How to Get Faster When You Have Nobody to Compare Against

We all know it's not that difficult to improve when you've got lots of fast teammates to learn from. But how do you actually improve when you're driving by yourself — on a random track day, testing? How will you improve your driving? How will you improve your lines?

These are common questions I get from my drivers, and that I hear in general. Because when you have a fast teammate to compare against — or not even a teammate, but you manage to get data from somebody else on track — that data becomes gold. You can understand exactly where you're losing time, because until then you're always guessing. Get the data from the fastest driver on track and you can see what you're losing; you can kind of steal their lines, steal their braking points. Even though I always believe that as a racing driver you should figure out your braking points yourself.

It's a big advantage whenever you have someone else's data that's faster than yours in that specific session — not necessarily a faster driver overall, just faster that session. It helps you understand where to go and find the lap time: maybe in the driving, maybe in the chassis, maybe in the engine tuning, or in all three. So the ideal is to have data from a fast driver on track.

But you can't always have that. Maybe you're a privateer, driving and racing by yourself. Maybe you're on a random test day alone, with no access to anybody else's data — and you don't even know what a good reference lap time is for that track, because you're the only one out there.

The question to ask instead

That question keeps coming up, and it happens to me too. When I'm driving by myself at Lonato, or Cremona, or Franciacorta, I think: is this actually a good time or not? Everybody asks themselves that. But the real question should be different.

How can I find lap time by myself, within my own self?

Because here's the reality, guys: everyone is going to have corners that were faster on other laps, or in other sessions, than they were on their fastest lap of the current session.

Let me explain. From session to session the track changes ever so slightly, so it won't be easy to compare between sessions in terms of lap time — it's not a real apples-to-apples comparison. But especially with sessions close to each other, you can get an idea of corners you did well in a previous session, or in the same session on a different lap. Because getting the perfect lap takes a lot of practice. It only happens to very experienced drivers, and even then it's hard to repeatedly set a fastest lap that matches all your mini sectors. That's what I call the perfect lap.

Over a 10-lap session, when the peak of the tire temperature is at, say, lap six, you'll have four or five laps in the window to keep setting faster times. And it may happen that on your quickest lap, only a few of your corners and sections were the absolute best of the session — in other laps you did better corners.

So the goal, as a racing driver, is to always chase the perfect lap within yourself. If you manage to get as close as possible to it — putting all your best corners, all your best mini sectors together from that session — you can be happy about your session. Most of the time that ends up being a high-performing session, and it usually shows up in the race or qualifying result too.

Priority one: close the gap to your theoretical

If you're just testing, you can't measure that against anyone. So in PURPL I built the features that let you benchmark against yourself: compare the mini sectors and see which lap gave you the best corner one, the best corner two, the best mini sector three. The goal is that when your tires and engine are at peak performance, you put everything together — and then repeat it over multiple laps.

Because the holy grail for a racing driver is to use every single tenth the kart gives you, and to repeat it. It's not about doing it once.

You're not going to become world champion by setting fastest laps. You become world champion if you can repeatedly set them — or maybe you don't even need the fastest lap. You just need to be quicker than the driver in P2.

If the driver in P15 is fastest on track, you don't really care. You only care about being faster than P2. That's the only goal at the end of the day, and it should make you reflect: it's not just about your ultimate lap, it's about repeating it consistently. And that is exactly what you can work on during a random test day, when you have nobody to compare against but yourself.

So try to match your theoretical best — which is hard. And do it with multiple mini sectors, which is my philosophy in racing. Not just the three sectors AiM gives you on the MyChron; I don't like that. I want to see all the different sections in a realistic way.

Of course, you don't want to compare literally corner by corner, because some corners are sequences — chicanes. It wouldn't be fair to put a mini sector in between the two, because it wouldn't be realistic. The sections algorithm we created is real and, most importantly, accurate — which makes it a useful tool for showing whether you're actually doing a good job. If you have two corners and then a straight, that's a section. Two more corners and another straight, that's another section. That's how it works.

The detection is precise, and what I wanted was for it to be honest — it shouldn't give you false sectors, because then it wouldn't be useful. I'd rather have fewer sectors than more, as long as they're real, with proper breathing space between corners, so that one corner doesn't affect the next and one mini sector doesn't affect the next. I wanted it to be real, and I think we managed it. It's splitting the lap into pieces, done in a way that respects where corners actually are.

Priority two: consistency

The second priority when you're driving by yourself is consistency. You want to get into the consistency sweet spot. How do you check it? You look at your standard deviation — there's a specific channel for that in the PURPL analysis dashboard.

If you did a really good job, your consistency is high and the value itself is low. The standard deviation is a statistics calculation showing how close you stayed to your best. A 0.1 standard deviation is much better than 0.4. The goal is the lowest possible number, which means the smallest swing from one lap to the other. If you can repeat laps again and again, you're on top of your game — that's the number to watch.

That tells you whether you had a good session not just in terms of ultimate lap time, but in terms of consistency, which is really key when you're driving alone. It's one of those things you can measure purely against yourself.

