'T EVEN CARE ABOUT THE SPORT.
Kids get one childhood.
Could be wrong, but perhaps that is why there is a prolonging of childhood after college amongst 20 somethings as the realization sets in that the adulthood they were told to embrace as an early teen isn't the one they ended up with?
It is a tough choice to make as a parent. Some kids need more pushing than others. Given that I don't think my parents or I had ever even heard of karting at the appropriate age for beginning participation, I can't fault them for that. However I do regret (my decision to quite) but them not pushing me more to keep going with (baseball in my case) when I turn 13 and tried to quit everything because I was slow to hit my growth spurt. I am under no impression I would have even been good enough to walk on D1, but I still would have had more fun than not playing.
Now my daughter is about the same age, going through her own stuff, and it is not easy to know how hard to push her.
I am sure you are thinking of the worst cases and excesses, but each choice on how to help is a slippery slope into those things. It is a struggle each day, so as much as I do despise those parents, I see how I could get there.
Saw this in motocross and it blew my mind. Like these parents are all Jamie Spears hoping that one of the lottery tickets, i.e. kids, hits.
It’s true not just of this hobby but most professions. Those who are backed and pushed from a young age to a higher degree than others will near always have that advantage.
My friend who was d1 ROTY is like that. When you get the gold key you can focus it all on honing talent if not just letting the machine do the work. I know it’ll come
off a bit jealous but it was annoying to watch his success with the “corporate backed” c6 completely eating up kids with home brewed Nissan 240s etc.
It’s not that I wasn’t happy to see him to do well, but I’ve been on that underdog side before. Not being able to afford the “right” tools and fighting with less took me right back to HS and college - which always seems to have a life parallel somewhere.
Jacks comment of races won in the garage/shop is pretty spot on. I obviously get into more drag racey type stuff merely due to cost and time restraints. Its a HUGE commitment to run open track. Even as a weekend warrior or some sort of annual semi annual warrior like my dumb ass was/is.
At any rate, the ability to “hot rod” can offset money but only to a point. In the straightline business the fastest way to the top is through your wallet. Even the fastest home brew just isn’t consistent enough or reliable enough to go rounds without substantial parts investment.
As of late our little weekend warrior “team” has been cleaning up the stick shift no-prep stuff for almost 2yrs now. Sounds cool, but the classes are smaller and rich friend likes to funnel in the money. Mindset doesn’t change though. We’ve been seeing growth and the attraction brings out other pockets. You can guess which ones are competitive.
So in closing I mostly just need a backer so I can stop working so much and concentrate on being as fast as the others 😁
Until then I’ll clutch my bronze star outlook of “impressive for what it is!” - be that vehicle or personal talent 🤪
What I always like to remind myself:
"We _get_ to do this."
We get to go out there. Weekend after weekend. And just... just go for it.
We get to spend our only fuckin' lives, while the rest of our cohort is jerking off to anime, binging TV, and reading Tweets, or whatever - out there living. Racing. Training. Traveling. Living. Making decisions that have immediate, permanent consequences.
The stick's short on both ends, but between choosing this life and "knowing a lot about which IPAs are good" - I'll break every bone, bleed every drop of blood, set every dollar on fire, and go blind looking for every last tenth.
The thrill of agony. The glory of defeat. Long live racing.
Hear, hear.
Josh, are you suggesting Lance Stroll wouldn't be racing in F1 if his father hadn't bought a team? :-)
Great Advice!
On a semi-related note: what in your opinion is the most difficult task in motorsports? My guess is winning on an Indy car street circuit from any starting position outside the top five. The "track" is a bumpy public street, the cars make a ton of downforce and have minimal suspension travel, and there's a concrete barrier at each corner with no margin for error, so every attempted pass is a near-collision while you're trying to brake and turn with a tire or two in the air and the car beating the living hell out of you.
As a driver? I think you're on to something with the Indy example.
Those Speedvision touring car races were some of the most entertaining I’ve still seen to this day. Saw one in person at Texas Motor Speedway, and loved the aggression of the drivers and how they just let ‘em race.
The nerd in me loves all of the data acquisition going on in modern racing. The spectator in me kind of hates it.
A few years ago, I started following Supercross/Motocross pretty heavily after a ~15 year absence. It still surprises me how far behind they are with regards to this kind of technology. In a way, it's almost impossible to collect quality data because the track itself changes so frequently.
