Ross Bentley & Sam Smith: How to get Better at Driving

Summary

The Smoking Tire Podcast: Episode Summary Episode: Ross Bentley & Sam Smith: How to Get Better at Driving
Release Date: October 22, 2024
Hosts: Matt Farah, Zack Klapman
Guests: Ross Bentley, Sam Smith

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1. Introduction

In this engaging episode of The Smoking Tire, hosts Matt Farah and Zack Klapman welcome two automotive experts: Ross Bentley, renowned driving instructor and race coach, and Sam Smith, a celebrated automotive journalist. The trio delves deep into the nuances of improving driving skills, the role of simulators versus real-world training, and the psychological aspects of racing.

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2. Simulation vs. Real-World Training

[00:00] Matt Farah: Is the sim today in 2024 a suitable replacement for a youth spent karting?

Ross Bentley explores the potential of simulators in early driver training, suggesting that while simulators offer valuable practice, a combination of physical training (like motorcycling for balance) and real-world track experience remains essential.

Notable Quote:

Ross Bentley [20:22]: "If I just come along and said, stand on one foot on your toes and just balance now and let me time that... I bet your personal sense of balance improves."

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3. The Mental Game in Driving and Racing

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the mental challenges drivers face. Ross emphasizes the importance of focus, presence, and managing fear to enhance performance on the track.

Notable Quotes:

Ross Bentley [24:34]: "Because work doesn't matter, family doesn't matter... It's just totally focused on just that one thing."

Sam Smith [43:27]: "It turns out that, like, there are guys cruising around India every year who get up to a certain speed, and that, like, 211 is fine. 212 is, like..."

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4. Coaching Techniques and Practice Strategies

Ross shares his coaching philosophy, highlighting deliberate practice and breaking down driving skills into discrete components. He contrasts this with traditional racing schools that may not offer personalized coaching.

Notable Quotes:

Ross Bentley [36:00]: "The next thing is knowing where to go fast and where to go slow... making those decisions around where to really try to go fast and where to have some patience."

Ross Bentley [39:27]: "Some of it is just about deliberate practice... it's like a football team practicing specific skills."

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5. Technology in Simulators

The conversation shifts to the role of advanced simulator setups. Ross discusses the effectiveness of high-end simulators versus more basic setups, concluding that while motion can enhance realism, it's not always necessary for skill improvement.

Notable Quotes:

Ross Bentley [53:25]: "The most important thing is a good brake pedal that gives you some kind of feel."

Ross Bentley [56:29]: "If you have no motion but you have visual and auditory, your brain says we need to imagine that. And your brain does a better job of filling that in than..."

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6. Personal Anecdotes and Experiences

Matt, Zach, Ross, and Sam share personal stories from their driving and racing experiences, illustrating the challenges and triumphs in their pursuit of better driving skills. These anecdotes provide real-world context to the strategies discussed.

Notable Quotes:

Matt Farah [32:35]: "I scream eyes up at myself at least once... I still have to remind myself to do it."

Sam Smith [27:07]: "The thing that really threw me was... when things get weird on a bike, I have to be constantly moving and thinking and working."

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7. Listener Questions and Answers

Engaging directly with listeners, the hosts address various questions related to driving improvement, track safety, and the integration of street driving habits into track performance.

Example Topic:

Listener Inquiry [84:23]: Driver traits that translate from street to track, and what habits to discard.

Ross Bentley's Response [88:37]:

"Situational awareness... You should be able to identify what cars are around you without looking around for them."

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8. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with final thoughts on the future of driving education, the importance of mindset in racing, and upcoming content. Hosts encourage listeners to engage via Patreon and tease future guests, ensuring the community remains vibrant and informed.

Notable Quote:

Sam Smith [111:53]: "It's all the same stuff... and that's what makes it interesting."

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Key Takeaways:

• Balanced Training: A mix of simulator use and real-world practice yields the best improvement in driving skills.
• Mental Focus: Developing a strong mental game is crucial for racing performance and safety.
• Deliberate Practice: Breaking down driving into specific skills and practicing them diligently leads to significant improvements.
• Technology's Role: Advanced simulators can enhance training but aren't strictly necessary; the quality of practice matters more.
• Continuous Learning: Even seasoned drivers can benefit from coaching and new training methods to stay sharp.

