High performance driving = motorsport = racecar driving

Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don't understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it's further interesting to think about why people don't get the difficulty.

Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have experience with the actual thing, and (3) even if you watch someone doing it, you will probably still not understand where the challenge lies.

By (3), I mean if I were to show you the hand and foot movements of a racecar driver doing their thing, you wouldn't understand the difficulty^[1], unlike if I showed you someone pole vaulting for the first time, where I think most people could intuitively see the challenge. I'll come back to this.

Ok, so what's hard? Where does the challenge lie?

We can work backward from the goal. The goal in motorsport is to get from one location to another location in as short as time as possible. It's a race. How do you do that?

I will mostly focus on the challenges for the driver but will make mention of the engineering challenges too.

Finding the best path (not the hardest thing)

Naively, you might say the key thing is to take the shortest path. Not quite. The literal shortest path is not actually the fastest path, because the shortest path will involve sharper turns which require slower speeds. Better to travel 100m at 100km/h than 80m at 75km/h.

So one of the skills, and not really the hardest one, I think, is determining the best path (or "line") to drive along so that time taken is minimized. Though if this is a race, where you should drive is enormously determined by the other cars, and it's not just about minimizing time. I should amend and say that in a race, the goal isn't minimizing overall time, but ensuring your time is smaller than anybody else's.

Learning the line is necessary but not the most central challenge in my opinion

Minimizing time = maximizing velocity = maximizing acceleration

At the heart of motorsport, where you're trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible, is trying to always have the highest velocity possible, which means always try to accelerate as quickly as possible.

And it's essential to understand that acceleratio...

The Motorsport Sequence