What Makes a Fast Kart Driver? Two Meta-Skills, Then Three You Can Train

What I tell to all my drivers at Babyrace is that each driver needs and must have two skills, that all the others will be on top of those. But these two skills are just fundamental and are essential in order to become a successful and crazy fast racing driver. The number one is fearlessness.

Meta-skill number one: fearlessness

Yes, you can't become a fast racing driver if you're fearing speed, if you're fearing crashing, if you're fearing hurting yourself. I mean, it's just not possible. I mean, you'll be holding up going through a flat-out corner because you'll be afraid of something, you'll be afraid of overtaking somebody and making dive bombs, etc. So if you are generally afraid of racing or driving, or you're just like a fearful person in general, then I mean, it's going to be very, very hard for you to make it in racing and become a professional racing driver. So you'll probably be better off stopping, stopping now, even though I'm nobody here to judge your current fear, fear level, but I mean, just, you can't force that on yourself. If you are really fearful in general, I mean, yeah, you can try to push yourself and try to be less fearful, but I'll be honest, like this is something that you're kind of either raised or born with.

But anyways, when you're at seven, eight, nine years old, I just feel like your fearless level is going to be kind of set. You know what I mean? So that is, it's just key. I mean, if again, you're fearing carrying speed into the corners, I mean, I will be wasting my time if I tell you to brake three meters later or get on the throttle one meter earlier, you know, I mean, it would be just me trying to push you, but you wouldn't want to push yourself.

So yeah, that's not more one thing, but then the second thing, which again everything else builds on top, is the coachability skill.

Meta-skill number two: coachability

Now, I guess you probably know what that means. With coachability, coachability basically refers to the fact that you're really good at listening to people giving you advices and basically applying those advices and tips, and you know, you're able to be willing to listen to that feedback and leave your ego aside, and yeah, generally care about the coaches and about their feedback. So that's a bit like how I see it.

And I feel that if you are not a coachable driver, and your coachability level is very low, then even though you may be, quote-unquote, a talent, a super fast driver by nature, even though I don't believe too much on that and I've talked about that a lot in other articles, but even though you are really fast early on in your career, if you are not going to listen to people, you will be just fast as a young driver, but you will not become a professional. Because even drivers like Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton or like Schumacher or Senna, they were considered legends even by people around them, you know, there were world champions, multiple world champion, they are some of them still, but reality is that they would always listen, they would always have something new to learn.

You can see Max Verstappen is listening all the time to their engineers, as well as Lewis Hamilton, you know, they're always doing briefings and listening to the feedbacks they receive from their data analysis, and they just look for ways to get faster. And basically, that is really the way. For example, if you want to become a very late braker, you know, you'll have to listen to your mechanic's feedback, let's say he's very experienced, or your coach's feedback, or, you know, what's your telemetry analysis telling you. Okay, if PURPL telemetry is telling you, oh, you have to brake three meters later, because you're braking too early, okay, well, if you're a coachable, you probably listen to this and you'll apply that. Okay, if your coach is telling you, braking three meters too early, so brake three meters later and harder, making sure you hold the brakes for a little bit longer, you just go out there and listen to him and you go out and do it. Bam, you found lap time. There you go. That's exactly what, uh, you are looking for, you know.

But again, these two meta-skills, as I like to call them, are what you need to build everything else on top such as the kart control, racecraft, etc. You know, you need all of these two in order to build the rest. So these are two no-brainer skills that a driver need to possess. You know, thankfully in racing, you don't need to have the strong genes like you may have in other sports, like, you know, Olympic athletes, for example, like the sprint runners mostly coming through Jamaica from very, very strong genes, or the same from the marathon runners mostly coming from Kenya, where they have, again, very strong genes for that sport, or even the basketball players, where you need to be two meters tall, at least, in order to be playing in the NBA, you know, because again, you need to be tall to play basketball. But thankfully, racing, you don't really need anything specific in terms of character traits, in terms of genes, but you do need to possess the fearlessness as well as the coachability. I mean, those two are no-brainers. And I see with our hundreds of drivers we have seen at Babyrace over the years, I mean, the ones that end up winning and making as professional racing drivers are the ones who are fearless and highly coachable.

Who you should actually listen to

I know it's just not easy to accept feedback, especially sometimes when a coach or your parent or your mechanic tells you in a pretty hard way. I was quite the same. I didn't really like when they were telling me, oh, you need to do that. You need to do this. This is not really good. You need to change the way you drive here. You need to change your line, or you're too tight, or you're too wide, or you brake in too early, or you brake way too late. I mean, most of the times I had a reason for doing what I was doing. I wasn't just driving clueless. So sometimes I felt like my coaches were giving me wrong feedback, even though I never really had a coach. I mean, I only had one race in Formula 3. I really enjoyed that, and I won that race at the Pau Grand Prix. And I wish I could have had a really good coach all the other days. But you know, I kind of learned by myself, and just being around my mechanic who was very experienced at the time, Piero, and also my dad, who, I mean, had a bit of experience because he drove himself, shifter karts, even though he started very late. But I still, like, had a lot of respect for them too, and I would listen.