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This episode offers a comprehensive exploration of enhancing driving skills, blending expert insights with relatable experiences, making it a valuable listen for both amateur enthusiasts and seasoned racers alike.

Transcript

[Matt Farah]

Is the sim today in 2024 a suitable replacement for a youth spent karting?

[Ross Bentley]

It would be really interesting if before you spent time on a motorcycle, on a track, if you had. If I just come along and said, stand on one foot on your toes and just balance now and let me time that.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And watch how you do it now after you go and do track days on a bike, on a track, now do the same thing.

[Matt Farah]

When someone works harder, what does that work literally look like? Does it mean just longer days at the track? Does it mean sim time? Does it mean extraordinary, you know, physical workouts? I mean, so what, what is the biggest hurdle for that person to move into the mid intermediate, maybe expert open passing group in the next 12 months? What is sort of the baseline for really improving real world skills using a simulator?

[Ross Bentley]

So really, really good question.

[Matt Farah]

What up everybody? Welcome to the Smoking Tire Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by off the Record. You know about off the Record. We love off the Record here. It is a motorist advocacy group. And if you get pulled over for any kind of moving violation, big or small, don't plead guilty, get off the record. Go to offtherecord.com TST or use code TSTPOD on the off the Record app. They will fight that ticket for you and they will hopefully win. Get those points off your record. They have an amazing track record of this stuff. And you can get an off the record attorney in almost anywhere in the United States of America. Big violation, small violation, doesn't matter. Can affect your insurance, can affect your employment, can affect your bottom line is what I'm saying. Or your right to your to drive your driving privileges. So go to offtherecord.com TST or use code TSTPOD on the off the Record app. Either of those codes will give you 10% off any and all legal services booked through off the Record. Don't take it from me. Take it from the thousands of people who have used off the Record to get those points off your record and maintain clean driving privileges. Offtherecord.com TST or code TST pod on the off the Record app. Get an account, make it, make it now so you're ready if the worst happens and then you don't have to sweat it out. All right, on today's episode, we've got Sam Smith and Ross Bentley in studio. Sam is a career automotive journalist, one of the best writers writing today. He is one of my journalism icons. You could say he writes crazy stuff. He's so good and he's brought with him our pal, Ross Bentley. Ross is one of the best, if not the best, driving instructor in America. He has won all kinds of races, but more importantly, he trains champions. So he's talking today about modern driving instruction techniques and. And ways to go faster. And he's always a pleasure to have in studio. So Sam Smith and Ro Bentley are on today's episode of the Smoking Tire podcast. Let's go. I have a notebook in front of me to make it look very professional. There's absolutely nothing of use on it.

[Sam Smith]

I don't even have anything to sketch. What am I doing?

[Ross Bentley]

Shopping list on there.

[Matt Farah]

One thing on my shopping list, but I do have some car news that we could give our thoughts on car news if we want. But, you know, we have one of the best car writers of all time in the room, and we have one of the best driving instructors of all time in the room, so we could probably find something better to do with this time than car news.

[Sam Smith]

The check that I sent him cleared. I paid him for this, and it went through.

[Ross Bentley]

Now I'm hurting, Right.

[Sam Smith]

He's very old. I have to abuse him.

[Matt Farah]

If you're the kind of guy where, if you showed up to an autocross in a stock Evo, I would assume the metal was lost.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, yeah. The quiet guy with glasses. Oh, Hi.

[Matt Farah]

Yes. Stock S2000 on Hoosiers, and you're just doing damage.

[Sam Smith]

The difference is Ross will never, ever talk about it. So we do this podcast. It's me, it's Ross, and it's our friend Jeff Brown, who is one of the winningest IMSA engineers in history. He's won, like, I don't know, a dozen IMSA championships. He's got more Rolexes than I know what to do with. I mean, Sebring, Daytona, and neither one of them. It's like pulling teeth. Get them to fucking talk about the shit they've done. They're just like, I don't know. I drive cars.

