How to Analyse Your Own Laps

Most rental venues give you lap times and not much else. That is still enough to work with, if you are systematic about it.

Step 1: split the lap in your head

Break the circuit into three or four sections, each ending at a point you can clearly identify. You are not measuring these with a stopwatch — you are creating a vocabulary so that "I lost time" becomes "I lost time in the second section".

Step 2: find the corners that vary

Between your laps, some corners will feel the same every time and some will feel different. The ones that vary are where you have not settled on a method yet, and they are almost always where the easiest time is.

Be honest here. The corner you know you get wrong occasionally is more valuable than the one that scares you.

Step 3: form one specific idea

Not "be faster through turn three". Something you can actually do: brake at the second barrier join instead of the first, or turn in a kart length later, or get to full throttle before the kerb ends.

Step 4: change one thing

Drive several laps with that single change and nothing else different. Compare the times. If they improved, keep it. If they got worse, discard it — and that is a result, not a failure.

If you change three things at once you will learn nothing, because you will not know which one did what.

Step 5: write it down

At the end of a session, note what you tried and what happened, while you still remember. Next time you go to the same track you start from what you learned rather than from scratch.

What to be careful about

• •Do not read too much into one lap. Traffic, kart variation and track conditions all move the number. Look for a pattern across several laps.
• •Do not assume the kart is the problem. Sometimes it is. Usually it is not.
• •Do not compare your times to someone else's from another day. Different conditions, possibly a different kart, sometimes a different layout.

Systematic beats intense. A driver with a method improves faster than a driver who just tries harder.