I'm not 100% certain that digital racing is like real racing, but I do know much of the theory applies across the two.
In the course of 7-8 years worth of Forza Motorsport racing in a club(yeah, yeah... I'm that lame guy), I went from being potentially the worst racer to one of the upper tier guys. On a good day with a weird car I can get into the top 10 times in the world for hotlapping.
How did I do it? I broke down every track and just did tons of analysis just like Jack said. I researched and visualized and ground out tens of thousands of miles worth of digital laps. When I got bored, I practiced things I needed to improve like being tailed for laps. Now I'm fast enough to overtake and the set of skills I need to place higher in races is completely different. Work ethic almost matters as much as pure talent.
Attitude and wanting to learn is more than half the battle. The rest is the need for large amounts of time or money. Which, the more that I think of it is why my window is closed... for now.
I don't think you're lame at all, for two reasons.
First, as you note, real-world racing requires a lot of time and money, which not all of us have. If online racing provides something approaching the same level of excitement and enjoyment, great! Embrace it!
Second, as the hardware and software involved in esports motor racing grows more sophisticated, I think we'll see more crossover from the digital realm to the physical one. Online racing can't replicate the physical and mental demands of a real car, but I do think it can provide a foundation by honing the attitude and some of the fundamentals.
That’s true. I use a nice rig and parts of having a good race is having good muscle memory too. That does translate somewhat. Gotta stay sharp somehow, right?
Does this also apply to mountain bike racing, or this is specific in car racing because the car itself is doing so much of the work? Can a weekend warrior hope to compete with the men who spend hours a day practicing physical strength and endurance?
I’d say not at a pro level. It’s so physical that you need to eat/sleep/breathe training to compete at a top level, and also be young. No dude in his 40’s is going to be able to train for a year or two and compete in World Cup.
Look at the Eastern States Cup enduro series. They have a Pro class, and the amateur classes are split up in 10-year age brackets.
One could definitely spend a year training and doing focused DH training rides on the weekends and be at the pointy end of their amateur class.
That's pretty logical. Emotionally, I want to believe there is some fixed set of balance drills and braking drills to do and become more or less as good as the pros. (Contrasted with something like track and field sprinting, which is almost entirely raw power and reaction time.)
But "get stronger and lose weight" is probably more beneficial to riding fast, which I supposed can't be faked.
Yeah the difference between the pace of an Amaury Pierron and a fast 20 something am is less like the difference between me and Alonso in the same car and more like the difference between Alonso in his V10 WDC cars and me in a 911GT3.
It does NOT apply to any form of cycling. BMX and MTB demand fitness, learned skill, and a fair amount of genetic predisposition. Road racing demands infinite effort, genetic predisposition, and (sadly) a bent doctor to get your blood up to spec.
If you didn't start jumping a bike seriously before puberty was over, you'll never make a dent in those disciplines. Everybody in mountain biking knows a story of a super fit and motivated 25 year old who is now a quad because they fucked up a jump that my son will deliberately land in a nose wheelie.
>Everybody in mountain biking knows a story of a super fit and motivated 25 year old who is now a quad
Wait, what? That's horrifying. Why isn't jumping some kind of skill you can develop like anything else..? Yes, I remember the post you wrote about tiny Baruth Jr. jumping that gap that shattered the Colombian BMX racer's collarbone when he attempted it. But... Really? You can't develop the jump-y skills the same way a teenager did on his trampoline with a welded BMX frame?
Not in your twenties, no. The people who try almost always end up getting seriously hurt.
Agreed. I came to mtb racing later in life and excelled at endurance XC racing because it was much more dependent upon conditioning (which anybody can develop with sufficient dedication & training) vs technique. I’m not ashamed to admit that every race I won was by dropping competitors on long, grinding climbs with enough margin to stay ahead on the descents.
When I was riding seriously (20 miles/day commuting + long Sunday rides) I'd sometimes go on group rides that included club racers from the Wolverine sports club (which has produced world champions in cycling and speed skating) and it was quite obvious that no matter how low I'd get my BMI and no matter how hard I'd train, with my stubby legs there was no way I'd ever be a competitive cyclist. When it'd be my turn to pull at the front the speed would drop 2 or 3 mph, though the serious riders were cool about it as long as I took my turn. It doesn't matter, I still enjoy cycling.
