Before jumping in the separate blog articles, it is good to understand first why these steps are necessary. Bottom line is that it's all about deliberate practice.

First, driving a car on the limit is much more difficult than it appears on first sight. Really pushing the car to the limit is about finding a delicate balance between a lot of parameters: your skill level and experience as a driver, the car itself and more importantly its setup, changing weather conditions, the very peculiar behaviour of rubber (your tires), constantly changing track conditions etc. You must know about all these parameters and how they influence each other to use them to your advantage. It's not so hard to drive on your limit, racing is about driving on the car's limit.

Secondly, the perfect lap or perfect racing line does not exist. I mean it's not something you can lookup in a book or track guide, it's not an absolute thing. The racing line on a given track and corner can differ from car to car, but also on track conditions. The devil is in the details: we are talking about small changes that could gain you a couple of milliseconds but adding this up over all corners could lead to seconds difference in lap time. So even if you know what a good racing line is under some conditions, you must always be "looking" for a faster line. This will help you in continuously improving your driving. Do some dirt oval races in your sim and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Third, your brain is limited. When attacking a track at full speed your brain is multitasking big time: where to brake, downshifting, defending your position, looking for the apex, correcting your steering and so on. Under these circumstances it will be difficult to have some mental bandwidth left to be very conscious about your driving, you are just surviving at this stage. Practicing on some specific things only, and don't bother about the rest will be giving you the extra bandwidth you'll need to think about your driving consciously and as a result get better. By deliberately practicing one thing at a time, even at lower speeds, you will build up your memory, and these are the things your brain will use unconsciously in racing conditions.

"You want to learn to drive, but do you also have the drive to learn?"

Fourth, avoid "the practice trap": driving endless practice laps in a sim doesn't cost you anything, besides time. Also, when you crash it doesn't cost you a dime. Hence, there is no extra motivation to think what you want to practice before you'll start. In real life, you'll have limited track time, limited set of tires, and everything has a real price tag: for sure you'll ask yourself before you'll start: "what am I practicing for? Where do I want to improve? What should be my focus?". Don't make the mistake to think that just driving meaningless practice laps is the same as practicing.

The Getting Faster series is made up of these blog articles, and could be extended in the future:

1. Learning the track:
Learn the track, the corners, racing lines at SLOW speed with a SLOW car, giving your brain the time to absorb all details

2. The baseline:
Once you know the track, start building up your speed progressively, but work on consistency first. Speed will come later.

3. Learning 120% of the track:
To know the real track boundaries, you must go over the boundaries. Some kerbs will kill you, on other kerbs you will gain some time.

4. Understanding your car's behaviour:
Your car is a platform that needs to be balanced all the time if you want to go fast. There are several natural forces working on your car while racing, so you must understand what is happening to be able to balance your car. For example, when your fuel tank will get empty during a race, the weight of your car lowers and the weight distribution could change. Most probably you'll need to adapt your driving a little bit or change your brake bias settings. If you encounter understeer or oversteer in some corners, reverse engineer these issues, try to understand what's happening with the balance and how you could overcome this.

"If you bin it, you won't win it."

5. Hot lapping versus racing:
Doing one ultra fast lap (aka hot lap) versus doing a full race are two different things. Of course, you'll need to practice both but trying to beat your best lap time during every lap in practice is not deliberate practicing your race. Practice for good overtaking spots, practice fuel saving, practice tire conservation, practice in night conditions, practice in foggy weather etc. Oh yeah, and just practice staying alive: driving 100% of the race on the black stuff is almost always faster than doing 10 consecutive hot laps and then going off the track losing 20 seconds in one corner.

6. Finding more speed using telemetry data:
Like I said before, the devil is in the details. And at a given point it's not so clear anymore where to improve your driving. Enter telemetry data. With this data you can compare in detail where and how much braking, throttle and steering is applied, compare minimum cornering speed, see in which track sections you should improve first etc. Tweaking your car setup and then looking for improvements is also much more visible in telemetry data. There is one caveat however: you must first be able to drive consistent lap times before you can start comparing your data, hence article #2 in the series (the baseline).

7. Next steps - how to go from here:
All the above is already challenging enough, so I would suggest you go through this deliberate practice steps with a fixed car setup. If you get a good feeling on your car and driving style, and you know what to do to keep on improving, you can start fiddling around with your car setups. Car mechanics and their influence on car dynamics is a rabbit hole on its own, but don't be afraid, the next series on this blog will be the Car Setup series.

In summary, most important is that you realise you need to break down your practice in different steps and exercises, and you must find a process to continuously improve your driving. This Getting Faster series is just a start, giving you a baseline to start from, see what works for you and create your own process.

Keep your eyes on the end goal, but don't forget to enjoy the ride!

Jump to the Getting Faster Series overwiew page to see all articles in the series.