In car racing (I’m watching Driven right now), how much skill is involved? I’ve never understood the sport. I imagine experience would be the determining factor in car racing, but how much “talent” is involved? It’s not like other sports, where you need to be in superb physical shape, you just need to be really good at driving.
So could the average taxi-driving Joe be a racer if he was given a car and some time to get a handle on the new style of driving?
I doubt it, but there’s some complexity I’m not seeing.
Actually, most types of racing do require the driver to be in very good physical condition. Races like Indy500 or a Foruma-1 last a long time and require quite a bit of endurance for the driver to perform at their absolute peak for the duration.
In addition, there are a lot of both learned skills and inate talents which make up a good driver, just like anything else. I believe there is a comparison to fishing, where there is also a component of talent. In the case of fishing, some people are just naturally more adept with a rod, have a lighter touch for the sensitive points of playing a fish, have greater patience for the mind-numbing tedium of the whole thing, etc. With driving, the natural talents show themselve more in timing, reflexes, etc. It might be a case where someone with talent develops the learned skills more quickly and becomes a “good” driver more easily than someone without talents, but a driver with no natural ability could overcome that. But the same could be said of almost any sport.
Certainly the average taxi-driving Joe could be trained to be a racer just like he could be trained to be a golfer or a quarterback or a goalie. Whether he would be any good would depend on how much he trained, how good his trainers were, and whether he had the natural abilities applicable to the new skills.
i would say that auto racing requires extreme fitness. it is very common for top drivers to have a heart rate of around 160-180 bpm for extended periods of time, and lose several pounds during a race. they must remain at maximum alert for the entire race. and the point you make about it not being like other sports is correct. if you make a mental error in basketball, you dont spin out of control and hit a wall at 200mph. if you stumble in baseball, you get dirty or scuffed up, you don’t burst into flames and flip down the track.
yeah, the average taxi driver could enter a race. no, hes not going to win. he is the guy who finished 27th out of 35 and 9 laps behind.
yes, there is a complexity your not seeing. top drivers (formula one-- that about all the racing i know about, so im not talking about nascar) have to have or develope a “feel” for the car and what it is doing to achieve maximum lap times. experiance plays a huge part, but i believe the best of the best, (schumacher, prost, lauda and that brazilian cry-baby) have a talent that others just don’t have. kinda like michael jordan. his game is just simply better (so i hear, i actuall know nothing about him). i cant really explain it, and im not saying i have it, but i believe its there.
of course, the top guys have been racing since they were kids, in go-karts (not any go-kart like you may have seen, these things are FAST and corner like you would not believe) so you can say they develop thier talent much like any other skill. practice, practice, practice! however, if two guys have identicle cars, experiance and luck, the guy with more talent will win.
this is why in formula one, 2 team mates with nearly identical cars have very different results. i believe that rubens barichello relys on michael schumacher to set up his car. michael just has a better “feel”. yet, in an outright race, rubens could not compete with michael, dispite the closeness of the cars.
enough from me, i’m going out to the garage to tweak the kid’s go-kart…
I would say concentration rather than fitness would be the most important. Of course, it does take a lot of stamina to concentrate.
I don’t know how they concentrate for 4 hours of going around and around. One little mistake at 200 mph and blam! -your car is a shiny hunk of scrap metal resting against the retainer wall.
I’ll bet Joe taxi-driver would have no problem matching the top drivers in maximum lap time…
And heart. I once saw Nigel Mansel get out of his car and try to push it after he ran out of gas a few yards short of the line (Dallas Grand Prix, many years ago). Nevermind that the rules wouldn’t have allowed him to win by pushing his car. Nevermind that he’d been driving for hours in an open cockpit in 98degF heat under blazing sun. He was going to put that car across the line. He had to be physically restrained by his crew.
Don’t skill and talent pretty much equal be(ing)really good at (whatever)?
One can be very “experienced” at swinging a bat, throwing a ball, shooting a gun, running, etc. AND be in supreme physical condition, but that “experience” doesn’t necessarily make them a good baseball player, football player, marksman, sprinter, etc.
Excellence in any sport requires more than physical conditioning and experience. It requires honing the skills involved. I’d suppose that being a good race car driver requires many of the same skills or talents as being good at hitting a baseball. Hand-eye coordination, judging distances and relative speed, timing, blocking out distractions, etc. Everybody has at least some ability in all of these skills. But not everybody can excel at them to the degree necessary to perform in professional sports.
I know there is skill and talent and stamina involved, but one thing that the average racer has that distinguishes him from the average person is superior visual acuity. In the eighties they did a test of racers and found that they were pretty much average on all physical tests except one, designed to measure visual acuity. The top drivers could read the label on a revolving 45 rpm record, the average person could not.
Thank you for your responses, there are many things I’ve never considered before.
Can someone explain to me what talent for racing is? Racing, like fishing, and (now that I think about it) golf seems, to me, to be dictated wholly by experience.
I don’t understand the concept of talent in non-physical sports. Talent, as I’m referring to it in this discussion, is a natural ability that is very rare. Handspeed in boxing, the reflexes of a goalie, the ability to track a pitch in baseball. These can be learned to the point where they can compete with talent, but when the man with talent is learning as well, he’s inevitably going to beat the person who only has experience.
The examples of talents in fishing do not seem insurmountable. Patience, playing a fish, when to jig the line, what type of bait to use and when, etc. These can all be learned. If someone said, “That man is a gifted fisherman.” what would he be gifted with? It would sound almost like luck.
So what are talented race car drivers gifted with that the average Joe isn’t?
