Ross Bentley’s

Speed Secret:

High Performance Driving is Mental

By Nigel Etherington

On Saturday June 13, instructors and advanced students from Porsche Car Club (Upper Canada Chapter) and BMW Car Club (Trillium Chapter) came out in droves to hear renowned professional racer and coach Ross Bentley teach his ‘Speed Secrets’. Peter Carroll, a BMW club racer and instructor, organized this terrific event and 96 attendees were glad he did. But the funny thing was they were nowhere near a track, didn’t get any seat time, and didn’t hear much about the mechanics of driving. So just what did Ross talk about for eight hours that kept everyone mesmerized?

Well, he talked about the performance improvement process. Which is really just the learning process. After writing six Speed Secrets books www.speedsecrets.com), founding the leading teen driving school in Seattle and a management/coaching consulting business (www.go-perform.com) on the side, Ross’ real ‘speed’ secret is simple: driving is mental. So, if you want to develop drivers - or anybody for that matter – to their maximum potential you need to know how the mind works, learns and performs best. The rest is just details.

The Onion Concept

As a former Indy Car driver who has raced with the likes of Jimmy Vasser, Al Unser Jr., Rick Mears, Danny Sullivan, Paul Tracey, Mario and Michael Andretti, to name a few, Ross Bentley’s driving credentials are impeccable. The attendees enjoyed hearing Ross’ stories about rubbing shoulders with racing champions and coaching NASCAR rookies like 18 year-old Colin Braun. But perhaps more surprising was realizing that Ross’ engaging seminar would not have been out of place at a university lecture on education. He began by inquiring what percentage of driving was mental… 50%..80%..90%...or more? With some encouragement from Ross, most agreed that driving was probably mostly mental…and so… instruction had to be about improving the learning process (‘the software’). Better ‘software’ will enable drivers to gather higher quality inputs, process them faster and make responses autonomic. Autonomic - an action that occurs without conscious control - is like automatic. And when driving becomes automatic it becomes confident and effortless - in the zone! How to get there is the question we ask ourselves. The learning process begins by feeding people information. You know, stuff about braking zones, apexes and trackouts, etc. But when drivers don’t ‘get it’ or ‘try too hard’ then the real teaching challenge begins. An instructor’s job is to peel back the layers – like an onion – to get to the core problem. High performance instructors do that best because they don’t confuse symptoms for root causes. The instructor’s toolkit, according to Ross, should include more than just techniques and mechanics of car control. It needs to include the ‘program’ for a driver’s ‘software’ which involves psychomotor skills, state of mind, decisions, behavioural traits and belief systems. In short, instructors need a toolkit to work with the driver’s mind.

The Driver’s Mind

Conventional wisdom says improving a driver’s performance takes more seat time. Bentley suggests that’s not always necessary, however. In fact, practicing bad habits might not help at all. Ross contends you can practice driving in your mind, where perfect practice can make perfect. Visualization can develop the ‘inner’ mental programming before you even head out to the track to actualize your driving goals. Bentley talked about how to warm up a driver’s psychomotor skills to quickly attain peak performance when you get to track. Ross brought some ‘guinea pigs’ from the audience up to the front to demonstrate his warm-up exercises. He contends these brain exercises switch on three key driver physical attributes: coordination, vision and balance. Described in his sixth book The Perfect Driver, these exercises for drivers - ‘cross-crawls’, ‘lazy-eights’ and ‘centering’ - are somewhat akin to stretching or jumping jacks.

Not surprisingly, performance improvement needs to start at the beginning; gathering more sensory input. More input equals more references. Ross recommends driving sessions focused on one sensory input at a time: visual, kinesthetic or auditory. In each case, the instruction is to get the driver to recount what they see, feel or hear that they’ve never seen, felt or heard before. The theory is that gathering more references usually equates to fewer driver errors. Ross also suggested drivers subscribe to a pre-planned thought - the PPT. The PPT is an individual’s own positive experience that can immediately trigger an improved mindset. Ross’ PPT is the memory of his first practice session at the inaugural Vancouver Indy in which he felt his car dancing in the rain on the way to his fifth place finish. So ‘car dancing’ is Ross’ trigger for the positive mindset that launches the ‘software’ program. Bentley explains that performance drivers need a ‘start button’ for improved performance. The PPT is that start button.

The Learning Curve

So how do drivers learn? And where should instructors begin, since everybody learns differently: some are visual (“I see what you mean”), some auditory (“I hear ya”) and some experiential (“got a feel for it ?”). But if learning is the objective, then both instructors and students should focus on the process. Ross encourages instructors to find out how their students learn best and adjust their teaching methods appropriately to bring out the best results. The problem is that learning is not a smooth process, but a sequence of inclines, steps and plateaus. So what then?

According to Bentley, the learning ‘curve’ can be reduced to a simple formula:

Goal (G) = Mental Imagery (MI) + Awareness (A)

Learning will occur quickly and reliably when the student has a mental image of what they are trying to accomplish (G), and then the situational awareness to know how close they are to it. Ross illustrated his formula with examples of students who either didn’t get the MI and/or the A part of the equation. In both cases the instructor’s job is to identify the goal and fill in the missing or incomplete part of the student’s learning equation.

Bentley’s speed secret is the G=MI+A formula. When used well, student learning can progress smoothly and quickly, developing their confidence with skill in equal balance. It’s much like a well-driven car it seems.