Is Your Driving Actually Improving? The Metrics Lap Times Hide

If you think that simply looking at your lap time is the way to actually track your progress and your improvement, well, I think you're probably wrong. And, you know, that's the mistake that I've been doing also myself at the beginning of my karting career. I would always look at the lap time, and I would always tell whether I had a good session or not based on the lap time.

But you know what? The reality is that your lap time just tells one part of the story, because the reality is that the conditions on the track change, change massively from session to session and from day to day, of course. So you can't really compare your lap time from today against your lap time that was yesterday, or two days ago, or two months ago, or six months ago.

Why lap time gives you false positives and false negatives

The track is always going to develop, either in a faster way or in a slower way. You may find yourself on a track which is rubbered in with very high quality rubber, perhaps very soft rubber, and you'll find really quick lap times, but maybe you're not driving well. Whereas on another day that you're driving much better in terms of your consistency, your gap to your theoretical, etc., you're driving really well in that sense, but your lap times are slower than the other time, because today, for example, in that specific day, you are going to have a much worse track condition.

So you can't just rely entirely on the lap time, which unfortunately 90% of drivers and parents do as a mistake, and I did as well. But now I realized after all these years at the racetrack that merely looking at lap time isn't the solution, and it's actually going to give you false positives or even false negatives.

So it can really trick you into thinking sometimes that you had a really good session in terms of lap time: wow, this lap time is so fast. But the reality is that the track was just super quick in that session, and maybe if you put somebody else on that kart, it would have been half a second quicker than you.

Conversely, it could trick you into thinking that you had a really bad session one day, because your lap time maybe is four tenths off from your personal best on that specific track. But, you know, your gap to your theoretical is absolutely zero, and your consistency is extremely good, and you were able to repeat the laps like crazy, and you were on the pace already on lap two, which was impressive. So, you know, that may have felt like a bad session because you were four tenths off your personal best in that track, but the reality is that that was an outstanding session, because if you can match your theoretical lap with your real lap, and being able to repeat that multiple laps, and you were on pace on lap two and not just on the last lap, then, well, you can imagine that was a very, very good session.

But if you just looked at your personal best time gap of four tenths, then you'll be like, oh, you know, that wasn't really good. So don't get tricked into thinking purely in terms of your lap time, because I always say that to my drivers, you know:

Relying on lap time is the losing strategy.

And even when you're driving, the problem is that you always know what's your personal best on that track, right? Everybody knows their personal best on a specific track. And so if you drive always thinking about that, and you're like, oh, you know, I just made, you know, a 55.6, but normally I do a 55.1. And if you're driving and you're thinking that, that's going to be for you a good thought to have when you're driving, or it's going to be a negative thought? Of course, it's going to be a negative thought, because you'll always be comparing against your personal best lap. But, I mean, as I just said, the reality is that you can't really do that. The track is always going to change. One day you'll have new tires and the track will be super fast. Another day you won't have new tires and the track could be super slow as well, so you may be driving at your best ever, but you're not going to be able to be within six tenths of that personal best, for some reason. So you should not rely on the lap time purely.

Sections beat sectors

So that's why at PURPL, we've developed this dashboard, where you can really have a look, by using multiple features, at how good you did in that session, independently of your lap time, relative to the other drivers. So you can see how good your session was, and you can see, see that based on your gap to your theoretical, first of all, because if you could do that, mini sector, because you could see, I have multiple mini sectors in PURPL on purpose, because I wanted you to have, realistically, all the separated corners in different sectors, instead of just relying on three sectors from MyChron that are split evenly across the track. I wanted to have more sectors, because, like this, you can really tell if you did some really good corners one lap, or some really bad corners on the other lap. So I really want to be able to see that.

But don't worry, we create the algorithm in a way that it's not catching false sections and unrealistic sections, let's say, splitting two corners in the middle of the chicane. No, it's not going to do that, obviously it would become unrealistic. So I, I took care of that, of course, don't worry. But, yeah, with all these different sectors, you can find, in a track like Lonato, six sectors instead of three, I call them sections. Same in Franciacorta, you will find like seven splits, seven sections, instead of just the three ones from MyChron.

