Things You Should Never Do In A Race Car (Or Truck)

First Of Two Parts

In many ways, Saturday-night racing is a trial-and-error sport. Racers lack the big-time budgets-and free time during the week-to test a lot of new ideas. So knowledge generally comes from two sources: advice from more experienced racers and trying things out for yourself on race night. If you are lucky, you can confirm whether or not a new setup works during the hour of practice you get before qualifying starts, but often you just cannot be sure until you test that setup in the heat of competition.

Like testing, many drivers learn how to drive a race car by simply going out and doing it. If you have a good night, take what you've learned from that event and try to duplicate it the next week. But mistakes can be costly. A driving mistake on the racetrack can mean bent sheetmetal, broken parts, hurt feelings, late nights in the shop, and the possibility that you may have to miss a weekend or two of racing while trying to scrape up enough money to try to fix the car. That's why it's much easier to avoid bad driving habits before they begin. After all, learning from your mistakes may sound good in theory, but it's not the best idea when those mistakes can potentially cost you cold, hard cash.

In order to help you avoid driving mistakes on the track, we surveyed some of the top drivers in NASCAR's Craftsman Truck Series. While many of these racers have Nextel Cup experience, they all have short-track roots. We asked them all one simple question: Among new or inexperienced drivers on any level, what driving mistakes or bad habits do you most often see? Here are their answers.

Don't Be A Copy Cat

The biggest thing that I've always tried to do is not just blindly follow the guy in front of me. In other words, when you chase the car in front of you and do what he is doing, you are making the same mistakes he is. You can never pass a guy when you are running in his tire tracks. So if he charges into the turn too fast and overshoots the corner and you do the same thing, you just lost your opportunity to take advantage of his mistake.

This may sound like a pretty simple thing not to do, but it's easier to fall into this habit than you might think. When you are following a car that's basically running the same line you have been running, and you are looking for a way around him, it's easy to start driving the track the same way he does. So if he charges into the corner, you do something different. Try a different line, change your apex, do something. If I'm leading the race, I will change up my driving style on purpose to confuse the guy that's behind me. I found it helped me to actually go completely unorthodox at places like Martinsville and other flat tracks because that forced other drivers to learn how to do something different if they were going to race with me. When they had to do something they weren't accustomed to, that gave me an advantage.

Along those same lines, I think a lot of drivers will stick with old habits for too long, and that's because what got most of us to where we are as race car drivers is driving very, very hard. Everywhere we go we have too much motor and too much tire. In a lot of cars, in all different kinds of series, people have the equipment to go out and really run hard for a few laps. But the next thing you know, the tires start to go away but the motor is still there, and suddenly everything changes with the way the car drives. In that situation you are just overdriving the car. You have to protect your tires so that they will be their best for as many laps as possible, but even then you have to be prepared for when the tires start to go away. Don't just set the car up for one fast lap. You want it to be as good as you can get it for as many different conditions as you might experience. A good race car has a kind of body language that a driver can read throughout a race. You have to find out how the car likes to be driven with a full load of fuel, with a partial load of fuel, and with the fuel cell nearly empty. How do you need to adjust your driving style when the tires are worn versus when they were brand-new? Being able to do this is huge.