By Evan Flaxman, JD, MBA
There is a point in a race when preparation has to take over.
At 150, 180, or 190 miles per hour, there is no room to think about anything except the task at hand. You cannot think about what will happen if something goes wrong. You cannot think about the difference between life and death, even though at those speeds that difference is very real. You cannot think about the car inches away from you or what a mistake could mean.
You have to drive.
When I began racing Porsches at a high level, I quickly learned that having a powerful car and knowing how to drive were two very different things. I was driving a Porsche GT3 Cup car, one of the most capable purpose-built race cars in the world, and initially its abilities exceeded my own.
I knew that.
Rather than pretending otherwise, I decided to invest heavily in learning. I hired an extraordinarily talented racing coach with more than 30 years of experience. He had come close to reaching Formula One and was, in my opinion, one of the finest race-car drivers in the world. I even had a passenger seat installed in my GT3 Cup car so that he could sit beside me and teach me on the track in real time.
That training changed the way I understood the relationship between a driver and a race car.
I didn’t yet know how far that training would take me.
Before I raced at that level, I had never understood how much communication exists between a race car and its driver.
A lot of people will spend an enormous amount of money on a race car but not invest enough in learning how to drive it. I wanted to do the opposite. I knew that if I was going to push a machine like that toward its limits, I had to increase my own abilities until I could confidently and properly execute the maneuvers required to race with 25 other cars, sometimes only inches apart.
Racing is very much like a dance. Your partner is the car.
When you push a vehicle to 99 percent of its limits while simultaneously pushing yourself toward your own, something happens between the two of you. The car is constantly giving you feedback—through the steering wheel, the brakes, the tires, the chassis, and the way the weight moves beneath you.
You have to learn to listen.
Eventually, the relationship begins to feel almost like a ballet. You are no longer simply telling the car what to do. You are responding to each other.
But none of that eliminates the intellectual demands of racing. Before I went onto a track, I would memorize it. I would sit in my hotel room during the nights before a race and mentally drive the course again and again.
Where do I brake?
How deep can I brake?
Where do I downshift?
Where do I upshift?
Where is my turn-in point?
When do I get back on the gas?
Where should my eyes be looking?
I would go through every sequence in my mind: brake hard at the three marker, downshift to second gear, turn in, find the apex, get back on the throttle.
Then I would do it again.
And again.
By the time I was racing, I didn’t want to be figuring out the track. I wanted the sequence to be so deeply memorized that I could execute it while concentrating on everything else happening around me.
The Fear You Cannot Afford to Think About
There is an emotional side to racing that is difficult to understand until you have experienced it.
When you are traveling at 180 or 190 miles per hour, the difference between life and death is palpable. You know what can happen. You understand the consequences of a mistake.
But you have to push that knowledge out of your mind.
You cannot divide your attention between driving the car and thinking about crashing it. At those speeds, complete concentration isn’t a preference. It is a necessity.
I learned that in a very real way when I had a major crash at Road America at more than 140 miles per hour.
Getting back into a race car after a crash like that is its own challenge. The fear doesn’t simply disappear because you want it to. You have to confront the knowledge of what happened and then return to an environment where hesitation itself can become dangerous.
You still have to brake deeply. You still have to carry speed into the corners. You still have to trust the car. And you still have to perform.
The goal isn’t to pretend fear doesn’t exist. It is to keep fear from taking control of the task.
The Race at Spring Mountain
When I raced at Spring Mountain, my coach was on the radio with me as my spotter.
By then, we had spent substantial time together. He had sat beside me in the GT3 Cup car. He had watched me develop. He knew my abilities, my weaknesses, and the work I had put into learning the car and the tracks.
During the race, I started building a lead.
After approximately four laps, I had opened up roughly a half-track advantage over the next car. Then my coach came over the radio.
He said:
“Evan, I’m going to let you take it from here. I know what you’re doing. You know what you’re doing.”
And then he went silent.
I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of that moment while it was happening.
I was racing.
I never stopped counting the gears. I never stopped thinking about my braking points or my turning points. I simply continued doing what I had done in the hotel room during the nights before the race.
I went back to what I had memorized.
Brake here.
Downshift here.
Turn in here.
Get back on the gas.
I didn’t change what I was doing because my coach had stopped talking. I kept executing.
He didn’t say another word for the rest of the race.
I won by approximately one minute and 40 seconds.
What the Silence Meant
It wasn’t until afterward that I understood the full significance of what had happened.
When I saw my coach after the race, he came up to me and told me how proud he was of me and how I had handled the race.
That mattered to me in a way the finishing time alone could not.
This was someone who had raced for more than 30 years. Someone who had trained me personally and watched my development from inside the car. Someone who knew what it took to perform at an elite level.
And during the race, he had decided that I no longer needed his voice in my ear.
He trusted me to take it from there.
That was when I realized I had a special talent.
There is a difference between believing you are good at something and having someone whose judgment you deeply respect recognize something in you. His opinion carried weight precisely because I knew what he had accomplished, what he understood, and the level at which he had competed.
I understood why he had gone silent during the race.
I didn’t understand what that silence truly meant until afterward.
Preparation Before Confidence
Looking back, the lesson I take from that race isn’t simply about confidence.
Confidence by itself would not have gotten me around that track. It wouldn’t have told me where to brake, when to downshift, where to turn in, or when to get back on the throttle.
The preparation came first.
I had spent the nights before the race mentally driving the track. I had invested in a coach instead of assuming that an expensive car would somehow make me an elite driver. I had installed a passenger seat so that I could learn in real time from someone with decades of experience. I had accepted that the car initially exceeded my abilities and worked to bring my abilities closer to what the car could do.
By the time my coach went silent, the preparation had already been done.
I didn’t have to rise to some magical occasion. I had to execute what I had practiced.
The moment my coach stopped coaching me was the moment he showed me how far I had come.
I just didn’t realize it until the race was over.