Qualifying is about speed. Racing is about position. And to your point, yes, if you narrow the parameters. But there's so, so much more to it than just laying down a smoking lap.
You're preaching to the choir, I have podiums in STU using a 137hp Neon! I'll talk about the other stuff in another article.
"So you're telling me there's a chance!" Lloyd Christmas, I'm off to find a brief case full of cash
I do have a few racing heroes, in no particular order...
1. Jesse Lazare, both for agreeing to drive in an AER endurance race and for doing so after having been given a quick lesson in driving a three-pedal manual because he'd only ever driven paddle-shifted cars.
2. DangerGirl, because she's taken to racing in such magnificent fashion. She is an inspiration to me and especially to my wife.
3. Kimi Raikkonen, both for his general attitude ("Leave me alone, I know what I'm doing," deciding to eat ice cream after a DNF, telling Martin Brundle he was "having a shit" when asked why he missed Schumacher's celebration after his last race, etc.) and because he always struck me as being someone who only ever wanted to race and had no time for or interest in any other part of F1. I always got the sense that if Kimi hadn't been paid to drive, he'd have been racing for pinkslips somewhere.
4. The team that spent the *entire* weekend of an AER endurance race at Mid-Ohio combining the best parts two engines (after having bought a parts car from a junkyard) to get their glorious E30 shitbox running again and finished with just enough time to complete one full lap before the checkered flag.
#4 is a large part of the reason I like cheap car racing.
I've never raced, beyond a NASCAR PC video game, but came to the same conclusion about drivers being "about the same" when I noted so many family members racing in NASCAR. I reasoned that if you had to be truly gifted, as opposed to well-trained, it would be unlikely that a driver's kids or sibling would ALSO be able to compete at that level. I mean, what are the odds, right?
I’d draw exactly the opposite conclusion from that data set. To whatever degree that genetic predisposition affects one’s success in racing, one would expect that the children of successful racing drivers would have an advantage.
There are several dynasties in Major League Baseball as another example.
Those kids are also likely to be exposed to motor sports at a very tender age as well, which certainly can’t hurt.
Are do geniuses run in families? Are there example of that? Remember, we're talking about truly "gifted" drivers. I'm more inclined to think that racing runs in families because of the "connections" and training they receive because of their exposure to it. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
We’ll not soon solve the question of nature vs nurture. My personal sense is that both are required for success at a high level.
As to your question, do you mean genius-level intellects? If so, I’m not sure how to even trace such a thing. Intelligence testing is only a few generations old now, and results aren’t generally revealed publicly.
Certainly, there are a multitude of families that have shown high achievement over generations.
First, since you mention the Stig, I would love to see a unified theory of Top Gear, in the version we all think of, and its influence on how we think about cars and reviews, its skewering of traditional magazines, traditional masculinity as oft discussed on this blog, and how car culture can admire (I do) what it was but move on to something new.
Second, the common thread for the racing you mentioned with pros and dentists being equal would appear to be mechanical grip, where series with an emphasis on aero grip were mentioned as places where those differences in talent still matter. Is it because of the differences between those things inherently, or simply because those aero dependent series have cars operating at such high energy levels that small differences in talent are magnified?
Would it be beneficial to create and amateur series that is aero dependent to highlight those talent differences, but uses some other rules constraint to limit the kinetic energy of the cars for safety reasons? Off the top of my head aero elements with insane amounts of drag, high downforce levels at more moderate speeds and small displacement engines with rev limits?
Aero has a big part to play, but there's also the speed at which the car operates. An E36 M3 converted to racing duty is like a truck compared to my Radical. I can't imagine spinning a converted street car in a race. You have so much time to fix your mistakes.
the shelby can-am was kinda designed for that very thing.
Thank you for this and confirming my decision to up for the Trackday subscription. Now I just hope this 47-year-old can fulfill these corollaries come September at Mid-Ohio…
What is the other corporate media channel? Couldn't stop wondering for the rest of the article after I saw that.
I can't say, I signed an NDA :)
So obvious now… I knew it was a dumb question. But I’m whole again now that I know so thank you. Wow again I can’t believe I didn’t put those two together, I’m gonna go sit in a corner now
A “haggard-ly” thing, no doubt! 😂