Communication

Written by Wes McDougall


“Hello...? Andrea.....? Andrea........? Hello?”



These words crackled into life over the airwaves into my radio headset. It was 2am, and I was sat at the prat perch at the world famous Spa-Francorchamps race circuit in Belgium. The rain was beginning to fall, and the track was starting to get covered with fog so thick and heavy, that it matched the drivers Italian accent. And it was just beginning to dawn on me, that the extent of English of the driver sat in the V12 machine, was limited to calling out for his friend, and lead driver, Andrea Piccini…….  



Over the past weekend, the 2023 Belgian Grand Prix took place at Spa. As is often the case, the weather was somewhat intermittent across the weekend, and this got me thinking back to a Spa 24 hour race that I engineered for Lister some....... (*checks watch*) 20 years ago.....

This also reminded me of the fact that often gets overlooked in motor-racing circles - which is: the importance of communication can never be dismissed.

And I'm not talking just about this obvious case where I had a driver with limited English trying to communicate to me that he didn't want to be in the car on a greasy track. More of that later.....

No, I'm talking about the regular everyday communication that is ever present, barely recognized, but entirely important between Drivers and their team. 

Perhaps the most widely know and discussed relationship exists between the driver and their engineer. Here, communication is the bed-rock of success and of vital importance. A lot is made of this relationship and the communication between both parties, but why is it of significance? Let take a look.

At it's core, the communication between the driver and engineer is about establishing a direct line of conversation and understanding, that results in an improvement to the performance of the driver and the car. 

So, as a driver, how can you achieve this? Firstly, it is wise to understand that it is a two way process - talking/explaining on one hand and listening/understanding on the the other.  With regards to the explaining factor, it can be easy to fall into the trap of wanting to convey a plethora of information to your engineer, but the true power comes with the knowledge of when the right time is to be concise, and to the point, and when the right time is to extrapolate and give details.

WHEN AND HOW TO GIVE FEEDBACK

In broad terms, giving feedback to you engineer, mechanics, or team in general can be broken down into two categories; 1. In Session, and 2. Post Session.

1. In Session

This is the time for clear, concise information. The clock is ticking, and those who keep their cool and relay the necessary information will ultimately succeed. This is perhaps the hardest place to express your feedback - you're in the car, it's hot, the pressure is on, your heart rate is elevated, and your mind is desperately scrambling to recall the past few laps, now that you have come rest in pitlane. This can be extremely hard to 'practice', but from my experience, the ability to drive both fast, and to recall how you did so, comes from practice, muscle memory, and time. This is because, as I explain in The Complete Race Driver. fundamentally the best and fastest way to drive a racecar at speed, is when the conscious and sub-conscious mind work together. And with practice and time, the subconscious ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting, because of its incredible processing and calculating power, when compared to the conscious mind. Thus, it is perfectly tailored for helping you drive a racecar, when you are hurtling across a ribbon of tarmac and your conscious mind is still thinking about trailbraking into the corner, whilst you right foot is pressing the throttle on corner exit........

In other words, over time, when you drive a car, your subconscious mind becomes a bigger part of your driving than you seemingly realise, and then lo-and-behold, your conscious mind now has all this extra processing power. And this is when drivers become better at recalling events that happen out on track, and are seemingly 'in-tune' with their cars behavior and what they want from it. All because the subconscious is being utilised for all the fast calculations required for driving, and the conscious mind now has the ability to look out for brake markers, engage in a battle with other drivers (on the track!) and of course the all important recall of the cars handling characteristics. So don't fret, if you are new to the sport and you have trouble replaying and conveying what happens out on track in your mind - this doesn't mean that you need to focus harder on what is happening - it actually means you need to practice more about becoming comfortable with driving at the limit in a subconscious manner, and the ability to provide concise feedback will almost come naturally. 

2. Post Session

This is almost the easy part! Usually here, there is time to stop, collect your thoughts and look at the data in a structured manner (usually, and hopefully with the heartrate down a few notches!) Here then is a better opportunity to go into greater detail about the handling of your vehicle and attempt to improve the cars performance. Again, clear concise information is important, but this provides a chance to explain and express the behavior of what you are feeling in such a way that it can be beneficial to the engineer and team. Whilst the phrases of 'Understeer' and 'Oversteer' are universal ('Tight' and 'Loose' for our American friends!) - by going into some more detail it can certainly help your engineer by expressing with greater vocabulary the cars traits, and your experiences.