The kart isn't going to change so much during a session that it stops you being consistent. That's a bit of an excuse. It's going to be you.

You keep yourself consistent by relying on muscle memory, experience and kart control. And when you do make a mistake — because everyone makes mistakes — try to adjust during the corner and reduce that mistake from, say, half a second to one tenth, or even half a tenth. That's what professional racing drivers do: they don't lose much for a mistake, they lose a tiny bit. Minimizing mistakes and minimizing the time lost per mistake is super important. If a corner keeps costing you and you can't tell why, that's when you ask whether it's you or the kart.

Borrowing a reference

If you have the chance to get data or onboard videos from drivers who have historically been really fast at that track, that's useful too — you can borrow a reference.

Onboard video shows the lines really well. So if you're going to a track you're not experienced with, check for onboards on YouTube, or ideally get one from a teammate. But it's fierce out there, and I doubt you'll get your hands on someone else's genuinely fast onboard. I don't share onboard videos with my teammates at all — that's pure competition; I'm not here to work for making the others win. Still, there are plenty of good videos on YouTube from most popular tracks and series, so you can get an idea of the best lines and start from there. If you find tricks for better lines, even better — but start from the baseline of what the winning drivers are doing.

Race videos work too: you get an idea of the lines, of using the track properly, of the turning points. You can't really see the braking points, and honestly those depend massively on the grip level, the setup and the category anyway.

Why cross-day data comparison misleads you

In terms of data, though — data from another day isn't going to be very useful. If you compare a session where the track was very hot against a day that was very cold, the grip level changes, and you won't really know by how much. The number of drivers on track will be different. The tire compounds laid down will be different. So many things differ that you can't compare apples to apples; it's an unfair comparison.

Having someone else's data file from another day gives you an idea — this driver started braking here, released the brakes there, carried this much speed. But I wouldn't lean on it. I'd use it as a starting point if you're spectacularly wrong, braking way too late or way too early; then it tells you roughly where you should be. Otherwise I'd focus on what happened during the day, and ideally within that specific session, because it's incredible how quickly track conditions change in karting — in a single day, or session to session — whether from the weather or from drivers laying down rubber. The same caution applies to overlaying two laps: the closer in time, the more honest the comparison.

That's why I use cross-session data only as an idea. When I drive at a track, I like getting a sense of where I'm losing compared to another day when I was quicker — is it on the straights, or in the corners, and which corners? In races, when I look at the data and see I'm losing three or four tenths down the straights, and I can't change gear where I want — I drive a KZ now, so if I can't shift at 15,000 rpm and have to shift at 14,000 because the carburetion isn't right or the engine isn't tuned, or it's a test engine — then I know there's not much I can do on the straights, and I have to do my best in the corners. And if I see I'm doing really well in the corners and only losing on the straights, I'm happy: it means the grip level is good and I'm just running a suboptimal engine. For a random test day, that's fine.

The same goes for the other channels. With the friction circle and the grip load index I can see that on one day I actually had more grip — which explains why I could carry five km/h more into a fast corner. Or that I had less grip, so now I should be carrying more speed and I'm not, which means I'm probably not doing my best job, and I need to understand why. And with exhaust temperature you can benchmark the carburetion across sessions and days, same with water temperature and RPM to know your sprocket is right.

So it's great to compare against other sessions, other days, even other drivers, to see broadly where you're losing — corners versus straights, exits, top speed. But for fine tuning you can't compare much, because the track changes too much and you'll end up with wrong and unreasonable information. In winter the engine simply goes faster: it takes in cold air through the airbox. When the air is 40 degrees and the track is 60, the engine on the straight is going to be slower in summer, and you can't tune it to match its winter pace. You may have to change the calibration, but it still won't go as fast. You live with it and find the lap time elsewhere around the track — maybe in the corners, because higher track temperature may mean more grip, and that's what you need in that moment.

The real shortcut: rent a benchmark

One really cool way to shortcut your learning curve is to get a private coach who can show you around. But the best version is to get a really fast driver to come and drive with you — literally side by side.

That's a brilliant add-on, and it makes comparison easy, because the track is the same for both of you at the same time. In that case you really have no excuses. If the karts are set up very evenly, you can genuinely push your driving and test how good you are against a fast driver.

Rent a fast benchmark. It's going to cost you a bit, but it's very worth it.

Get yourself a day against a really good driver of your category and you'll know exactly how far you are from him — or maybe you're on the same pace, or maybe, surprisingly, you're quicker, which will leave you with a pretty big smile on your face. If you can swap karts, even better. You'll understand exactly your level, and it'll give you a lot to work on as a racing driver. I think that's one of the best ways to shortcut the learning curve — and it's the same reason real data beats guesswork when you're trying to improve.

So I hope you go out there and do it. You can find all the tools we talked about in this guide on purpl.app — go ahead and give it a try. I'm sure you'll enjoy it, and send me some feedback. Remember to keep sending it. Ciao ciao.