Racing Without a Team: The Privateer's Data Playbook

For all those drivers racing as a privateer — not driving with a team, but solo — I have good news. Right now you can get so many insights from your sessions, even if you can't access data from teammates.

The track is always the best teacher. You learn so much by following other drivers even when they aren't your teammates, and by watching drivers from the outside during other sessions. You can always pick up the best lines and learn a lot, especially when you go to a new track.

The memory bank a privateer never used to have

Data analysis is a bit like learning a language. You can't learn a language in ten days by watching tutorials — it takes a while, it takes experience. That's why AI matters here: it gives you high-quality insight from your data without demanding years of study first.

The really useful part is memory. If you drove at a track before a platform like PURPL existed, most of the time you simply wouldn't analyze your data, because for most people it was too hard. And even if you did, you wouldn't end up with a bank of notes and insights from all your sessions. You'd just be left with data files you had to re-analyze from scratch every time.

Now the insights get stored. It builds a memory bank of your driving — your style, your strong areas, your weak areas — so you can track progress over time.

And it gets specific per track. I drive a lot at Lonato and at Franciacorta. When I open PURPL on my phone or tablet, I'm getting feedback that's already been analyzed from previous sessions there. It already knows my weak areas around those tracks and what it wants me to work on. So the feedback is custom not just to the track but to my driving style.

The two numbers to track, and the one prerequisite

Start with your gap to your theoretical time — and not the one on the MyChron, because there you only get three splits. The reality is you can segment the track into far more than three, the way an F1 analysis does. In PURPL you get six or seven mini splits, which shows you much more precisely where the time went.

Those splits aren't set in the middle of a chicane, where it would be unnatural and unrealistic to compete for a theoretical time. The algorithm places a section only when your steering is straight, with a bit of breathing room before the next corner, so you're not engaged in a corner or already preparing for one. That way each corner is genuinely separated.

My prerequisite: get the gap to your theoretical to a tenth or less. It's easy to be within a tenth on the MyChron's three splits. It's really hard across seven.

If you're consistently four or five tenths off your theoretical, that's what you should be fixing — before you go looking at someone else's data or start changing your setup to chase a tenth.

The second number is your standard deviation: your consistency. Low value means little variance across your laps, which means high consistency — the two are inversely correlated, so the lower the better. Then always check both against your other sessions to see the trend. Has my standard deviation improved at this track, or got worse? Has my gap to theoretical come down, or gone up? Those are the two metrics I track in my own driving and in my drivers'. The full method for benchmarking against yourself goes deeper on both.

When you plateau: trading data with a rival

Once you've got experience with different setups and different lines at a track, and you feel you're hitting a plateau, you can try asking someone on track to share their data.

It's hard. Let me be honest with you about this:

If you find someone as competitive as me, I will never share my data with you. This sport is cutthroat, it's ruthless, and I'm very ruthless myself.

But you may find somebody willing. Maybe they're a tenth slower than you — and you can still ask to trade, because even a driver a tenth slower will be quicker than you in some corners.

Just remember that whatever kart and setup they're running may be making those corners easier for them. If someone has a very short wheelbase, a pointy, oversteery setup, they won't match you in the fast corners that need rear stability — but they'll be really fast in the slow corners and the changes of direction. You won't fully replicate that with your own driving, because their setup is built for it.

So look for someone on a similar kart brand with a similar setup. You can tell a lot from the outside: caster, what axle and hubs they're on, the rims, even ride heights. If they're running close to what you're running, it's a fair apples-to-apples comparison. Against a completely different kart, benchmarking the data isn't reasonable — though knowing what each change does tells you how to read the difference.

Corners or straights? The fastest read on someone else's data

Even with an imperfect comparison, you can immediately see whether the other driver is quick in the corners or quick on the straights. That one split tells you a lot.

Maybe you're driving phenomenally well in the corners but you're still on a test engine, so you're losing three, four, five tenths on the straights. That's actually reassurance — when the race engine arrives, you should be a lot quicker.

Or maybe it's the opposite: your engine is already a race engine, but you're not fast enough in the corners. Then it's either tires, or your driving, or both.

The track is the teacher — that's how I learned

If someone is two tenths quicker than you in the previous session, go out and follow them. Try to see where you're losing. You'll pick up lines and techniques you wouldn't have imagined — maybe they turn in a bit later, or a bit earlier than you thought, because there's more grip there than you realized, or because they've simply done more laps at that track and in those conditions.

That's how I learned, honestly. I didn't have a coach. My mechanic would give me advice here and there — mostly "brake later, brake later". That was his number-one line every single time. I was already braking really late and I knew it, but being pushed like that made me brake later and later.

I think that's what turned me into a braking monster.

Beyond that, I learned by driving around other drivers and picking up the tricks and the styles myself, depending on conditions and tracks. And I want to be clear about this: when I was driving in Mini and Juniors I didn't really have strong teammates. I only had proper teammates in KZ, for a few races, when my brother Leo was driving shifters with me. Having his data was great, because I could see exactly where I was gaining and where I was losing. But for most of my career I had nobody to compare against — and I didn't even use data until I was about 15, almost by the time I was getting into formula cars.

I'm not saying you should do the same. The world has changed, and you should use data now — it's a genuine performance enhancer and you should leverage it as much as possible. I'm saying you can still win races without strong teammates to compare against. Just make sure you leverage the track for everything it's worth.

Record it, then re-watch yourself

Record onboard video, so you can re-watch what other drivers are doing rather than relying on memory. Then you're working from memory plus the video plus the data.

And re-watch your own data. We built the traces in PURPL to be visual rather than text-heavy — I hope not boring at all — so it feels more like a game than an analysis exercise. You can replay your laps and your lines. If you look at your theoretical, you can see which lap gave you your absolute best corner two, or corner four, and then go and look at what you actually did there.

Zoom into that corner and ask: what did I do well on that lap, because I want to do it again. Maybe you turned in a bit later, got a later apex, straightened the kart earlier and got a much better exit — and maybe a better entry too. That's the same detective work as finding where you're losing time, just pointed at the laps where you got it right.

You can learn a lot from others, sure. But believe me, you can learn a huge amount from yourself — especially at a new track, where you'll be trying loads of things, sometimes without even noticing while you drive. At the end of the session you can go back and study all of it. Privateers doing their own analysis should also know which channels are actually worth watching.

If you don't know where to start

Finally: if you're a privateer driving by yourself and you don't know where to begin, follow the nine post-session questions. There's a full guide with every question you should be asking yourself.

Honestly, you'll find those questions answered inside PURPL. It tells you exactly where to go and find lap time, and gives you the metrics to answer each one, so there's no manual work. You just have to go out there and see it for yourself.

Sign up to PURPL for free — I hope it's a great experience. Let me know how it feels, and remember to keep sending it. Ciao.