But you know, when strangers would come up to me and give me some random advice, or like some teammates, I mean, I would be quite skeptical, and I wouldn't really listen to them. But I think this makes sense, you know, you wouldn't want to listen to everybody, even to, you know, somebody who's never driven a kart. So I think you should be coachable? Yes. You should be coachable to everybody? No. Of course, you should be just listening to the people that ideally know what they're talking about.

I mean, of course, ideally you're surrounding yourself with the best people that know very well about what they're saying. But unfortunately, yeah, I understand it's not easy for everybody to be surrounded by the best people. So yeah, in those cases, try to judge yourself whether the people around you actually know what they're talking about, and just listen to them. Otherwise, just go by your feeling and try to improve by self-analyzing, and by watching your onboard videos, applying the fundamentals, and going through your data. I'm sure PURPL is going to provide lots of insights for you to work on in the next sessions, so you can keep on improving, keep on working.

Entry speed sensing

There's one other very important aspect that fast karting drivers possess, and that is the entry speed sensing ability. So let me explain, of course there's many other important aspects which include speed sensing skills as well as kart control, which we will talk about in a minute. But the feeling of carrying the speed on the entries of the corners, so going really fast on the entries of the corners while, obviously, still making the apex and still getting the optimal exit, well, that is the task which is probably the most difficult to develop. But once you possess it, you're going to be probably the fastest driver on the grid, and maybe in your category, and maybe in the whole world for your age. Michael Schumacher used to say that, I mean, the difficult part is nailing the entry and carrying the most amount of speed on the entries.

I mean, it's easy to just focus on the exit, you know, the kind of bullshit idea of slow in, fast out. It's the easy way to do that, and it's what everybody is used to trying and used to think about, that's the way to go. Especially in lower-power karts like 60 Mini or Juniors, you constantly get told, oh, you gotta drive slow in to get fast out, as if this was the right way to do this. You know, of course you will find yourself getting decent exits, but they will, most of the times, not compensate what you end up losing on the entries of the corners. Okay, imagine when you are driving in a Formula One car, I mean, you have to push yourself on the entries and still make the mid corners and the apexes.

But I mean, you cannot think about, oh, I'm going to brake early so I can get a better exit. Oh, I'm going to brake soft and early so I'm going to get better mid and exit. No, it's just not going to work. You may get a really good exit, but at the end of the day, you care about the whole corner lap time and the whole lap lap time, you know? So, I mean, if you gain one tenth on the exit by going slow in, fast out, but you lose two tenths on the entries, either on the braking, just by carrying the entry speed in a fast corner, well, at the end of the day, that's a net loss, and that's pretty much what I see most of the times. But to be honest, it's even funny, because with that slow in, fast out technique, most of the times you end up losing also on the exit, because typically when you brake that early, you end up also turning in early, so you will end up getting a decently high minimum speed, but then the exit will be also bad, will be compromised, because you'll have to steal the other car on the exit.

So yeah, the reality is that, I mean, the entry speed sensing skill is just extremely important. And every time I push my drivers at Babyrace to just push themselves like crazy on the entries, push yourself, push yourself, brake later, carry more speed, brake later, carry more speed, and by doing so they develop that feeling, and they become monsters. I mean, as I said, if you drive under the limit on the entry, you may be fast eventually, sometimes, but you know, it just doesn't make sense, because that's the easy thing, and that's what everybody else around you will try doing. So please don't become the next driver who's slow on the entries. The difficult part, especially when you will go up to formulas or GT cars, is carrying the speed on the entry, especially going into a fast corner, like in Spa-Francorchamps, you know, when you're going through Eau Rouge, but also when you go to Pouhon, in that left-hander where it's really hard to make it, it's very close to flat, and you know that if you make a small mistake, you're in the wall. But that makes a difference between finding one tenth and being the top three, or losing one to two tenths and being in the midfield. You know, but again, if you carry slow speed on the entry, you will not be able to compensate on the exit. It's just not possible. You gotta carry the entry speed, and that comes with confidence. That's why you gotta develop and push yourself. As I said, the other two core skills that you need to possess is the general speed sensing skill.

