Interesting thread – being able to practice OK but falling to pieces with another car around you is something that many people struggle with when starting off.

As well as the other tips mentioned here, Id like to suggest some mental development techniques. These are used by pro sportsmen, will help drivers of all levels and best of all cost nothing!!! I got into this a few years ago when I stopped rc and went karting, and since coming back into rc in 2006 I have applied the same techniques and I have had some reasonable success

Firstly, you need to train the subconscious to drive automatically. Your subconscious brain can process something like 10 million times more information than your conscious brain. If you ever watch the good guys and wonder how their reactions are so fast, it is because they are using the subconscious part of the brain. Your conscious brain can just cope with driving an rc car by itself, but when there are other things going on (other cars, nervousness due to competition, distraction from announcer etc etc) it gets overloaded.

This might sound like mumbo-jumbo, but the good news is that it is easy to ‘program’ your brain before you get to the track using visualization techniques. In a quiet area, close your eyes, picture the track in your head, and picture the car going around it. If possible hold your transmitter in your hand while you do this, and even stand near your car so the smells etc remind you of being at the track.

Start off slowly, thinking which way you will turn the wheel for each corner, where you will apply throttle and brake etc. Then start to imagine a few alternatives – how will I react when the car oversteers in this corner, nose dives off this jump, understeers here etc etc and drive it in your head. You don’t need to be going at race pace in your head – the slower the better to start with – what you are trying to do is make your corrections reflex rather than thought. After a while, you will find that you can do this much faster in your head and it starts to become more natural. And so far, it has cost nothing other than some time!!

When its time to hit the track for practice, there is another saying to keep in mind: ‘Perfect practice makes perfect’. Don’t just go out and ‘cut laps’ (that is what bashing is for) – focus on 3 or so things that you want to try and improve. It may be holding a particular line through a certain corner, experimenting with your technique of applying throttle, trying a different approach to a jump – the brain cant focus on too many things so pick a couple and try to think about those during the run.

When you are racing, there is another saying to keep in mind: ‘Focus on your performance, not your result’. In other words, don’t say ‘I’m hoping to finish third’ or “I'm hoping to get a consistency of 0.5s’ – these are results. Think ‘I am going to focus on braking at this point for this corner, hitting this line for this jump, holding the steering smooth through the sweeper’ etc. You will then find that the results come.

There is a fantastic book I can recommend to everyone called ‘Inner Speed Secrets’ by Ross Bentley which is a book on Mental Techniques for race drivers. It has some great stuff on training your brain which is relevant for rc drivers.

Hope that this is of some help – it’s definitely made me a better racer and even though I am getting older my reactions and race results seem better than 10 years ago!!!

Most of all - have fun!!

L8r

Ray