It seems to me that your answer is included within your own post. “Reflexes of a goalie, the ability to track a pitch in baseball”. I’d say that driving around at breakneck speeds often within mere inches of several other cars is something that requires incredible reflexes and an terrific ability to track the motion of the other cars wouldn’t you?
There is physical aspects to racing, but much of it is in relax and mental ability. The margin of error while driving an F1 car is so slim. Taking a car up to 200+ mph then dropping down to 60 to 120 for a corner is hard enough. Add the fact that if you don’t hit the apex at the perfect angle and speed, you will run right off the course. If you have ever watched an F1 race when they switch to the camera angle that is just about the driver’s head, you will appreciate the skill needed to drive properly. I am hardly able to see the turns as they are coming up, yet these drivers are hitting them with precision and speed. I don’t rank nascar as being anywhere near the level of talent an open wheel driver must possess.
(My area of interest is primarily NASCAR, by the way.)
Simply having experience doesn’t necessarily translate to success in racing at all. For instance, Rick Mast has been racing since he was 16 years old. He has been in NASCAR’s Winston Cup series for about fourteen years. He has a lot of experience, but he’s never won once. Then there’s Kevin Harvick. I don’t know when he started racing, but this is his first year in Winston Cup, and he’s already won twice. (A case could be made that the disparity in each drivers’ team funding had an effect on their performance, and certainly Mast has never been with a premier team while Harvick had one of the best teams in the sport handed to him when he inherited Dale Earnhardt’s ride, but I’m just going to assume that the cream rises to the top and a good driver would be able to get into good teams.)
Racing often comes down to thousandths of a second. Drivers must be absolutely flawless. They can not miss an apex by 6 inches, or be slow in a corner by 2 MPH. Practice of course helps, but most of being a great driver is being absolutely perfect in that respect.
Knowing the “feel” of the car is crucial. Having the rear wing having an angle .5[super]o[/super] off will mean the difference between victory and defeat. 6th gear being a hair too low will severly hamper his chances at winning. Racing drivers must know everything about their car, and how to adjust their car so it performs at the absolutepeak, or they lose. The discrepency between victory and last place is far smaller than most other sports.
As stated before, making a mistake doesn’t mean getting a flag thrown or walking back to the dugout to do it again a few innings later, it often means careening into a wall at over 200 MPH, a trip to the emergency room, and if worse comes to worst, you’re pushing up daisies.
Racing often comes down to thousandths of a second. Drivers must be absolutely flawless. They can not miss an apex by 6 inches, or be slow in a corner by 2 MPH. Practice of course helps, but most of being a great driver is being absolutely perfect in that respect.
Knowing the “feel” of the car is crucial. Having the rear wing having an angle .5 degrees off will mean the difference between victory and defeat. 6th gear being a hair too low will severly hamper his chances at winning. Racing drivers must know everything about their car, and how to adjust their car so it performs at the absolute peak, or they lose. The discrepency between victory and last place is far smaller than most other sports.
As stated before, making a mistake doesn’t mean getting a flag thrown or walking back to the dugout to do it again a few innings later, it often means careening into a wall at over 200 MPH, a trip to the emergency room, and if worse comes to worst, you’re pushing up daisies.
this is NOT meant to be insulting in ANY WAY, but im guessing you don’t have any racing talent. its just something you can “feel”. hell, i cant really describe it.
i used to race motorcycles, and i can tell ya, when someone with real talent passes you, you know it!
the answer to your question above is, “talented race car drivers are gifted with the abiliy to race cars”. sorry, thats the best i can do!
i guess im saying if you knew what it was, you would be a talented race car driver.
p.s.-- movies about racing are all pretty much shit, as far as i’m concerned. there was a “documentary” from the early 70’s called “the quick and the dead” that focused on grand prix racing and it gives a little insight into these people, but it’s only a fair attempt, and kinda loses focus toward the end…
nascar driving is harder than driving f1, hands down.
reason is that f1 is all about teamwork and science coming together. nascar requires teamwork and science(some people say nascar is more low tech, thus less science), but compare to f1, it is a lot more individualistic. Now, nascar requires you to have your competitors cooperate. F1 does not require you to get your competitors cooperation. Actually, you never cooperate with your competitors unless to prevent crashes.
Nascar like F1 requires great skill and concentration to keep car running fast and not losing control. F1 goes a lot faster so requires faster reflexes and quicker thinking, but Nascar requires you to keep control of your car while being bumped and the air flow around your car is constantly changing. F1 cars gets less air flow turbulance.
So to sum up, I believe F1 drivers are more talented and gifted physically as they are driving faster, but Nascar drivers have something else they have to worry about… communicating with other drivers. Thus, all the problems of politics comes in. F1 drivers barely have to touch this part of racing compare to Nascar. All drivers have to be aware of their competitors, but you never see them depend on each other to win a race as much as Nascar does.
The other key point is that oval racing ain’t as easy as it looks. Air flow may change at any second and changes more than grand prix tracks. In F1, the fastest line barely changes during the course of the race. In oval, the fastest line will change depending on other cars, wind, track condition. In F1, the way you tuned your car for the race stays the same or change very little when you have a very fast car. In oval, you constantly have to change as the track condition changes. You can start with the fastest car at the beginning of the day and end up with a pretty slow car at the end as you run out of tires.
er… I don’t see anybody crapping on NASCAR. It’s just that all but one (two, now) of the people responding to this thread happened to have interests focussed on other forms of auto racing. If anybody craps on NASCAR I get all over them like white on rice.
On second re-reading, D_Nice ended his post with a jab at NASCAR being less intensive than F1. But you know, that’s not what this thread is about. That topic’s been done to death and as far as I’m concerned it’s MOOT. They’re different kinds of racing, they require different talents, you don’t like one then don’t watch it. :shrug:
Anal Scurvy