VISION EXPRESS

Written by Andrew Bentley - one of the UK's top motorsport instructors & racing extraordinaire, taking a 'look' at vision, focus and gaining time on track. You can always improve your track day driving with instruction; the best way to be a safer, quicker & more confident driver.

In this fast paced life that we lead, everyone is after a shortcut here or there in order to achieve our goals. I firmly believe that this isn’t always going to yield the best results and really the only way to master anything is to spend time building solid foundations and working your way through the boring stuff to get to the good stuff. But, when someone asks me for a tip on how to drive faster, learn a circuit more quickly, gain confidence or just learn the racing line, then my answer is always the same. Vision.

This is normally met with a nodding response and a slight distant look in the eye. Not enough people ask me exactly what I mean: in order to be a good track day driver and drive to the limit of your car, you have to look where you are going.

LOOK, STUPID!

Sounds obvious doesn’t it? But when I start to show my clients the distances involved by pointing out apex kerbs, cones, marshal posts, gantries etc. way off into the distance, the standard response is ‘oh, really? That far!?’ Yes, and that’s just for starters.

How can you drive somewhere when you don’t know where you’re going? If you haven’t seen the corner coming up, how do you know how tight it is? If you don't know how tight it is you don't know where to position the car, when to brake, how hard to brake, how long to brake for, when to start turning, how much to turn, when to start releasing the steering lock…. you can see where I’m going with this right?

So, the first thing you need to do is scan the corner from way back so you can work all of this out even if you are on your 43rd lap.

For example, lets take a simple 90’ right hander with a long straight both before and after. Lets assume you’ve done a few laps of the circuit and you are happy with where you’re going and have a rough idea of the correct racing line. You’ll have positioned the car on the left hand side of the track and at the earliest opportunity, you need to look through the corner. Then, you’ll pick out the reference points you have gained from previous laps as to where you are going to brake. From there, you need to look ahead to the point where you will be turning. This is very important because at the point of turning, you can’t be looking directly at that reference point. You’ll be using your peripheral vision to gauge this. So, it’s imperative you have a picture of that in your minds eye.  Once you have started your braking, you should be turning your head ‘into’ the corner and picking your clipping point or ‘apex’. This is way in advance of actually turning the steering wheel. As you start to bleed off the brakes and turn the wheel into the corner, your vision should now start to transfer towards the exit point.  Allowing the car to almost guide it’s self through the corner.

TURN YOUR HEAD

This can only be achieved by turning your head. A lot. More than you’d think in fact. Your head should pivot on the points you are driving towards even if that is out of the side window. If you watch the video of Scott to the right, you’ll see that his head is always turned more than their steering wheel, meaning he are looking beyond the current position of the car (and if Scott can do it, it's not hard!).

Sometimes, if a driver are travelling through a tight chicane, their head could be pointing in completely the opposite direction from their current trajectory because where the head is pointing, the car is going next.

TAKE ME TO THE 'UNCOMFORTABLE ZONE'

All of this takes some doing. You have to remove your self from the comfort zone you are in and force your eyes further up the road. Our every day experience of driving means that we get lazy and our focus point is generally the car in front of us, which is generally 30 meters ahead of us, so even if there is no car in front of us, our vision generally falls to 30 meters ahead of us. All of which is of course totally useless unless you are moving at 10 miles an hour.

Worryingly, for me anyway, if I am instructing someone and we are doing 110 miles and hour, that 30 meter focus point hasn’t changed all that much. This is because it’s comfortable and when you are doing 110 mph, you are looking to be comfortable as it is something you don’t do every day. The problem is, this only makes it worse. By looking so close, everything is moving way too fast to be able to do anything about anything.

By pushing yourself out of that comfort zone and picking your vision up, you will actually slow everything down. Things move slower when they are further away, you know what is coming so there are no nasty surprises and you can see any incidents way in advance of you arriving at the scene. You gain in every way. With regards to the stuff that is right in front of you, well, you know about that because you looked at it 300 meters ago.

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