Ross Bentley’s Speed Secret:

High Performance Driving is Mental

By Nigel Etherington

On Saturday June 13, instructors and advanced students from Porsche Car Club (Upper Canada Chapter) and BMW Car Club (Trillium Chapter) came out in droves to hear renowned professional racer and coach Ross’ Bentley teach his ‘Speed Secrets’.  Peter Carroll, a BMW club racer and instructor, organized this terrific event and 96 attendees were were glad he did. But the funny thing was they were nowhere near a track, didn’t get any seat time, and didn’t hear much about the mechanics of driving. So just what did Ross talk about for 8 hours that kept everyone mesmerized ?

Well, he talked about the performance improvement process. Which is really just the learning process.   After writing six Speed Secrets books (www.speedsecrets.com), founding the leading teen driving school in Seattle (www.goswerve.com), and a management/coaching consulting business (www.go-perform.com) on the side, Ross’ real ‘speed’ secret is simple: driving is mental.  So, if you want to develop drivers - or anybody for that matter - to their maximum potential you need to know how the mind works, learns and performs best. The rest is just details.

The Onion Concept

As a former Indy Car driver who has raced with the likes of Jimmy Vasser, Al Unser Jr., Rick Mears, Danny Sullivan, Paul Tracey, Mario and Michael Andretti, to name a few, Ross Bentley’s driving credentials are impeccable. The attendees enjoyed hearing Ross’ stories about rubbing shoulders with racing champions, and coaching NASCAR rookies like 18 year-old Colin Braun. But perhaps more surprising was realizing that Ross’s engaging seminar would not have been out of place at a university lecture on education.  

He began by inquiring what percentage of driving was mental…50%..80%..90%...or more? With some encouragement from Ross, most agreed that driving was probably mostly mental…. and so…. instruction had to be about improving the learning process (‘the software’). Better ‘software’ will enable  drivers to gather higher quality inputs, process them faster, and make responses autonomic. Autonomic - an action that occurs without conscious control - is like automatic.  And when driving becomes automatic it becomes confident and effortless -  ‘in the zone’ !

How to get there is the question we ask ourselves. The learning process begins by feeding people information. You know stuff about braking zones, apexes and trackouts etc. But when drivers don’t ‘get it’ or ‘try too hard’ then the real teaching challenge begins.  The instructors’ job is to peel back the layers of the onion to get to the core problem.  High performance instructors do that best because they don’t confuse symptoms for root causes. That instructor’s toolkit, according to Ross, should include more than just techniques and mechanics of car control.  It needs to include the (re)program for the drivers  ‘software’ which includes psychomotor skills, state of mind, decisions, behavioural traits and belief systems.  In short, instructor’s need to have a toolkit to work with the driver’s mind.

The Drivers Mind

Not surprisingly, performance improvement needs to start at the beginning, which is gathering more sensory input. More input equals more references. Ross recommended sessions focused on one sensory input at a time: visual, kinesthetic or auditory. In each case, the instruction was to get the driver to recount what they’d seen, felt or heard that they’d never seen, felt or heard before.  The theory was that gather more references usually equates to fewer driver errors.

Ross also subscribes to the Pre-Planned Thought, or the PPT. The PPT is an individual’s positive experience that can immediately trigger an improved mindset. Ross’s PPT is his memorable fifth place qualifying at the inaugural Vancouver Indy in which he felt his car ‘dancing’ in the rain.  So ‘car dancing’ is Ross’ trigger for the positive mindset that launches the ‘software’ program. Bentley contends performance drivers need a ‘start button’ for improved performance. The PPT is that start button.

Bentley also talked about how to ‘warmup’ a driver’s psychomotor skills to quickly attain peak performance. Ross brought some ‘guinea pigs’ from the audience up to the front to demonstrate his ‘brain’ exercises.  Bentley contends these exercises ‘switch on’ three key driver physical attributes: coordination, vision and balance.  Described in his book ‘The Perfect Driver’, these exercises - called ‘cross-crawls’, ‘lazy-eights’ and ‘centering’ - are akin to jumping jacks but really do work!

Conventional wisdom say’s improving a driver’s performance takes more seat time.  Bentley suggests that’s not always necessary,in fact practicing bad habits might not help at all. Perfect practice makes perfect, and Ross contends you can practice driving in your mind. Visualization develops the ‘inner’ mental programming before you head out to the track to actualize your driving goals. 

The Learning Curve

Drivers learn differently. Some are visual (“I see what you mean”), some auditory (“I hear ya”) and some experiential (“got a feel for it ?”).  But if learning is the objective, then both instructors and students should focus on the process.  Ross encouraged instructors to find out how their students learn best and adjust their teaching methods appropriately to bring out the best results.  The problem is that learning is not a smooth process, but a sequence of inclines, steps and plateaus.  So what then ?

According the Bentley the learning ‘curve’ can reduced to a simple formula:

Goal (G) = Mental Imagery (MI) + Awareness (A)

Learning will occur quickly and reliably when the student has a mental image of what they are trying to accomplish (G), and then the situational awareness to know how close they are to it.  Ross illustrated his formula with  examples of students who either didn’t ‘get’ the ‘MI’and/or the ‘A’ part of the equation. In both cases the instructor’s job was identify the goal and remediate the missing or incomplete part of the student’s learning equation. When done well the student learning progresses smoothly and quickly, developing confidence with skill in equal balance. 

Much like a well driven car it seems.

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This article was previously published in 2007 in the BMW Club - Trillium Chapter's Contact magazine.