The defining arc of my time at Dirtfish was the Pendulum.

The one skill I picked up almost instantly and intuitively was the “Pendulum turn”, or the “Scandiavian Flick”. I got it right the first time I tried it, and could do it repeatedly. Not perfectly, of course, but to within a pretty recognizable and repeatable margin.

The problem was that for not pendulum turns, my skills developed… like a pendulum.

Trying to learn to apply the solid brake pressure you needed to get the car to turn and then wait for it to turn – I’d think really hard about it, and get to a point where I’d be able to do it. I’d get up in my head trying to analyze what was working, what wasn’t, etc. and often “get lost” trying to figure it out. In the end, it was pretty simple.

When I was conscious about it, I’d realize that I needed deliberate brake pressure – when braking on gravel, out of 10, I’d need to go from 0 immediately to 6 if I wanted the car to turn. If I rolled on, track-style – 0/1/2/3/4/5/6, by the time it got to 6, the car would be settled, and wouldn’t turn. I’d also sometimes apply the right pressure, but then chicken out. So what I needed was 0>6. What I’d either do is 0123456, or 0>6>4. If I did either of the latter, the car doesn’t turn. But I’ve trained myself to do the former. And that if I did 0>6, that was wrong and I should back out of it, thus 0>6>4.

So. I’d consciously work my way to 0>6. And I’d get it. The car would turn. It’d be awesome. I’d do it a few times, and the session would end. And the next time, I’d subconsciously try to rely on my subconscious. Because hey, we learned a thing! Now we can just apply it! But the thing stored in my subconscious was 0123456.

Because of that, the quality of my sessions was almost always “exert a ton of mental effort to learn a thing, learn it, execute it alright, then come back to try again and have an absolutely terrible time.” This was mentally brutal. It’d shatter my confidence, it’d get me all up into my head, I’d spend so much time trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, because it felt like I was doing things the same (I wasn’t), and it wasn’t until the coach could figure out what I was doing and give me conscious instruction, and then I could get un-discombobulated, and start to properly execute this totally counter-intuitive feeling thing that the performance would come back.

This was much more difficult than it sounds, because you’re trying to judge correct brake pressure, correct steering input, timing of when to lift, steer, brake, and then transition back to the gas all while traveling in an unfamiliar car at full tilt (because if you’re not going full tilt, you’re not generating enough momentum/energy to make it work at all). So for me, by the end, I found my two bad habits were “too smooth/gentle on inputs”, and “often steering/braking too late”, but it took two full days to figure out that those were the issues among the whole sea of variables we were drowning in.

In retrospect, there are two issues. In the moment, there were infinite possibilities no answers, and what felt like a constant surge in progress then a discombobulating, confidence-shattering backslide for what appeared to be no discernible reason.

It was really interesting to me, because like I’d said in the other post, the other track guy not only had a similar issue, but as we talked about it, and a similar confidence response. We’d both swing wildly from “Holy shit that was amazing!” to “What the fuck am I doing why is none of this working?” Sessions would vary from fantastic to abhorrent (at least for me, from my perspective), and my confidence would swing dramatically from right to left. One of the harder things was seeing the non-track folks with less seat time start from the same place (WTF is this lift-turn-brake stuff?) and then grow linearly, while the two of us swung back and forth from good to bad and wonder if we were going to ever make any kind of repeatable progress.

The thing I needed to do, and was finally able to in the end, was to look – not where the car was headed, but where it needed to go.