SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Book Review - Speed Secrets: Professional Race Driving Techniques

All along the way, each chapter will have a few bold-type phrases or sentences that summarize a discussed concept in to a "speed secret" sound bite. All in all, there are 34 of them in this book. If you've driven a race car, or are a veteran virtual racer in the Papy or ISI sims, then scanning the pages to find and read these "secrets" you'll find that most of them aren't so secret. You already have exposure to them. What you may not have, and don't realize you lack, is a firm understanding of these secrets' relationship to physics, to other aspects of the car, or to yourself. That's in the meat of the text, and it's done in such a clear and concise way you will often find yourself saying "Ah Ha! Now I get it!" ...and each such discovery will allow you to refine your technique further.

So really, if there's nothing new or earth-shattering in this book, why buy it? Buy it for what makes "Speed Secrets" special: The HOW. How the author frames each topic, how he relates it to previously discussed concepts, and how he explains it all in a way that leaves you with a greater understanding of driving at the limit than you had before.

I grew up, academically, in the finishing school that is naval aviation. During my 18 months of flight school, 9 months in the F-14 replacement squadron, and 5 intense weeks at TOPGUN, the subject at hand was 'how to fly and fight your jet to the limit with confidence, and win in the air combat arena.' Learning to drive a race car isn't much different, really — you're piloting a high tech machine with multiple subsystems, in a fast-paced and demanding environment. It requires athletic ability and rapid mental processes, as well as a good bit of homework study to understand the details of the technology involved. So for someone with my background, I found the author's wording, format and sequence of topics in this book to be very similar to the way I was trained to operate a high performance aircraft. That made absorbing "Speed Secrets" prose a comfortable experience for me.

As I finished reading the book, I drove road course sims in Practice or Test session modes, just turning laps and working on my lap times while I thought about the latest tips and concepts I had read in the book. As I did in flight school as a student NFO, I tried to visualize the things I'd read and learned as I applied them in real time to my actual driving technique as I worked the corners of various tracks.

At first, I figured that with 2+ years of GPL under my belt, not to mention a full year of NR2003, the PWF PTA mod, and ISI's F1 Challenge/RH2004 mod, that I wasn't going to see the contents of this book doing much to improve my lap times. To my surprise, what I found was that I was immediately shaving tenths off my lap times at a rate faster than I ever had before. It was amazing. With each lap, I was analyzing my technique from within the style and context of Bentley's text, and instead of saying "well, I hosed that turn up" I was thinking, "next lap, I'll do a little more of this and shave some time off." The book was really working! In a matter of days I was setting personal best times at a slew of tracks in F1C/RH2004, and then bettering those times as well.

SpeedSecrets

To put it another way, in a sense the book reminded me of the Navy Fighter Weapons School's (TOPGUN) texts and lectures on "graduate-level" tactics. In aerial combat, the basic concepts, principles and techniques for success haven't fundamentally changed since the early days of WW I and Oswald Boelke's "Dicta Boelke" guide for air fighting, so at its most basic level any new text on the subject is merely a rehash of already explored territory. But what TOPGUN has done over the decades is to find new and better ways to explain the art of air combat, and thereby improve the aviator's depth of understanding of what's really going on, and how to maximize his strengths and minimize the weaknesses. Essentially that's just what Bentley's done for race car driving in this small, unassuming book. I highly recommend it.

Note: If you're interested in finding out more about Ross Bentley and the driving programs he offers, his web site is located here. To get your own copy of Ross' book, you can find it at Amazon.com, here.

Reviewer's System Specifications

Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP 2
CPU: Intel P4 3.0GHz
Motherboard: Asus P4C800 Deluxe
HDD: Western Digital Raptor 74 GB, 10,000 rpm SATA
Optical Drives: Sony 48x CD-ROM & Plextor 16x DVD+/-RW
Video: PNY Verto GeForce 6800GT 256 MB (Forceware v66.93)
Settings: 8xS FSAA, 8x AF, High Quality
Monitor: Dell EH171 17" LCD
Resolution: 1152x864x32bit @ 60Hz
Audio: Creative Audigy 2 ZS
RAM: 1024MB DDR Corsair PC3200
NIC: Integrated 3Com 100MB/sec on DSL
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 480W
Controller: Logitech Momo Racing FF Wheel

SpeedSecrets - Silverstone

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