[Matt Farah]

I think, how far down the level of team does. Do you get the Rolex?

[Sam Smith]

I don't.

[Matt Farah]

Because if he's gotten everyone on the.

[Sam Smith]

Team, is it at every class?

[Ross Bentley]

I don't know. If Jeff.

[Matt Farah]

Did he steal them?

[Sam Smith]

Does he have rules?

[Ross Bentley]

Drivers get them.

[Matt Farah]

I know the drivers get them. I didn't know anyone on the crew got them. Maybe the team principal or.

[Ross Bentley]

I don't know.

[Sam Smith]

Well, then, I mean, I. I don't know. I don't know.

[Matt Farah]

We'll have to ask. We'll have to make a phone call.

[Sam Smith]

If Jeff doesn't have Rolexes. I feel like he needs to get some.

[Matt Farah]

Can we call Pat Long? Let's get him on the phone.

[Ross Bentley]

He'll know.

[Matt Farah]

He might know. I don't know who's. We probably know seven or eight people that have.

[Zach Klapman]

That's called Jensen.

[Matt Farah]

24 hours winner. Rolex.

[Sam Smith]

Such a name.

[Matt Farah]

How many do you have?

[Sam Smith]

A lot.

[Matt Farah]

Right?

[Ross Bentley]

One.

[Matt Farah]

One. Is it you?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Do you have one?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

What year?

[Ross Bentley]

2003.

[Sam Smith]

See, we've been talking about this for two minutes.

[Matt Farah]

He doesn't need the humility.

[Zach Klapman]

I'm just gonna. I said it to Sam. The humility of Ross and Jeff drives me fucking nuts. I'm saying it to your face right now because I listen to your show. I like your show a lot. He's our listener, and I know who you two are.

[Matt Farah]

He's the listener.

[Zach Klapman]

Not because I know Sam, but if a listener doesn't know Sam personally or one of you two guys, the way you guys intro yourselves. Jeff goes, I drive an rv, and you're like. I look at speed traces and I'm yelling at the ceiling like, you're one of the best driving coaches in the world. And Jeff wins endurance racing and, like, is such a great engineer, and you guys have such a deep wealth of knowledge. It's great. And it just. It cracks me up, and it also infuriates me.

[Matt Farah]

You know what's not good for broadcasting? Humility. Like, there's a reason that Alex Jones had a billion dollars to lose. And if this goes under, you know, you've got, like 12 bucks and we've got 18 bucks.

[Sam Smith]

We talk about this all the time. Like, what do you do when you're a Jewish kid who doesn't like talking about himself so badly that he got into a business where literally every ounce of the job is asking other people question? And then you're on a radio show and you forget to talk about yourself because you don't like talking about yourself.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, talking about yourself is a weird thing to be good at.

[Sam Smith]

What's the trick? What's the trick?

[Matt Farah]

Oh, I don't know. I don't actually like it, despite how much I do it. I feel weird every time I do it. You cut. It's weird. You have to be demented a little bit.

[Sam Smith]

Makes me feel better, though.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Times a thousand.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, you're demented, but, like, in a different way.

[Sam Smith]

I'm just a broken.

[Ross Bentley]

Aren't we all?

[Matt Farah]

I mean. Yes, you have your own.

[Ross Bentley]

The four of us sitting in a weird room with weird sound in it, and we're going to talk about cars and whatever.

[Matt Farah]

Right.

[Ross Bentley]

We're dimensional.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, there's a consistency across people who have weird talents, which is like, if you are, you know, savant, like at one specific thing, as many people are, the rest of your life is something of a disaster. You know what I mean? Like, oh, yeah, there's a, there's a lot of examples of this.

[Sam Smith]

I like how you qualify with something instead of just saying a complete and total fucking disaster, which is how the rest of my life works out anyway, so.

[Matt Farah]

Well, I mean, there's levels of disaster. Right. I mean, it's not, you're not necessarily.

[Ross Bentley]

You know, we're not homeless.

[Matt Farah]

You're not homeless. And you're not, you know, jumping off a bridge.

