Re: The good and the great
And Massa is having a difficult time adjusting to racing w/o traction control.
I'm only a casual observer, but that seems to be the consensus amongst others I've talked to. And since Wag the Dog is my favorite movie, when I see stuff like this
A Ferrari spokesman has plainly dismissed rumours that a deal is already in place to put Fernando Alonso alongside Kimi Raikkonen at the Italian team in 2009.
"There is no arrangement at all with Fernando and Ferrari," he is quoted as saying by The Times.
I think to myself; what he said under his breath 2 seconds later was "YET". :tongue:
Massa appears to not have the reflexes under pressure? He has time to make a recovery, but he definitely has to figure out how to correct that deficiency.
Did anyone see
this article on what makes great drivers?
The Gift
Quick in His Seat
By TOMMY CRAGGS
Published: March 2, 2008
Tony Stewart doesn’t look like your idea of an elite athlete, unless you’re thinking of a professional bowler. Doughy and unimposing, Stewart, 36, is nevertheless one of the finest racers of his generation. A two-time Nascar series champ, Stewart is the only driver to have won titles in stock cars and Indy cars, as well as midget, sprint and Silver Crown cars, and he is now routinely placed alongside his hero, A. J. Foyt, racing’s most protean driver. Stewart’s former crew chief Scott Diehl says, “I believe Tony Stewart could make a bicycle fast.” What is it, then, that makes a good driver great?
For starters, Stewart has superb eyesight — 20/13 in one eye, 20/15 in the other — but it’s not visual acuity that matters so much as a driver’s ability to process everything that drifts into his periphery while he travels at 200 m.p.h. “A driver has to know what’s unfolding in front of him at a rate of a football field a second,” says Dr. Stephen Olvey, a founding fellow of the F.I.A. Institute for Motor Sport Safety. Stewart evidently has a knack for coping with multiple inputs: last year, only two drivers were faster in “traffic” (when an opponent was less than a car length away). Greg Zipadelli, Stewart’s crew chief, says his driver hones his talent with a popular
training tool: PlayStation.
TIME OUT OF MIND
The governing trait of any driver is the speed of his mind, something Dr. Jacques Dallaire likens to a computer’s central processing unit. “The faster the C.P.U., the more powerful the computer,” says Dallaire, an occupational performance consultant who has studied hundreds of racecar drivers. “They have exceptionally fast C.P.U.’s. Their concentration skills are very good. Memory skills are very good. Anticipatory timing skills are all quite good.” Drivers’ brains relay information to their muscles more quickly. Olvey once conducted an informal study of drivers’ reaction times and compared them with those of the general public; the drivers were about 33 percent faster. In a racing machine like Stewart, the mind, more than anything, is the engine.
KING OF THE CORNERS
Stewart spent his formative racing years rooster-tailing sprint cars around Midwestern dirt tracks, which taught him how to bring a slipping car to heel. “You learn car control that way,” Stewart says. “How to slide the car around without sliding off the racetrack, how to manipulate the car and make it do what you want it to do.” Stewart distinguishes himself in the corners, where control is most crucial. He was Nascar’s second-fastest driver in turns last season, a result that Chris Cook, a driving instructor and road-course specialist, attributes in part to his former pupil’s exceptional touch on the brakes. “With road racing, you’ve got such diverse approaches to different corners,” Cook says. “You’ve got 15 to 20 different corners requiring 15 to 20 different brake pressures,” not to mention both right and left turns. As a student, Cook recalls, Stewart “attacked” the corners: “He never overslowed the car. He always used the right brake pressures.” Moreover, in corners, a smart driver uses his brakes to control the weight balance of the car, effectively “steering” it. “You race just as much with your brake pedal as with the gas pedal,” Scott Diehl says. Going faster, in other words, means learning to go slower.
THE FEEL FOR SPEED
“That seat-of-the-pants feeling is the biggest thing you have to have,” Stewart says. “As the car moves around, you feel it through both your hands and through your core — if the car is tight or if it’s loose.” This skill also likely stems from his early days on dirt, where the surface changes from lap to lap. A driver has to determine, based on the car’s handling, just where the track is running fastest at that particular moment, thus honing what Dallaire calls a “kinesthetic feel” for the vehicle. “Most drivers will tell you that their three most important parts are their eyes, their fingers and their butts,” Dallaire says. “It’s a complex interaction between the eyes, the vestibular system in the inner ear and even some joint receptors that allows us to judge our physical position in space.” And Stewart has a “phenomenal feel for the car,” says Lorin Ranier, the driver development coordinator for Chip Ganassi Racing and one of the men responsible for Stewart’s move to stock cars. “For him, driving a racecar is like you and me chewing gum.”