Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emerongi | Hacker News Reader

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I've been doing a bit of karting lately and the difference between a 58s and a 59s lap is crazy. Super hard to shave that second off, but it's also so obvious that the guy doing 58s laps is way faster.

Last year there was a hobbyist race on my local track and the person who won it was a guy who mainly practices at home on his computer. I imagine a gokart simulation is close enough to the real deal that training on it actually can help a lot. You can get much more fine-grained feedback on how well you're taking certain corners etc. One thing that trips me up is understanding the kart - my local ones have somewhat poor acceleration, so it seems it's not actually best to take the corners as sharp as possible and try to accelerate out of the corner, but instead try to maintain as much speed as possible going into the corner, even if you end up on a bad line. This would be easy to test in a simulation, but I just have to go by gut feeling.

The 1st rule we've learned is : you look all over the place, not just the kart in front of you.

The 2nd rule we've learned is : no skidding, never. That's really hard to do. But look at top pilots, they don't skid.

The 3d rule is : you do your best time on every single lap (super good pilots do almost the same time on most of their laps, within 0.3 sec range; it's hard to believe they do it, but they do !).

4th rule : figure out the best trajectory. According to my kid's teacher it's a question of 10 centimeters here or there (good luck figuring that out !).

Strangely, passing a car is the last thing you learn. But in retrospect,it's normal : most of the time you run after the one in front of you. The opportunities to pass another pilot are rare (most of the time you're much faster so the blue flags forces them to let you pass).

As a dad, I'd say : find a good teacher, it makes a big difference.

I knew a bunch of Indy car drivers and they could visualize a road course lap in their head down to 0.3 repeatably.

how much do you weigh compared to the top drivers.

I don't think that matters as much as you might think. We have 3 race classes at our local track. The Pro guys (top level) are easily 1-2 seconds above the Pro-am guys (mid-level). Some of these pros are not exactly lightweights and are considerably above the minimum weight. Yet they manage to slaughter everybody else out there. You would think they had a disadvantage to the people who are running the baseline weight in the kart, but you sure can't tell it.

The very top drivers (1.5s faster than me) are probably around my weight, I'm ~70kg. There are heavier guys who are doing 1s faster laps than me.

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