[Zach Klapman]

But like, that shows you can still get better at what you're doing because if your skill accelerates, then your life will fall apart at a greater rate.

[Matt Farah]

Right. Like, because it becomes like, you know, Anthony Bourdain, you know, became Icarus. Yeah. Or, you know, Chris Cornell or, you know, someone that was so singularly talented but like the rest of their life, like, they just couldn't handle.

[Sam Smith]

Okay, so that's an interesting question, Ross. So you've worked with, I don't know, you probably worked with more racing drivers than people that I've met in my life. What percentage of them are well adjusted humans?

[Ross Bentley]

None of them.

[Matt Farah]

Zero of the racing drivers?

[Ross Bentley]

Well, I guess it's. How do you define.

[Sam Smith]

Okay, what percentage of them have like functional social skills and you could drop them into a party and they don't know anybody and they'd probably carry a conversation with people for an hour.

[Ross Bentley]

I would say that just about every single one of them, you can, because they can turn it on and off.

[Sam Smith]

Okay.

[Matt Farah]

Is that because you work with gentlemen drivers that did not start out as savant racing drivers?

[Ross Bentley]

Well, I spent a lot of years working with 14, 15, 16 year olds as well.

[Matt Farah]

Okay. Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And you know, I, I guess first off, they're weird in how mature they are for their age.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah. I mean, sports parents and sports kids generally are.

[Ross Bentley]

Right. Or they've adjusted well to being beaten up by their parents.

[Matt Farah]

Ah, the Verstappen.

[Ross Bentley]

I didn't say that.

[Matt Farah]

Tiger. It's the Tiger woods, which I. Well, is he adjusted? One might argue maybe not, but.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

That's an example of the rest of his life.

[Zach Klapman]

Well, it seems like some pro racing drivers are incredibly social and gregarious. I mean, James Hunt's like the legendary one. But is some of that from media training or These days, do they come off like, you know, robots because they are so media trained that the answers they give on camera are just like, you know, toe the company line. But then in social circles when they're themselves, they're actually much more fun.

[Ross Bentley]

I actually think that the best get the media training and then kind of ignore it and have. And let their personality come through. I always think, like in nascar, like one of the best, I think of all time in that way was Carl Edwards. He could drop the sponsors names in a way that you didn't even know he was dropping the sponsors names, that is. And yet you get somebody else that gets out. You know, when I think my STP shell, you know, Goodyear, you know, that whole thing and it just sounds so corny and bad.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

But I think it's their personality that comes first.

[Zach Klapman]

Okay.

[Matt Farah]

But it's more about like the management of the rest of their life than it is their ability to pull it together for an interview after the race that we're talking about is like, is there someone who did six hours of karting a day for their entire youth who is now climbing the ranks in a GP car? Is that a balanced human? Maybe, maybe not. Drive to Survive has presented us with some very imbalanced humans.

[Ross Bentley]

But how much of that is real? How much of it.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, that's what's amazing about Drive to Survive is that you see the imbalance and every ounce of that is crafted right. And they know that. They know where it's going out, they know what the show is, they know how it works. And then you see people that still manage to be a kind of a hot mess. Like, how have. Go back to the sports parent thing for a second. Like, have sports parents gotten more aware of themselves as your career's gone? I mean, you've been doing this since what, the early 90s, mid-90s, since you got out of IndyCar?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

So has the nature of the guy who put his kids, the pair of parents who put their kids into a cartoon at age 5 or 6, have they become more functional humans? Or is it still like, no, Timmy, you're going to spend 3,000 hours at the gym and be a champion?

[Ross Bentley]

Some have, some haven't.

[Sam Smith]

What does that look like?

[Matt Farah]

Can the kids succeed without the crazy parenting? Or is that a crucial element to ultimate success?

[Ross Bentley]

I think ultimately it comes down to how bad the kid wants it, as opposed to how bad the dad wants it.

[Matt Farah]

Right.

[Ross Bentley]

Typically the dad.

[Sam Smith]

How early can you tell what's the youngest kid you've worked with?

