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

What I tell all my drivers at Babyrace is that each driver needs — must — have two skills, and all the others build on top of those. These two skills are just fundamental, essential, in order to become a successful and crazy-fast racing driver.

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. It's just not possible. You'll be holding back going through a flat-out corner because you'll be afraid of something; you'll be afraid of overtaking somebody. So if you are generally afraid of racing or driving, or you're just a fearful person in general, it's going to be very, very hard for you to make it in racing and become a professional racing driver — you'll probably be better off stopping now. I'm nobody here to judge your current fear level, but you can't force it on yourself. If you are really fearful in general, you can try to push yourself to be less fearful, but I'll be honest: this is something you're kind of raised with, or born with.

By the time you're at seven, eight, nine years old, I just feel like your fearlessness level is going to be kind of set. You know what I mean? And that is key. If you're fearing carrying speed into the corners, I'd be wasting my time telling you to brake three meters later or get on the throttle one meter earlier. It would just be me trying to push you — but you wouldn't want to push yourself. Confidence and fear show up in the data too, by the way — I've written about using data to build confidence without anxiety for exactly this reason.

Meta-skill number two: coachability

The second thing — which, again, everything else builds on top of — is coachability. You probably know what that means: coachability refers to being really good at listening to people giving you advice, and actually applying those tips. Being willing to hear the feedback, leave your ego aside, and genuinely care about the coaches and their feedback.

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 in that and I've talked about it a lot in other articles — even if you're really fast early in your career, if you're not going to listen to people, you'll just be fast as a young driver. You will not become a professional.

Even drivers like Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton, Schumacher, Senna — considered legends, multiple world champions — they would always listen. They always had something new to learn.

You can see Max Verstappen listening all the time to his engineers, same as Lewis Hamilton. They're always doing briefings, listening to the feedback they receive from their data analysis, looking for ways to get faster. And that's really the way. If you want to become a very late braker, you'll have to listen to your mechanic's feedback if he's very experienced, or your coach's feedback, or what your telemetry analysis is telling you. If PURPL's telemetry is telling you — you have to brake three meters later, because you're braking too early — okay: if you're coachable, you listen, and you apply it. Your coach tells you you're braking three meters too early? Brake three meters later and harder, hold the brakes a little longer, go out there and do it. Bam — you found lap time. That's exactly what you're looking for.

These two meta-skills, as I like to call them, are what you need to build everything else on top of — kart control, racecraft, et cetera. Two no-brainer skills a driver needs to possess. And thankfully, in racing you don't need strong genes like in other sports — the Olympic sprinters mostly coming through Jamaica, the marathon runners mostly coming from Kenya, or basketball where you need to be two meters tall to play in the NBA. In racing you don't need anything specific in terms of genes. But you do need fearlessness and coachability. With the hundreds of drivers we've seen at Babyrace over the years, the ones who end up winning and making it as professional racing drivers are the ones who are fearless and highly coachable.

Who you should actually listen to

I know it's not easy to accept feedback, especially 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 good, you need to change the way you drive here, change your line, you're too tight, you're too wide, you're braking too early, you're braking way too late. Most of the times I had a reason for what I was doing — I wasn't driving clueless. So sometimes I felt like my coaches were giving me wrong feedback — even though I never really had a coach. I only had one for a single race, in Formula 3. I really enjoyed that, and I won that race, at the Pau Grand Prix. I wish I could have had a really good coach all the other days. But I kind of learned by myself, being around my mechanic Piero, who was very experienced at the time, and my dad — who had a bit of experience because he drove shifter karts himself, even though he started very late. I had a lot of respect for them, and I would listen.

But when strangers would come up and give me random advice, or some teammates — I'd be quite skeptical, and I wouldn't really listen. And I think that makes sense. You wouldn't want to listen to everybody — not to somebody who's never driven a kart. Should you be coachable? Yes. Coachable to everybody? No. You should be listening to the people who ideally know what they're talking about. Ideally you surround yourself with the best people — a good coach is worth it — but I understand it's not easy for everybody to be surrounded by the best. In those cases, judge for yourself whether the people around you actually know what they're talking about, and listen to them. Otherwise, go by your feeling and improve by self-analyzing: watch your onboard videos, apply the fundamentals, and go through your data — I'm sure PURPL is going to provide lots of insights for you to work on in the next sessions.

Entry speed sensing — the skill that separates the field

There's one other very important aspect that fast karting drivers possess, and that is the entry speed sensing ability. There are many other important aspects — general speed sensing and kart control, which we'll talk about in a minute — but the feeling of carrying speed into the entries of the corners, going really fast on entry while still making the apex and still getting the optimal exit: that is probably the most difficult task to develop. Once you possess it, you're going to be probably the fastest driver on the grid — maybe in your category, maybe in the whole world for your age. Michael Schumacher used to say it: the difficult part is nailing the entry and carrying the most amount of speed on the entries.

