by Ross Bentley | Dec 28, 2020 | Ask Ross
Q: “Now that sim racing has become more popular and I’ve done quite a lot of it during lockdown, I find myself with some bad habits. Braking and brake feel for instance is much different on my sim rig compared to real life. It can take me hours in real life to find the right amount of trail braking after doing it on the sim one way for so long. Also, I have the problem of thinking I’m going faster the more g’s I pull which isn’t always true now that I can feel g-forces again. How do I quickly adjust from sim racing to real life racing?”
by Ross Bentley | Jan 6, 2020 | Ask Ross
Q: “I’ve been autocrossing for about 20 years. I’m not a national champion, but I generally run slightly behind the national champs that run with our club and I usually finish in the top 10%. Last season I took on a co-driver of national caliber and ran data (SoloStorm) the whole season. Initially what I learned from the data was that we did many things in a similar fashion, but he made much more use of the throttle than I did. Trying to force myself into using more throttle closed the gap with him a little, but also resulted in a lot of spins. After looking at things more closely, I realized that he was putting the car in better positions to be able to use the throttle more, but the distinction is subtle enough that I cannot usually tell much of a difference in our line from the data. So, my question is… what is the best way I can learn more about car position and how to know if I am positioning the car in the most efficient way?”
by Ross Bentley | Jun 8, 2020 | Ask Ross
Q: “I have a problem driving on the limit all the time. As soon as the car starts move, especially with oversteer on entry, I react immediately and arrest the movement. How do I get past this?”
by Ross Bentley | Mar 29, 2022 | Ask Ross
Q: “As I look forward to the 2022 race season, and watching instructional videos, I often hear people talk about the importance of being ‘smooth’ with your inputs. At one level, I understand that, when going down the front straight, if I rapidly step on the brake while turning the steering wheel as fast as I can is likely going to cause me to lose control. But I also know that “smooth” is not the same thing as ‘slow.’ So, my question is, how can you make rapid inputs, while still being ‘smooth’?”
by Ross Bentley | Nov 5, 2018 | Ask Ross
Q” “Something I’ve been pondering lately goes well with improving the mental game, I think. I guess it’d be called mindfulness? I go out in the car for an HPDE session with a plan of a few things to work on and I think I do pretty well sticking to that – most times anyway! 🙂 But then I get out of the car and while I can remember certain moments from the session, like a huge pucker factor moment carrying too much speed into a turn, the rest of it is all a blur. Is there some sort of corresponding technique to visualization for this?”
by Ross Bentley | Aug 3, 2021 | Ask Ross
Q: “What can I do to improve my kinesthetic sense so that I can better understand and manage what the car is doing? I have been trying to use visualization techniques and other things to get mentally prepared, I have been practicing “vision” both in terms of learning how to look down the track rather than always staring at braking points or apexes as well as “looking” around blind corners, but feel like (other than driving) I haven’t really been doing anything to improve my kinesthetic sense. What can and should I be doing?”