[Ross Bentley]

7 8. And the first question is, okay, mom, dad, how bad do you want this to happen? And then it's trying to figure out how bad the kid wants it. And there's a lot of seven, eight year old kids that just blow me away with how mature they are and how knowledgeable they are of what they want. And so it. But I'm going to say they're rare. Yeah, but you know, we talked about it the other day. Colin Brown on came to a two day seminar webinar thing or seminar thing that we're doing and doing live. And I'm thinking, what's a 12 year old going to be able to do sitting for like eight hours a day listening to couple old guys talking about driving and he's there taking notes and asking more better questions than the adults in the room.

[Sam Smith]

And Colin, Colin is just for background. Colin is like the podcast. The other, the other guy, the IMSA engineer is Jeff Brown, Colin's dad. And Colin is now what, 36, 37. That was a couple decades ago somewhere now. And Colin has won multiple IMSA championships and prototypes. He's won Le Mans, he's won Daytona. Like it was there. And you saw whatever made him him 20 years later. You saw that early on, right?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Like can you always see it or does it take time to develop?

[Ross Bentley]

Good question. I have seen some that I didn't think were going to make it. So I did a program, I forget how long ago it was now with a group of eight up and coming NASCAR drivers. And out of the eight, currently there are four of them in Cup. William Byron, Bubba Wallace, Eric Jones and Daniel Hamrick.

[Sam Smith]

You worked with William Byron when he was little?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, when he was 15.

[Matt Farah]

Oh wow.

[Ross Bentley]

And I'll be honest, out of those eight, he was not the guy that I thought was going to be close to, you know, in the, in the whatever they do, the playoffs or whatever it is to, for the championship. I didn't think he was going to be the guy.

[Sam Smith]

How often do you miss, how often do you look at somebody and then 20 years later you're like, oh yeah, that guy turned into that dude.

[Matt Farah]

Well, and what wasn't there, that's there now? I mean, what did he figure out?

[Sam Smith]

Right?

[Ross Bentley]

I'm going to say that like it wasn't like, oh man, he's never going to make it. No, it was like, you know, out of this bunch, he's not at the top of the list. I thought Eric Jones was the guy and Bubba Wallace was the next guy. And you know, I thought William Was in there in the top half, but wasn't like at the very top. But I think what it was, that what it was is he works really hard at it, harder than most people ever imagined. And I'm going to say that about anybody that's at the top, they work harder at it. And ultimately that. When I got hired to do this program, it was essentially. It was essentially funded by his father, William's father. And I thought, well, I kind of know where this is going. Yeah, dad wants this. But William impressed me with how he stepped up and said, no, I want this. And when someone works harder, what does.

[Matt Farah]

That work literally look like? Does it mean just longer days at the track? Does it mean sim time? Does it mean extraordinary, you know, physical workouts? I mean, what does that literally look like?

[Ross Bentley]

Yes. So the main area that I was working with these drivers on was the mental game. And, you know, I've stayed in touch with his dad and his dad says that's a daily part of his routine now. I don't know what that looks like now, but yeah, so, you know, the working out in the gym, the working with the team, the sim time, you know, William came from that world. He was a sim racer before he was. I don't know how much karting he ever even did compared to guys like Eric Jones and Bubba and people like that. But he spends a lot of time in the sim and he spends a lot of time doing mental stuff.

[Matt Farah]

Is the sim today in 2024 a suitable replacement for a youth spent carting. Guys, we got to take a quick break from the show for Delete Me. I have gotten a my account going on Delete me. I joined Delete Me because I want to stop some of these robo calls right now. You probably know someone who or may have been a victim of identity theft or harassment, stalking, doxing, etc. Privacy is important. And for me, when privacy problems hit me was the phone, right? The robo calls, the robo texts, the phone scams, they're always calling. And I wanted that to stop. That's why I got Delete Me, right? I'm super aware of this. And if these people can get my phone number, who else can? Data brokers are compiling that information that you put out there online shopping or applying for stuff. They sell your data to data brokers and then they sell it online, right? So I signed up and provided Delete Me with all this information, right? Anything I wanted gone. My address, my phone number, my email, variations on my. How my name could be written, my birthday My wife's name, my family's name, addresses that I used to live at, cars I've owned, etc. Etc. And then Delete Me goes to work. Their experts take it from there. They send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what they found and where they found it and what was removed. And Delete Me is not just a one time service, it's always working for you. Constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. When I got my first report back from Delete me it found over a thousand instances of my personal information on data broker websites. Now fortunately, almost all of it was old and outdated, meaning it's addresses I used to live at, jobs I used to have, things like that. But still we don't need that out there. So we've, they've been going to work deleting that stuff and, and actually in the last week or two the robo calls have really, really reduced and hopefully they'll continue to reduce. So you can do it too. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special disc, our listeners get 20% off your delete me plan. When you go to JoinDelete me.com tire and use promo code tire at checkout. That's JoinDelete me.com tire & enter code tire at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindelete me.com tire and enter code tire at checkout. Now back to the show.