GIVING BETTER FEEDBACK

Three tips I have for drivers on how to give better feedback are as follows:

1. Try and tie you feedback up with a driver output . If you can say something along the lines of 'it feels like it just pushes when I pick up the throttle' that this can clearly identify in the data for the engineer where in the corner you are experiencing the problem, and thus give them a better chance to either fix the problem, or know whether it is a driver induced issue (i.e. cracking the throttle too early). Other phrases such as 'when I first hit the brakes' or 'when I unwind the lock' also start to paint a more complete picture to help locate the issue rather than a broad "It's understeering' comment.

2. Try and connect the issue you may have (i.e. Understeer) with a corner type (i.e. slow speed versus high speed corners, or a hairpin corner versus sweeper for instance). Again, this going to allow the engineer to be able to fully engage their knowledge and help you to improve the car for specific corners.

3. If possible, try and pair together your feelings with repeatable phrases. For example you might use the phrase "It feels like the car is sitting on top of the road" to describe the that the car is not transferring weight to the rear axle under acceleration. If you then make a change to the car and it helps this, it could be of great benefit to use this same phrase if this happens again at another point in time, which will then hopefully fast track the knowledge of what to do to car to improve its handling.

HONESTY

I touched earlier on the temptation to sometimes want to express every last detail, just for the sheer notion that you can, but often saying nothing, can be all the more powerful.  If you are not sure what you felt when you were out there on track, no-one is going to think less of you for commenting as such. It is far better to say that you didn't feel a change, or you didn't notice a difference than making out like you have amazing super sensory feel. This is because often there are just so many variables that go into motorsport (track conditions, weather conditions, car setup, tyre quality......and the driver!) which means that on numerous occasions ,a setup change can go undetected due to a change in another parameter. So if you hold your hand up and say 'hey, I didn't notice any difference', or 'sorry, I can't give you any solid feedback on that', then that will have far greater potential to illicit positive change, than going down the wrong setup route through a false feedback comment.

BE COACHABLE

As the saying goes, 'It takes two to tango', in other words, communication is a two way street. So for all the feedback that it is important to give and explain, the other part of the communication equation is the listening part.  

It is worth taking the time to ponder how you best receive information. For some, having a team member or engineer explain something verbally may be sufficient, but for others, having a conversation may not be enough to fully understand, and data or a diagram may be needed to complete the picture. A number of times in my career, both myself and the driver I have worked with, have worked alongside a sports psychologist to understand how the driver best receives information:

  • Visually (data, diagrams etc)
  • Aurally (verbal communication)
  • Reading / Writing (In text format, like a list / email etc)

How do you best process this? It could be extremely beneficial to let your engineer or team know how you best understand things. That is one of the reason why, in The Complete Race Driver, I purposely try to explain the content with Videos, Diagrams and Text to help a wide variety of drivers.

ENGINEERS AREN'T IMMUNE!

In my profession, it is always a very easy thing to 'blame' the driver (just as it is easy for the driver to blame the car!) . Therefore,  a large part of what the engineer does as well as 'making the car go fast', is communication, and working out the best way to explain, teach and coach drivers on how to improve. There is a big difference between those engineers who just say "Brake 10 metres later at Turn 3" and those who explain how and why to brake later at Turn 3.......



As it often does at Spa, the rain and fog began to ease, and staying out on Slicks was the right choice in this part of the race. The rain would continue to come and go across the full 24 hours of the race, and this running of the event would go on to become etched into history as one of the biggest David versus Goliath battles in GT racing. This is because ultimately, the 2nd class (N-GT) Porsche ended up beating its more fancied and powerful GT1 rivals of Ferrari, Lister, Chrysler , Saleen and Corvette. With a rear engined car that was both efficient on its fuel and tyres in the tricky conditions, the Porsche of Oretlli, Dumas and Lieb went on to score a famous victory.

And what of the two the British, Belgian and two Italian drivers who were paired up with an Australian engineer in the 7 litre V12 Lister Storm? (Sounds like the beginning of a joke....) Well, after running in 3rd at one stage, a broken hub put an end to our challenge in this twice around the clock Endurance Race.

Afterwards I made sure to buy myself a little Italian / English dictionary to get better at communication. (This was the days before Google Translate was a thing). This came in handy the following year when I also engineered a Lister in the Italian GT Championship with another Italian driver who didn't speak English.......!



 

Additional products