Why is that useful? Well, because you can have an idea. If it's 14 corners on the track, you can see that on average, you know, two corners of that track at Franciacorta is going to be, every two corners going to be a mini section. And that's good because, you know, sometimes in a sector from AiM, you may have four corners, and you may be doing really well two corners, but really bad two corners, but that may still be your fastest sector. But that wouldn't be useful, because you want to see which were your best corners, let's say, put all together, to tell your real theoretical best lap, okay, because most of the time the AiM is not accurate enough, you know, it's not telling you the right picture. Of course it's doing its job, it's being given three sectors per track from the satellite GPS, and, of course, it just follows that reliably. But the reality is that it's not very useful, because the funny thing is that the beginning and the end of those sectors, most of the times, are right in the middle of some corners, and therefore it's not really accurate, because, I mean, that's exactly the thing we are trying to avoid at PURPL, because we obviously want to make it realistic, and we don't want to cut, uh, you know, a sector and start a new one in the middle of a corner, or in the middle of the chicane, which, that's a section of a corner, so it would be unrealistic. So, you know, that's what I think, I really believe that you wouldn't really want to just look at the MyChron three sectors, I want you to have a look at something which is more precise and tells you a better picture, which is the PURPL sections. I really feel those are the, the way to go.

Chase the meta lap, then close the gap

So once you're able to have an idea of all the sections you did across the lap, you'll be able to have an idea, okay, this lap I did this section really well, in this other lap I did this section really bad, okay. So the goal is to put all the best mini sections together, and those are going to combine into your perfect lap. So, ideally, that's really what you're looking for.

I will call it the meta lap, where you're really putting everything together. You're using everything you got from that track grip available, as well as your kart grip available.

And if you combine everything with your, you know, optimal peak level of grip, that maybe comes on lap six or seven, because, you know, the tires are a bit cold at the beginning. But then you have three, four laps where you have the optimal peak grip, and so you can try to go for your perfect lap in those laps that you are in the window.

And on top of that, you can always rely on, not only your gap to your perfect lap. So the goal is to close that gap as much as possible. I mean, it's going to be very hard to match exactly your perfect lap. I mean, the closer you are, the better, of course, but you also have to rely on your consistency.

Consistency, measured properly

And how do we value and calculate your consistency? Well, we use the standard deviation. So, the lower the value of your standard deviation, which is basically a statistics value that basically sees how much variance, okay, how much difference there is from your fastest lap to all your other laps. So we want to see how many, you know, tenths of a second, for example, you are swinging from one lap to, from the best lap to all the other laps. And, obviously, the lower that standard deviation, the better, because it means you have higher consistency. So, the closer you are to zero, the better, okay. If you have a 0.01 standard deviation, you're doing an absolutely phenomenal job. If you're doing a 0.5 variation, it's a huge difference, because it means you're on average five tenths off from your lap time, from your fastest lap time, and, therefore, you are not being consistent enough.

Of course, it's going to be almost impossible to bring that value down to zero, because in the first laps, I mean, let's be honest, the tires won't be at the peak of the performance, it's going to be hard for those to get to that level. But I'm sure that you are going to understand the value of it by, you know, just trying to get the value as low as possible, as close as possible to zero. But, again, nobody can really get to that zero, but that should be your target. If you can get close to zero, well, then you are doing a really good job, and you can track the number over time. And you can see that, okay, six months ago, my standard deviation, so it was like 0.55 on average during the day, and now it's 0.25. Well, well, then I've improved massively.

And in a race, you don't just want to have a good fastest lap. You know, nobody wins with fastest lap alone. You need to have consistently fast laps.

I would rather have one tenth worse optimal fastest lap, but repeat that lap every lap than having an unbelievable fastest lap and being all the time three, four tenths away from that, because I'm not able to replicate it.

And it's kind of like I say to my drivers at Babyrace, when you do a lap and you can't replicate it anymore, it's almost like you had it by luck and by chance. But it's not the way it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be that you can repeat it over and over again.

And I know there's sometimes some effects from slipstream, from traffic, tire degradation, or tire performance in terms of temperature. I understand that. I mean, I've been driving myself many years and I still drive. But the reality is that those variables do not have as much of an effect as you think. So you got to make sure that you're real to yourself, and you're like, okay, yeah, I know, no, there are some variables, but the reality is that they don't play that much of a factor. Of course, in some categories, like in 60 Mini or Juniors, the slipstream is quite effective. So if you have a track like Zuera where the straights are so long, yeah, you're going to have definitely some slipstream effect, even up to two, three tenths or four tenths. So it's going to be pretty wild, but, you know, you keep that into consideration, and you should just live with that.

The real signature of a fast driver

The real skill that a successful racing driver has is that you look at his lap times, or her lap times, on the data, and you can't quite tell the difference from one lap to the other. The laps are so similar to each other, you can't tell the difference. You almost have to, you know, zoom in massively to tell the differences in speed or in the lines.

So we have some really cool ways to see your repeatability. In terms of braking repeatability, we have that feature in PURPL, but we also have the racing line repeatability, so we can really see how close from your fastest lap racing line you were, and how many laps you were able to repeat that, and, on average, how many meters away you are from that line. So if one lap you're perfect, then the next lap you're two meters away, the other lap you're three meters away, you know, you're going to have 2.5 meters on average from what you did on your fastest lap. So, of course, you want to bring that down. And also, in terms of braking repeatability, you know, once you get to the fastest lap, the goal is to, you know, repeat that braking point as close as possible.