[Ross Bentley]

That's a really good question. Yes. So if I was, you know, if somebody came to me and said, you know, here's my five year old daughter or son, make them a world champion in whatever form of racing they want to go to. It would be a combination of karting sim and actually you know what, I'd have them on a dirt bike and anything else that especially that did a.

[Matt Farah]

Lot of weight transfer. Motorcycles for weight transfer balance. Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. But it would be a combination race.

[Matt Farah]

Ride motorcycles made me a lot better on the racetrack. Yeah, I could tell it was a big difference. That's interesting how having different front and rear brakes and having to, I mean having to learn when to use which one and how much and why the you know, braking while leaning down into the corner, accelerating while straightening the bike back up. I mean basic. I'm not like, I'm not, I'm not like a crazy man on a motorcycle. But just like it's so much easier to mentally visualize weight transfer on a motorcycle than it is on a car. And once you have that skill, at least at some degree of proficiency on the bike, bringing that mentally back to a car is quite easy, I think.

[Ross Bentley]

And I've never tried this, but I'm thinking about it now. It would be really interesting if before you spent time on a motorcycle on a track, if you had. If I just come along and said, stand on one foot, on your toes and just balance now and let me time that.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And watch how you do it now after you go and do track days on a bike, on a track. Now do the same thing. I bet your personal sense of balance improves. And when we're in a car, we're kind of attached to that car. So we're actually kind of feeling the balance of us and the car.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

But if your own personal sense of balance is not so good, you're not going to have that same level of sensitivity.

[Matt Farah]

Might be a good skill. I mean, you could do it on a bicycle. You don't need them. You don't need motor to do it.

[Ross Bentley]

Exactly.

[Matt Farah]

You could do it on almost anything.

[Zach Klapman]

I think we were talking about this a little bit of coffee, but if you have a history of some kind of like dialogue with your body. Yes, I think so. That's kind of what you're talking about. Like, you think about how you're balancing. At first it's very like front of mind. And then like with any driving skill or anything else, and then it eventually becomes more back of mind because you have that dialogue and you have those channels and you have that muscle memory built. But that's what I find, like, I mean, I guess projecting, like, it helps me a little bit because I go, okay, I can talk to my right foot and my left hand from doing other things.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

The thing that really threw me was so I am halfway decent in a car and absolutely atrocious on a bike. Right. And I love being on a bike in any sense where the bike is losing traction. Mostly because at some point the 300 voices in my brain focus on all the things I'm bad at. And then I fall off the motorcycle and inevitably I end up learning something from it. But the thing that threw me the first time I tried it, the first bike track day I did was how so in a car, when things get weird, when the car starts to slide, when you don't know what's about to happen, like, there's over time. I Had trained myself to just focus and still my body and think about what the car was doing on a bike, if you freeze up, if you still your body and start thinking more, you fall off the bike. Because every ounce of what you're doing on the bike comes down to where you put your. Where you put your weight. What you do with body position like that directly impacts you, can induce understeer, oversteer. You can make the bike brake better or worse, or make the front wheel come up. All this constant motion. And the end lesson was that, like, when things go funky on a bike, which is ultimately, like when you're at the limit on a bike, which I am rarely, because I'm not good at it, you have to be constantly moving and thinking and working. And I could never meld those two. Like, how. I don't know. Matt and Zach, both of you ridden, like, is that. What was that?