It's easy to focus on the exit. The kind of bullshit idea of "slow in, fast out" — it's the easy way, and it's what everybody is used to trying.

Especially in lower-power karts like 60 Mini or Juniors, you constantly get told: you've got to drive slow in to get fast out, as if this was the right way. Of course you'll find yourself getting decent exits — but most of the times they will not compensate what you lose on the entries. Imagine driving a Formula 1 car: you have to push yourself on the entries and still make the mid-corner and the apex. You cannot think "I'm going to brake soft and early so I get a better mid and exit." You may get a really good exit, but at the end of the day you care about the whole corner's lap time and the whole lap's time. If you gain one tenth on the exit by going slow in, fast out, but you lose two tenths on the entry — on the braking, or just on carried entry speed in a fast corner — that's a net loss. And that's what I see most of the times.

It's even funny: with the slow-in-fast-out technique, most of the times you end up losing on the exit too. When you brake that early, you end up turning in early as well — so you get a decently high minimum speed, but the exit gets compromised anyway. I've gone deeper on the entry-vs-exit trade in why corner exit speed matters — the two ideas are not in conflict: the exit matters, and you still must not buy it by giving away the entry. The reality is that entry speed sensing is just extremely important. I push my drivers at Babyrace to push themselves like crazy on the entries: push yourself, brake later, carry more speed, brake later, carry more speed. By doing so they develop that feeling, and they become monsters. If you drive under the limit on entry, you may be fast eventually, sometimes — but that's the easy thing, and it's what everybody else around you is doing. Please don't become the next driver who's slow on the entries. The difficult part — especially when you go up to formula cars or GT — is carrying speed on entry in fast corners: Spa-Francorchamps through Eau Rouge, or Pouhon, that left-hander that's very close to flat, where a small mistake puts you in the wall. That's the difference between finding one tenth and being top three, or losing one to two tenths and being in the midfield.

General speed sensing — your onboard limit meter

The next core skill is the general speed sensing skill — feeling whether you are on the limit or not, based on the speed you carry. That's extremely important. Being able to tell: oh, I went in a bit too fast, and that's why the kart slid — I went maybe two or three kilometers per hour too fast, I've got to carry two or three less next lap. Okay, fixed it. Or: I went too slow in that corner — I could feel I had to get on the throttle very early because I braked too early. Or: I made no minimum speed in the mid-corner, no rotation, because I didn't carry enough speed.

If you can feel and sense speed really well, you will be unstoppable — you can adjust your driving lap by lap, corner by corner, instead of having to wait for the data in the next session. Data analysis is really good, but it's backward-looking — it's not live information. So your speed sensing is what picks the pace up in real time: am I going fast enough in this corner, too fast, or just right? When you're starting out you probably won't possess this. The drivers who develop it the most are probably the ones who end up becoming Formula 1 drivers — it's just that important. The way to develop it: push yourself like crazy into the corners, keep the self-awareness session by session, lap by lap — did I carry too much speed there? — and re-watch your videos to build that self-awareness. You will always have to choose how much speed to carry into a corner; becoming genuinely good at judging it is a huge advantage over the drivers who always rely on somebody else — a coach, or the data — to tell them.

At the end of the day, you are alone inside the track. Even in F1, with engineers telling you information — the reality is you're inside the car, inside your head, and it's you who chooses how much speed to carry, where to hit the brakes, where to lift, when to get on the throttle, when to release the brakes to carry speed into the corner. Nobody else is doing that for you.

Kart control — the 0-to-100 scale

Finally, what really levels you up and turns you into a legendary driver is the kart control skill. To some extent we all have some — it's not a yes or no, zero or one; it's more like a zero to one hundred. How good is your kart control?

The way I like to think about it: when you're sliding the kart, are you able to control it in a way that loses the least amount of time? Are you able to feel where the kart is sliding — whether it's sliding in understeer or in oversteer — and are you able to respond: get the rotation you need, or reduce the rotation when there's too much? If the kart slides, can you counterbalance it, fix it with your driving, during the session? Maybe you carried way too much speed into a corner and the perfect corner is gone — but are you able to save the kart, save the corner, and lose 0.01 instead of losing half a second? That's very, very important.

You see kart control in action when you drive in the rain — extremely low grip, where you need to be super smooth, control the traction and the wheelspin, keep the rear from sliding and spinning, and still have braking stability like in the dry. This skill is something you're going to need so much to become an exceptional racing driver. And I'm sure you will — if you work on these skills. You're not born with them; you develop them.

If you're driving constantly below the limit, the kart is never sliding — by definition, you never practice your kart control.

The only way to develop it is to push your limits. Good ways to practice: drive in the rain many times, and do some ice karting — situations with limited grip where you're always beyond the limit. It is just mandatory for drivers. I hope you remember. As always — just send it.