Advanced Driving Techniques - The Art of Endurance Driving

SAFEisFAST.com Online Driver Development SAFEisFAST.com Presented by Honda The Art of Endurance Driving In the old days, you had the H pad gear box. You had to nurse the equipment. You had severe overheating. You couldn't really last the distance on your breaks. You had to change midway through the race if you're unlucky. Nowadays you just give it hell every lap. The cars are so reliable that basically it's a string of 24-hour sprint races. You run approximately an hour on a tank of gas. You fill up. You get new tires. You go out, and you drive those stints, those tanks of gas, as hard as you possibly can go. So its 24-hour little, miniature sprint races. And we make our time, like I said before, through the traffic. Not through saving the equipment. Technology has allowed us to push almost a sprint race pace for 24-hours. The cars have evolved. The gear boxes are stronger. The tires are better. We really do push that maximum attack level, but knowing the first quarter is not going to make the difference in the 24-hour race. Make sure your car is going to get to the end of the race -- and the race is very long. Sometimes, you take a little bit more care of the car than you would do in Formula 1. You have to make sure you don't overdrive the car. You don't go over the limit. You just want to go to the limit, and keep the grip of the tires -- don't overheat the tires. If you overheat them they breakdown, and they don't last long. There are plenty of people with speed, but that's only one-fifth of the equation. You really have the hone that other part of it, and a lot of that comes down to being safe, and understanding how to get through a race without wrecking your equipment. You have to be patient. Patience is something that you don't really think about when you're driving a race car. But when you're patient, you have to evaluate the circumstance -- on whether you want to gamble, whether you're going to make the pass, or not make the pass. What changes is your outlook on letting somebody go past. If there is a competitor behind you that's causing issues for you -- if you find yourself trying to have to work too hard to try to keep up with a guy behind you -- if you're only an hour or two hours into a 24-hour race, what's the point in racing him now? Because he may have a problem in 30 minutes, and then he's gone. Its not worth fighting him that hard. You need to leave a little bit of your bandwith open for recording and learning. It can't just be a 100% on a flat out blitz every single lap, because there's got to be learning constantly going on. As a track evolves -- as it gets wetter, as it gets greasier, as it gets stickier, if a cloud comes over -- These things evolve, and you need to have awareness -- self-awareness, car-awareness, track-awareness -- of what's going on, and how to evolve that car. In 24-hour races, you can get into a situation where maybe the conditions don't suit the car very well, and you have to wait a little bit for a specific tire to work or something. Then you would just kind of relax a little bit -- make sure you make it to the next stop, and then you can make a change. Sometimes, you'll have to make a little bit a fuel, or save a bit a fuel, to make the stint last a bit longer -- to try to do that extra lap at the end of the stint. You try to lift the early, and try to coast a bit. And also tire conservation as well. You might be doing a double stint on the tire, or triple stint on the tire. There's a lot of grip available when you first put them on, so can't take the grip out of them straightaway, otherwise after about one stint, the tire will be dead. How you drive changes depending on at what point of the race you are, and your situation. If you're two laps down, you'll drive a little bit harder than if you're in second or third place. If you're just cruising around a little bit -- and when I say cruising I don't mean that you're not driving quickly. You're always pushing hard, but you're making smart decisions. SAFEisFAST.com Online Driver Development SAFEisFAST.com Presented by Honda