[Matt Farah]

I don't ride the limit either. And one of my goals for the next year is to do a dirt bike school where the bike moves around a lot. I've never done it, and because I've had back injuries and I'm scared to fall off a bike and end up, like, paralyzed, I haven't, but I'd like to. It's one of those things I'd like to get over and that I'll probably learn a lot more doing that than I have in my motorcycling experience the last 15 years.

[Sam Smith]

It's crazy because, like, it forces you in the moment to think about where weight goes.

[Matt Farah]

For sure.

[Sam Smith]

It's stuff that, like, in a car, you tend to kind of put in the back of your head because you can.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, maybe you know this or have experienced this with the drivers you worked with. We talked about it. We've talked about it a bunch on the show. There's a book I really like called the Power of Now. You know this book, Eckhart Tolle, and a lot of people that do things like ride motorcycles or drive race cars or go scuba diving or skiing or very individualized sports where if you lose focus, you die? It helps to quiet everything else that's happening in your mind and your life and focus on this one thing. So do you find that a lot of drivers and. Or motorcycle people or whatever that you work with have that thing where outside the car there's a lot, but inside the car they can just be here and present?

[Ross Bentley]

I mentioned Carl Edwards earlier. Yeah, I met when Colin was doing. Colin Brown was doing some NASCAR stuff. Carl Edwards was also driving at Roush and I spent a little bit of time with him and went, this guy is Carl Edwards. If he's not adhd, I don't know who is. But in a really good way. But in a car, he could focus like the best in that world. Right. So I think the great thing about being on track is you have to focus. And it's why. It's why there are so many gentlemen drivers. Right?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

They go, it's the most relaxing place in the world.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Because work doesn't matter, family doesn't matter, you know, whatever. It's just totally focused on just that one thing. So, yes, I think it's a. Now, can everybody make that switch immediately? No. But I think it's something you either learn or you don't perform well.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, they do. I just did the Spring Mountain Corvette school, and before anyone got on the track, they were like, just remember, like, your phone doesn't matter what's going at home. Doesn't matter. Like, basically, please do what we're talking about. Please focus. Because if you guys try to do two things and you try to text someone, or if you try to think about a lawsuit or whatever, something at work, you're going to crash at like 100 miles an hour. And people probably need to be told.

[Ross Bentley]

That, unfortunately, there is that motivation that you just mentioned, you could die.

[Zach Klapman]

Right. Survival.

[Matt Farah]

You should not have your Bluetooth connected to your track car.

[Ross Bentley]

Right. Right.

[Matt Farah]

You ever have a fucking. You ever have a phone ring when you're on a track? You want to talk. You want to talk about something that'll fuck you up real quick? Yeah, I've. You know, I track press cars all the time.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

And so I've been. I've been lapping at Sonoma or somewhere that really requires focus. And. And your phone is fucking. It's. You didn't. You didn't hit do not disturb, dude. And your shit is connected to the car and now the car, and you're like, oh, my God. And you can't even think of. You can't even figure out how to make it go away. You know, it's in a somewhat unfamiliar car.

[Ross Bentley]

I was in the right seat with a guy years ago, and we're coming through some corner and his phone rings.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

He reaches down and grabs it and goes against the side of his helmet and he's yelling into it going, I can't hear you. I can't hear you. That's wild. It's like, get Fred. Anyways. Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

That's crazy. I'm not surprised.

[Ross Bentley]

No, I'm not surprised.

[Matt Farah]

That's the kind of thing that happens with rich guys and they're.

[Ross Bentley]

But it's just a habit. I mean, right?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

Muscle memory.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. Think about your phone rings. Gotta go. Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

No. Yeah. That's crazy.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. When you were talking about the motorcycle thing, I'm thinking about, like, I wrote a bit on the track years ago, and the thing that kept me away from going quick was, first of all, I had a cousin who was, like, a really, really top motorcycle racer. And I think he'd broken every single bone in his body. And so there was that in the back of my mind. But I think the other thing was I didn't know how to fall.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And I think, actually one of the things you went through, the Yamaha school.

