One point to note about mileage: I've got (looks...) 30,000 miles online, but that doesn't mean I spent all those miles wisely. I bet more than half of them were spent touring around not really learning anything and just doing the same old pace I always do.

The only laps that count are the ones that teach you how to go faster, and I imagine the naturally talented people get those laps more often than the rest of us.

i'm guessing 1:01.93, it won't get below a minute.

What a silly claim, anyone can be as good as anyone else? There is no such thing as talent? Your point doesn't make much sense, Leprekaun.

I'll beat people with more mileage than me in LFS and people with less mileage than me also manage to beat me. That throws your theory right out the window.

Mileage and practice will only get you to a certain level, after that it comes down to talent in finding that little extra. Sure, with determination you can try improve this talent but it will just never come as naturally as it does to the ones who are `born` with it, so to speak. I’ve watched people race karts for years and years and still never get good at it. One in particular practically finished last in every race he did, even against people in their first race meeting (novices). For me it just never seemed to click, he could never improve.

To me it’s just logical that some people just can’t think the way they need to, to go quick. Some people are good with maths, some with English and some are better at thinking logically. Whether this is something we are born with or it’s to do with how we’ve been brought up at a very young age, I have no idea. I just know that people are better than me at various tasks, no matter how much work I put in. I had to work my ass off to pass higher English where as a couple of my friends passed with an A without doing much work.

I know for a fact I'll never be as good as Bawbag or any of the other well known drivers. I just can't find that limit and whilst I may with more practice get closer to this, they will just move the marker further in that time.

I started racing R/C Touring Cars four years back and I'm beating/competing with drivers who have probably covered more than 4 times the mileage I've done. Considering some of them have been racing for 15+ years, they should be beating me with that extra 11 years `experience.`

I can't help but laugh when people join servers, leave the pits and fly off the road a few times. Stop and ask for a setup, saying "Setup plz, mine keeps spinning" or words to that affect. They then get the setup and continue to fly off the road. I know this isn’t your point, before you repeat it I’m just stating something whilst we’re on the topic.

I’ll finish this off with a question for you. If it comes down to experience, why in the world did Ferrari pay Schumacher 50+ Million to drive for them, why did they lure Raikkonen with a similarly scary salary? Why do teams try lure great designers and engineers from other teams with big sums of money? If in actual fact they could grab a student and train them up to do the job whilst paying minimum wage. Give them more experience than Adrian Newey etc received before they started designing race winning cars…

As I stated before, skill is just an illusion of competition.

There are always factors in what decides a victor and a faliure. I know that some days I am doing really well, and some days I am not, and I try to find out why. I am confident I can do something, but I don't know if I can do it over and over.

It's like an FPS I was playing today. I had a score of 8 kills, 0 deaths. I was confident. But when I reached 9 kills, I got less confident, and more nervous. And guess what, I died.

Doesn't mean I have lost skill, it just means that one of the factors changed..

I think the following items are required to make a quick and / or winning driver.

Talent - Hand/eye co-ordination, instinct, feel, reflexes. The more natural abilities that you bring to the table. Some of these can be improved with practice / training.

Application - Determination, work ethic etc. Graham Hill had less natural talent than Jim Clark but he helped make up for it by studying tracks and cars endlessly. He would examine pictures of corners and plan his method of driving through them, in a similar way to the how Lep described exiting a corner in the XRT. He was a more mechanical driver in style than Clark, but he still won races and titles. The will to win is also vitally important - the drive to win is common to all champions.

Experience - Self explanatory really. The more experience you have then the less you are surprised by situations that may arise. Not the most important factor for pure speed, but invaluable for league races etc.

The 3 Cs - Calmness, concentration, consistency. Mental attributes that could possibly be lumped in with talent.

It's not all about the distance, or the setup (Jim Clark didn't change his set at all during the 1967 F1 season), or even pure talent. It's many, many things. So many factors that mean we are all different have different speeds and different potentials. Mileage is only one tiny factor.

@storm cloud: Good points. And O.O at Jim Clark not changing his setup. I doubt that though, because a Monza setup for a Lotus 49 wouldn't work for Monaco or the 'Ring, would it?

Calmness is the key here, IMO, you can't do as well if you're pissed off

DK

Sorry, apart from changing final drive ratios to account for different top speeds he made a front suspension change in practice for the Monaco GP and then changed it back before the race.

Very true points there Storm, very true indeed. Personally, I'm not quite sure whats special about my driving but I've understood that over the years, experience was an important factor to why I've improved. Sometimes, I notice that when I just think harder about my driving style and how maybe I could become a smoother driver, I can get some drastic results. I remember back in the CRC days in the 2nd season of the Challenge Cup (XFRs), in the first round, my front tyres would burn up easily and this ticked me off quite a bit so I kept increasing pressure in the tyres and while it helped a bit, I would still lose time so thats when I decided to go into deep thought about my driving style and consciously trying to be smoother and smoother till it became part of my driving style and I found that even with my new improved driving style that I was saving my tyres really well, I noticed that I was able to extract much, much more speed out of the car waay beyond my imagination which put a nice big on my face . So I believe that if someone just really thinks about their driving and try and analyse their driving style at every point in a corner and think about what the car is doing, you can go waay beyond your imagination when you improve.

I like to think tbh that its to do with how Senna looked at things. For example, Senna would comment on how when he was at Monaco, he reached such a stage of deep concentration and analysis that he could physically be outside the car to observe what the car is doing at each precise moment through each corner where drivers like Prost and Berger just couldn't comprehend how can someone reach that kind of level of concentration but Senna did and it proves to why he was so much more better than drivers when he was really in the zone.

In terms of my personal ability, I don't know where I gain my speed but I have a fair idea that its down to understanding of the car, the track and also really thinking about how the car responds to my various inputs. Thankfully, I think that yes, after reading many of the posters here, I believe I was incorrect to say that there is no such thing as "talent" because why would drivers like Senna and Schumacher be so much better than their team mates, well, perhaps with Senna, Prost was also very talented so there wasn't much of a big difference but with his former team mates, Senna did prove that he was something else. Like storm said, talent is just a factor to why someone can be better than someone else and even tho it is in fact an important factor, having talent alone won't get you anywhere without having determination, understanding and the drive to win.

Quote from Rappa Z :

i'm guessing 1:01.93, it won't get below a minute.

Good guess

Nice one Racin Jason

Very dissapointed with my effort, pb splits are down to a 1:01.43 but I just can't nail the sectors at the same time. Time to watch the F1 race... rofl what a crazy start