One of the many things that everyone struggled with at DirtFish was looking where you were supposed to go. It’s really surprisingly difficult. On the track, you look at corner entry, then the apex, then the exit. At least at the level I’m at, you’re generally looking at the next thing you’re concerned about. So when you’re looking for your braking point, it’s in front of you. The apex? In front of you. Maybe a little to one side, as the car is turning. Sometimes dramatically so, but because it’s the track, and because cars can only rotate so fast, you look… more or less in front of you. Corner exit? Same thing. You know where you’re headed, you let the car glide out to the outside, and you’re looking forward to the next corner.
Compare that with the pendulum turn. Prior to getting to the corner, you’re looking at everything. Where am I going? Where is the corner apex? How wide is the road where I need to turn? It doesn’t seem like that much more stuff, but if you’re going left, you’re looking for the apex and exit of the corner to your left, but also the edge of the track to the right. Because you’re approaching the corner on the inside (on the left for a left turn), and since you’re going to turn right, first, and boy, you don’t want to drive off the road. So as your car starts to turn right, you naturally look right. I mean, who doesn’t watch where the car is going. You, that’s who.
Instead, you look left as you steer right. You feel the car start to turn, and once it’s “weighted up” on the left wheels (since it’s turning right and slowing), you steer hard to the left, and let go of the brake. Yeah, you’re steering in a direction you’re not looking, and as the car starts to turn you let go of the brake.
The car’s weight is totally upset, the load shifts from the compressed left, essentially hops over the center line of the car, and slams down on the right, suddenly loading the front right tire (which is turned left), and the car dramatically turns to the left. When the car is in the direction you want it to go, you give it a ton of gas, it squats, unloading the steering wheels, and shoots out of the corner in the direction you’re pointing.
It’s a really disconcerting experience. But as you improve, you realize that the edge of the track on the right isn’t going anywhere. So if I look at it as I approach, great – I don’t need to look at it again. By looking left, I let my body unconsciously give it the right amount of steering input, and I can focus on the things I was struggling with – brake pressure and a more “sturdy” application of throttle.
But since the whole of the DirtFish course for me was a pendulum, I kept “looking right”. I kept second guessing how much brake. How much throttle. The whole course was set up safely – if I “failed”, I wouldn’t hurt anything. But the combination of ingrained “smoothness” on the pedals kept coming back. And I kept falling back on this instinct – looking right – when I needed to look left.
Even in the last runs of the 3rd day, I was second-guessing brake application. Repeatedly, my instructor would say, “You had the right pressure on the first application, but then backed off!” I looked right.
But one of the really genius bits of the DirtFish curriculum is that they teach you a handful of tools. How to turn in a variety of conditions, in a few different styles. How to correct it if you’re too tight. Too far out. They drill that into you in the “exercises”. Then you start driving the short courses – the Boneyard or the Link, which force you to use these tools in applications, not isolation.
I still struggled with these. I’d hit a lovely turn correctly, and then my brain would back off, and I’d smoothly enter the next corner and slide wide.
Then I’d look back at the mistake I’d just made (look right) and get lost.
It didn’t happen to me, but one funny technique that the instructors had was that some of them would point where you should look – in the pendulum turn, they’d point to the left – right in front of your face, blocking your view completely if you were looking to the right. That is, you were approaching a corner at full speed, and they would put their hand in front of your eyes, pointing to where you should be looking. Completely blocking your view.
On day 3, one of the things they did forced me to entirely turn off my brain. It was the first time it all clicked.