{"id":1158,"date":"2015-02-24T14:59:18","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T14:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.specr53.com\/blog\/?p=1158"},"modified":"2015-02-24T14:59:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T14:59:18","slug":"fear-fight-flight-or-freeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/hpde\/fear-fight-flight-or-freeze\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear: Fight, Flight, or Freeze"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Randy<\/a>Randy Pobst was the keynote speaker at the first day of the annual SCCA Motorsports Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina last week. His speaking topic was fear, but his message was really about vision. We know instinctively that fear causes the fight, flight, or freeze response. Randy noted that rational fear helps control risk.\u00a0 It can help us perceive scary cars or situations on the track and it nags us to check fluid levels, lug nuts, and safety equipment.\u00a0 But he also observed that fear hurts driving performance as well.\u00a0 When we get the white-knuckle grip on the wheel, our pumped-up forearms are incapable of subtle movements. Instinctively we realize the car isn’t handling right, but the tight grip doesn’t give any feel for what the car is really doing. Fear also adds to the physical and mental workload associated with driving, and can cause a loss of focus, causing the driver to miss flags, gauge warnings, or objects in mirrors.\u00a0 He cautioned that mirror fear also causes mistakes and sets one up for easy intimidation by the competition. That in turn causes timidity, getting run-over, stagnation, missed opportunities, and no improvement.<\/p>\n

The biggest impact of fear, Randy noted, was that it makes us look at what we fear — the vision connection.\u00a0 It makes us look where we fear we’re going<\/em>, not where we want to be going<\/em>.\u00a0 He calls it Mother Nature’s revenge for the industrial revolution: all of our instincts are wrong.\u00a0 You go where you look and your hands just work it out. (So, by Randy’s own admission, you should still be looking at the apex when you hit the wall.) If you aren’t looking where you want to go, you’ll feed in the power at the wrong time\/wrong amount.\u00a0 It seems intuitive, but if you aren’t going where you want to go, why do you want to go there faster?\u00a0 Yet you’ll often hear drivers back on the gas in a spin. Look not at what you fear — sound advice.<\/p>\n

So how do you alleviate fears?\u00a0 You can extinct fears by creating new memories. Always be learning, whether that’s attending driver’s schools, seeking coaching or mentorship, or reading.\u00a0 Randy recommends “Going Faster” by Carl Lopez — the Skippy Bible.\u00a0 But most importantly is to ask for help “especially if you’re bad…” Randy is a huge fan of the skid pad and getting a stable car set-up.\u00a0 Remember, under-steer is frustrating; fear is over-steer.\u00a0 Most importantly, have fun.\u00a0 Thinking about fun reduces fear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randy Pobst was the keynote speaker at the first day of the annual SCCA Motorsports Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina last week. His speaking topic was fear, but his message was really about vision. We know instinctively that fear causes the fight, flight, or freeze response. Randy noted that rational fear helps control risk.\u00a0 It … <\/p>\n

Read more “Fear: Fight, Flight, or Freeze”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,17],"tags":[181,237],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpde","category-racing","tag-msx-expo","tag-scca"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}