To become more effective at any task, borrow from a race car driver’s mental tool kit.
Few sports demand as intense concentration as Formula 1 racing.
For nearly two hours, a driver needs to navigate hairpin turns and straightaways at speeds of over 200 miles per hour, in a cockpit that can reach 140 degrees.
Races can be won and lost in a split second, and opportunities for disaster are constant.
McLaren Racing
Most of us don’t require F1-level focus to get through our days. But we all struggle with distraction — and the techniques that drivers use to optimize their performance can help anyone to be more intentional and effective in all sorts of situations. We asked McLaren Formula 1 team driver Oscar Piastri (that’s him, in the video above), along with a sports psychologist and an attention expert, for tricks to stay on track.
Visualize important challenges in advance.
F1 racers use simulators and mental rehearsal ahead of an event so that when they are driving, they can focus on driving, rather than wondering what’s around the next turn. “We’re going on the simple premise that a lot of planning and practice and rehearsal makes things more automated,” said Robbie Anderson, a sports psychologist at Hintsa Performance in Finland who works with multiple F1 drivers. Racers visualize options, and then visualize doing the most favorable option several times, until it feels automatic.
Piastri — who is currently No. 4 in driver standings for the 2024 season with two wins, and who is racing in the Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend — said he spends about a day training in a simulator before each event, “getting a fundamental idea of what to do and where.”
The most effective kind of visualization recreates the situation as realistically as possible, Dr. Anderson said. “You’re trying to pick out key sensory information — the feel of the steering wheel, the closeness of your car.”
You can do the same thing when you’re preparing for a presentation or a job interview by creating a mental image of what you will see looking out from a stage, or of the person who’ll be interviewing you. The idea is “to put yourself in the first-person perspective of a given moment,” Dr. Anderson said.
Talk yourself through it.
Dr. Anderson coaches drivers to use self-talk to help them on the course. This can be instructional (“See the target smooth through the exit”) or motivational (“Game on!”). It can be a personal mantra or a reminder, at a certain corner, to “take a breath.”