General speed sensing

You know, we talked about the entry speed skill, but just the general speed sensing skill, and feeling like whether you are on the limit or not, based on the speed you carry, that's extremely, extremely important. You know, being able to tell, oh, I went in a bit too fast, and that's why I made the kart slide. I went maybe two or three kilometers too fast, I got to carry two or three kilometers less next lap, okay, fixed it. Or, oh, actually, I went too slow in the corner, I could feel that I had to, you know, almost get on the throttle very early because I just braked too early and I went too slow. So, you know, or, ah, I made no minimum speed in the mid corner, so, you know, basically I had no rotation because I didn't carry enough speed, or stuff like that.

You know, if you can feel and sense the speed really well, you will be unstoppable. You can just adjust your driving lap by lap, corner by corner, instead of having to wait for the data in the next session. I mean, data analysis is really good, but it's backward looking, it's not forward looking, or like, you know, live information. So it's too important to get you to pick up the pace by figuring out your current speed sensing skill and feeling like, oh, am I going fast enough in the corner, am I going too fast, or am I going just right. Yeah, you know, when you're starting out, you probably won't possess this, but that's something you develop. Who develops it the most probably end up becoming a Formula 1 driver. I mean, it's just too important. Okay, the only way I suggest you to develop the skill is just to push yourself like crazy into the corners, and kind of have, like, the self-awareness of, you know, session by session, lap by lap, understanding, okay, did I carry too much speed there. And also, re-watching the videos is really good for building that self-awareness, so the driver understands, oh, I made a mistake, why did I make this mistake, oh, because I went too slow, oh, no, maybe because I went too fast, oh, you know, stuff like that.

So you will always have to choose how much speed to carry into a corner. And if you can find the optimal sweet spot, and judging, and becoming good actually at judging the speed that you carry, it will be a huge, huge advantage compared to the other drivers who can't, and always have to rely on somebody else, like a coach or data, to tell them how much speed to carry in the corners. I mean, at the end of the day, you are alone inside the track, even though you may have, in F1, like, yes, the engineers telling you what to do and information, but the reality is that you are inside of yourself, inside of the kart, inside of your head. And it's just you, and you that you need to choose how much speed to carry into the corners. You need to choose where to hit the brakes, where to take off the gas, when to get on the throttle, when to release the brakes in order to carry the speed in the corner. So, like, it's just you choosing that. Nobody else is doing that for you. So it's extremely important for you to build that speed sensing skill. I mean, it's just too important, and it's going to make you dangerously fast.

Kart control: the 0-to-100 scale

Then finally, what really is going to level you up and turn you into a legendary driver is the kart control skill. Now, I mean, to some extent, we all have that kind of control skill, of course. I mean, it's not whether you have it or not, it's not like a yes or no, zero or one. It is more of like a zero to hundred, how good is your kart control skill. And that's basically with all of the skills we've mentioned.

So the one way I like to think about kart control is like, whether, you know, you're sliding the kart, are you actually able to control it in a way that makes you lose least amount of time, and are you able to even feel where the kart is sliding or not, are you feeling what the kart is, like, sliding, but in terms of understeer, or sliding because of oversteer, are you able to sense that, and are you able to give that feedback to, you know, get the rotation from the kart you need, or to reduce the rotation, in case we have too much rotation, we have oversteer, we want to get a bit less rotation, you know. But also, if the kart is sliding, are you able to, you know, notice that, and are you able to counterbalance that, or fix that with, yeah, you know, with your driving during the session. You know, are you able to control the slide? Perhaps, you know, you carry way too much speed into a corner, and, you know, the only option is to reduce the time loss in that corner. I mean, you can't maybe get the perfect corner there anymore, because you made a mistake, but are you able to save the kart, save the corner, and just maybe lose 0.01 instead of losing half a second? You know, that's very, very important.

So, you know, you can see that kart control skill in action when you probably go and drive in the rain. You need to drive in the rain with extremely low grip conditions. You need to be super smooth and drive super well, in a way that it makes you control the traction, wheel spin, but also control the rear from potentially sliding and spinning the kart. Also on the brakes, because when you're braking, you want to have the same braking stability as when you brake in the dry, because the grip level, obviously, is very low.

So this kart control skill is just something you are going to need so much in order to become an exceptional racing driver. And I'm sure you will, if you work on these skills. Of course, you're not born with them, you develop them. And the only way to develop them, remember, is to push your limits. One of the good ways also to practice the kart control skill is to go driving in the rain many times, as well as doing some ice karting, that puts you in that situation where you're like, you know, in limited grip conditions, and you're always beyond the limit, let's say. And I feel that the only way to just develop your kart control is to push yourself outside of the limits. If you're driving constantly below the limits, the kart is never sliding, by definition. You would never practice your kart control if you're never sliding. So it is just mandatory for drivers to do that. I hope you remember. As always, just send it.