Even though we all know we drive by feeling as karting drivers, don't focus too much on the, on reference points. I totally agree, you know, and you'll never hear me telling you, oh, you should find a reference point, just brake there all the time. No, I just feel that you should do that in formula cars and in GT cars, because you arrive at such higher speeds, at 300 kilometers an hour on the straight, you must use reference points for braking. But in karting you don't have to, because you arrive at much lower speeds, you don't really have clear reference points, and it's just, you know, happening so fast because every corner is right next to the other, so it's, it's almost impossible, I would say, to find those reference points. So that's why you shouldn't really focus on those. So aim at closing that number as close to zero as possible, in terms of braking repeatability, as well as line consistency, because those are two things that racing drivers that are at their peak of their performance, they're able to do.

Adaptability: how fast do you get up to pace?

Then the other thing, of course, is adaptability. You know, the best drivers are able to adapt massively from session to session, from day to day, and from track to track, and so they're able to get up to pace a lot sooner than when they were starting out, of course. So, you know, that means that they can get to their fastest lap much earlier. They are not going to take 15 laps to get to a quick lap, they're going to maybe take only five laps in that specific session to adapt to the track conditions and getting up to pace.

Because, you know, when you're going out, you always have to kind of discover the grip. I have this theory of grip discovery, so it's really going to be like, yeah, drivers discovering the grip as soon as they go out. But, again, you gotta adapt, because if you feel, oh, there's a lot of grip, I'm gonna adapt and carry more speed into the corners, brake later, release the brakes, get on the throttle early, etc. Whereas if you discover that, oh, there's no grip compared to the session before, for some reason, so you gotta adapt to that too, okay. So that's what I call grip discovery adaptability. But in general, you gotta adapt pretty much anything, okay, to your setup, to your, the track condition, so you gotta be good at adapting.

And so, if, as I said, it took you normally 15 laps in a session to start to adapt to the track and the kart, whatever, you need to take that down to like two, three, four laps. I mean, drivers like Verstappen, Leclerc, Schumacher, Hamilton, they are those kind of drivers that can adapt super fast. And I'm sure they weren't like that on day one when they started out. They developed that adaptability, and that's super, super important also in the rain, when driving in the wet.

I mean, you've got to adapt really quickly. The conditions are never the same in the wet. They're all the time different. As soon as you drive in the wet, you're gonna have a grip level different massively from a grip level of another day in the wet, or another session. So you always have to adapt. You always have either a bit more rain or a bit less rain, a bit more standing water, a bit less standing water, a bit more rubber on the track which becomes soap, or a bit less rubber which becomes better in the rain, actually, because there's actually more grip available. So all these things you gotta adapt massively.

Race metrics, not just session metrics

And then, obviously, it's not just about your individual lap time or individual driving session, it's also about trying to trace and measure your race metrics, okay? For example, like, how many overtakes you can do in a race, or how good are you at holding your position on lap one.

You know, there's some drivers who are really fast, but on lap one, they will lose on average five positions, okay. While there are other drivers which are maybe not as fast, but they can always gain two, three positions on average. So those are some measurable metrics that you can track, and it's really cool, because it shows you also, you know, drivers that are maybe not so fast, but they're always able to recover positions.

And that's something you really want to see in drivers, because, obviously, you want to have drivers that are really fast, and, ideally, they don't have to recover any positions because they're starting P1. I mean, that would be the nirvana and the ultimate holy grail of all drivers. But, you know, it's going to be unlikely to achieve that outcome, and everybody will need to make up positions at some point. And you will need to, either with pace or not enough pace, you got to make up the positions, and you need to just wrestle your way through, and, you know, with all the muscles out there, just grab the positions, even though you may not have the maximum pace. So, again, it's not just about ultimate lap time metrics and single session metrics, but it's also in terms of race metrics. So how good are you at overtaking, how good are you at defending, how many laps can you do without making mistakes, you know, how, how many laps can you drive at the front of the pack without losing your focus, you know. So it's all like that, and it's really cool to see.

We already have some race metrics that we're tracking at PURPL. If you go in the Race Intel feature, you can drop your PDF from your race, and you can have an idea of things like how many positions you gained, how many positions you lost, etc. But, equally, I feel that we have a few features to build, and that's what we're working on in the next few weeks, on making that even more understandable and more valuable.

So stay tuned, keep analyzing your sessions on PURPL, keep finding lap time. Go purple, and remember to keep sending it. Ciao, ciao.