In Driver's Eye with James Hinchcliffe, the six-time INDYCAR winner will bring you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans. I've spent a lot of time in this column diving deep into how physically tough motorsports can be. But this sport is just as much, if not even more, a mental contest for drivers at 200 miles an hour.
The yips aren't common. You don't just forget how to drive a race car quickly. So when a driver experiences a dip in form, it sometimes can be the result of not being in the right place mentally.
In the same way, a golfer doesn’t forget how to swing, and a pitcher doesn’t forget how to throw. But sometimes, the space between your ears gets foggy, and it can affect your performance. Just like any sport, INDYCAR drivers have to contend with mistakes in the moment.
If you make a mistake and crash out of a race, you have plenty of time to digest what happened, learn from it and eventually move on. When you make a mistake but your race continues, that time isn’t a luxury you have. And unlike hockey, when you can process a mistake over a shift change, or football, when you’re on the bench as the other line hits the field, racing offers no breaks — literal ones aside.
So you have to be able to manage the situation in real time. At real speeds. Most drivers are perfectionists and hyper-competitive.
They don’t like making mistakes, and they don’t like losing. They get frustrated when either of those things happen. But when you make a mistake in a race, and you haven't totaled your car and ruined your day, getting over it has to be instantaneous.
If you can’t do that, it tends to snowball. I worked with a mental coach for years, and one of the big things we worked on together was how to get through these exact scenarios. Usually, when a driver lets a single mistake fester, they make more.
Driving angry can often make you drive slower. You start trying too hard to overcome the mistake, and it leads to more mistakes, which leads to driving harder, which leads to… well, you see where this is going. Many drivers work with mental coaches to address this.
They have different exercises that drivers can do to try and practice this skill. And it is a skill. And it certainly is not the type of work that can be accomplished in a day.
It takes lots of time dedicated to this one mental aspect of the sport to master it. One of the biggest challenges with making a mistake on track is the responsibility you feel to the team. Every driver is acutely aware of the hours and hours that go into preparing and running a successful INDYCAR weekend.
When you make a mistake that costs your team a result, you feel terrible for that group. But as we say all the time, racing is a team sport, and teams support each other. Usually, the most supportive group that you will face is your mechanics and engineers.
They will throw their arms around you and say, "We’ll get ‘em next time." The fact of the matter is: Every member of that team will make a mistake at some point, and you all have to lift each other up when that happens. For drivers, one of the challenges is that the mistakes are very public. They are on TV and easily identifiable.
If a pit member drops a wheel nut on a stop, for example, that’s a mistake that’s noticed but more quickly looked over — and often the person isn’t identified. If an engineer makes a mistake on setup, people may never know. So whether the mistake was big or small, public or hidden, the most important part for any member of that team is to learn from it, let it go, and move on to the next race, pit stop or lap.
SOUND LIKE AN INDYCAR EXPERT: SURVIVING THE HEAT Having covered the pure physicality of INDYCAR racing, this past weekend at Mid-Ohio brought to the forefront another factor that can exponentially increase the toll on the body: the heat. Mid-O was a stifling scene on Sunday, and an all-green race — no caution periods to even catch your breath for a few minutes — meant it was as hard a day as the drivers will likely face this year. Physical track, hot conditions, no cautions.
And it can get up to 120, 130 degrees inside a cockpit. Knowing that we race in the Midwest in the summer, these hot and humid days have to be expected. So drivers will include an element of heat acclimation into their training.
This can come in several different forms. If a driver lives in a warm and humid climate — I am looking at all the Florida residents in the field! — then you can get outside and run or cycle to get your body acclimated to that sort of strain. If you live in milder climates, especially in the winter, that’s not an option, so you have to get creative.
One way to do that is to bring your training to a hot climate. It’s not uncommon to set up a bike trainer in a small room with a heater pumping and getting the temperature up into the 90s. Saunas work too.
A long, steady ride in those conditions can get the body more comfortable for a two-hour race with four layers of Nomex — intense, flame-resistant fabric, essentially — in a tight cockpit. But as we’ve said, this game is as mental as it is physical, and when the body starts to overheat, your cognitive abilities start to falter. To combat this, some training combines heat with cognitive drills.
Bringing an iPad with a purpose-built program designed to test memory, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and more into a sauna after a big workout can partially simulate the conditions of late in a race on a hot day. I've done this before — it works! There are things that drivers can do to survive the heat on race day too.
Namely, hydration with a detailed plan that starts on a Thursday and is based on the projected weather on Sunday. Of course, there's race day hydration too. Drivers have a small Camelback that holds about a liter of fluid, making it easily accessible behind the wheel.
And then there is the cool suit — a shirt with cooling coils running through it — which gets mixed reviews from drivers. The biggest concern with it being that if the system fails, as happened to Scott McLaughlin at Mid-Ohio, it actually makes you hotter. But some swear by it.
I personally used a cool suit on hotter days, but I was always afraid of it failing — which, luckily, never happened to me. At the end of the day, it’s a tough sport that is sometimes run in tough conditions, so you have to train to be prepared for anything. 1 FOR THE ROAD In last week’s column, I talked of the impending move of one of the titans of the sport in Scott Dixon.
Now, we know that he is, in fact, headed to McLaren, along with friend and former teammate Felix Rosenqvist to partner Pato O’Ward. This left open two very attractive rides at Chip Ganassi Racing and Meyer Shank Racing. Christian Lundgaard — whose contract was not renewed to make way for Dixon — is clearly the hottest free agent on the market.
He reminded the paddock that with a pole and second place on Sunday. But there are a few other names being thrown around that could make the next few weeks super fascinating from the silly season perspective. Rinus VeeKay has been in great form in the one and a half seasons since being dropped from ECR and running with smaller teams.
Those great results in under-resourced programs have certainly made some team owners perk up with interest. Also in the running is the young rookie Caio Collett, who has been impressing with his ability to regularly out pace veteran teammate Santino Ferrucci at AJ Foyt Racing. Will these teams go for a known quantity in VeeKay, or risk the potential big upside of a promising rookie, or perhaps look to Europe or a sidelined veteran to fill the seats?
The only sure thing about INDYCAR for 2027 is that the driver lineup will look very different! MORE DRIVER'S EYE:
