After Oulton Park, I probably spent more time reviewing driving footage than I ever had before.
The reason was simple.
I was trying to understand where the energy in the car was coming from.
After the anti-roll bar failure at Oulton and everything I learned from that weekend, I realised I needed to communicate the information from the car, and from myself, back to the team and to Dave in a clear and accurate way.
The lap times already told us the car was wrong.
But I needed more than that.
I wanted to understand why the behaviour looked so different.
For the first time, I had footage from the same circuit, in similar conditions, but from two completely different weekends and setups. One version of the car looked calm, flowing and stable. The other looked nervous, busy and constantly on edge.
So I started breaking everything down corner by corner.
I ran two laps side by side, one on my laptop and one on my phone, stopping them at the same places around the circuit. I had help recording notes while I talked through the laps.
The first stage was scoring.
I gave every corner a score out of five for:
- braking point
- corner entry
- apex
- exit
This gave me a baseline to compare both the setup and the driving behaviour.
But the more interesting part came afterwards.
I started reviewing steering inputs, corrections, head movement and commitment level through each corner. I wasn’t really interested in lap time anymore because I already knew the balance problem had compromised that.
What I wanted to understand was how the instability was appearing and what I was doing to counter it.
That’s where the notes started building up.
“Busy.”
“Counter steer.”
“Wash out.”
“No commitment.”
“Late correction.”
“Impatient throttle.”
I use a trick whenever I review myself.
I start commentating on the footage as if I am reviewing another driver entirely. To do that, there are no names and no teams. Just car numbers.
“Car 75 compromised the exit there.”
“Car 75 overloaded the entry.”
“Car 75 lost confidence through the middle phase.”
It allows me to separate emotion from memory.
Instead of remembering how I felt in the car, I can just watch the onboard as if it belongs to someone else.
It could be anyone.
Once I got into the footage properly, I started spotting patterns much more clearly.
What became obvious very quickly was how much the car itself was creating extra energy that then had to be managed by the driver.
At Oulton, the disconnected front anti-roll bar had completely changed the balance of the car. Looking back at the footage, I could see the effects everywhere.
The steering became razor sharp, almost hyperactive.
The corrections were constant and I had no way to be subtle.
Commitment disappeared in high-speed corners.
The car stopped flowing naturally between phases of the corner.
I was entering corners using the throttle and opposite lock. Ideal for a drift day. Hopeless through Shell Oils.
What interested me most was how visible the conflict became once I knew what I was looking for.
Some of the movements I originally blamed on myself were responses to instability being introduced by the setup problem.
Other issues were coming from me trying to compensate too aggressively once confidence in the balance started disappearing.
That was probably the biggest lesson from all of it.
The car always reacts to energy.
The difficult part is understanding where that energy is being introduced.
Sometimes it comes from the setup.
Sometimes from the track surface.
Sometimes from the driver.
The challenge is learning how to separate those things honestly.
I had to do that to give the correct information to Dave, but also to improve myself.
Now all these notes go into my notebook and become part of future debriefs with Dave. When we return to circuits, I can compare behaviours, setup changes and driving habits against previous runs much more objectively.
I’ve also started keeping notes on rival drivers too.
Not personal things.
Just patterns.
How they defend.
Where they struggle.
How they respond under pressure.
What happens before mistakes appear.
The more I study driving, the more I realise that patterns exist everywhere.
Usually, if you slow things down enough and observe them properly, the car tells you far more than the stopwatch ever will.