[Zach Klapman]

Would not know how to fall.

[Sam Smith]

I just say that when you say somebody doesn't know how to fall, which is entirely accurate. But maybe one person in this room has been there when I have broken multiple bones in my body. But go on.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay. So, like, it's almost like if I was doing a motorcycle school, maybe what I would do is I'd put people in, like, the big padded suits. Now go and ride and fall.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Just have a dumper bike.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Because just throw them off the roof of a building in the padded suit. This is what pain is.

[Ross Bentley]

Thinking about the number of drivers I've had that crashed and went. I feel a whole lot better now because it's not a big deal.

[Matt Farah]

Sure. Because they weren't hurt.

[Ross Bentley]

They weren't hurt.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

I think the motorcycle school might go differently, though.

[Ross Bentley]

Well, it might. It might. Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

I did not feel a whole lot better.

[Zach Klapman]

I know how to fall. I did martial arts and snowboarding. I know how to fall in those environments. But I have fallen once on a motorcycle, and I didn't do a great job at falling, Ross. So none of my skills from that helped with that particular.

[Ross Bentley]

But I'm thinking about snowboarding is when you learn how to fall, you realize it's not the end of the world.

[Zach Klapman]

That is very true. I think when there's rocks and motorcycles involved, it can go differently.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

No, the motorcycle racers typically, when they're on a racetrack, do have. They're usually okay.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

You know, they slide for a bit. They're wearing the right stuff. You know, there isn't an oncoming GMC Sierra, you know, that they need to worry about.

[Zach Klapman]

The Clarkson quote has never been more appropriate. Like, the speed doesn't kill you.

[Matt Farah]

It suddenly stops, suddenly becomes stationary.

[Zach Klapman]

Slide on your leathers. For a mile?

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Zach Klapman]

I slid about 50ft and then hit a rock. And that's when the falling goes south.

[Ross Bentley]

A rock.

[Zach Klapman]

It was not on a track. Sorry.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay. I'm kind of going, wait a minute, was a rock.

[Matt Farah]

There's a couple tracks. You fall at Willow, you're hitting a rock.

[Sam Smith]

If you're interested in doing, you mentioned doing an off road school and there are a bunch of great ones. You know, all the flak, track oriented stuff, flat track oriented stuff, where you're on tiny like 125s in a horse theater and learning to slide a bike at like 8 miles an hour with your leg out. But if there's a school out in Pahrump. Yeah, the Jimmy Lewis school. Jimmy used to be, I want to say he won Baja and he was an editor at Cycle World for a long time. But it's out on, on a dry lake outside of Pahrump. And you sit there and half of it is like ripping through the hills, learning how to do not stupid stuff. And the other half is weird ass exercises on the dry lake where they come and watch you and poke you with big bikes and small bikes and basically just teach you to not be afraid of coming off the thing while controlling it in really fine small ways. And like, you end up, you end up learning just how dumb your hands are and how dumb your legs are and how dumb, in my case, the rest of your body is. But it's amazing. It's one of those moments, like I love those moments where you're dumped into a situation and you kind of get this fire hose of everything you're not good at and then you have to start sorting through it. But that school, there's no. And the good ones, really, there's no risk. And it's one of the reasons why, like off road bikes are so much more fulfilling than anything you do on the street. And again, same thing with cars.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, there's a reason that the desert is so appealing, right? We can get something, we can get it loose, we can do all kinds of stuff, we can go fast, there's no loss. Like it's the same sort of thing. It's been a very long time since I've been to any type of motorsport school where I knew like nothing. Yeah, you know, I've done like advanced racing schools and shit, but I have some level of competence before I got there. It's been 20 years since I knew nothing. This would be like an I know nothing situation, which actually has some appeal.

[Ross Bentley]

Wonder how difficult it would be for you to, you know, go in with the beginner's mind, like to be able to.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, I actually don't have a lot of ego when it comes to that kind of stuff. So, like assuming, like I could remain calm in the very beginnings and not be like, all right, on with it, it would probably be fine.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. Patience would be a challenge. Maybe. Okay.

[Matt Farah]

Like when. So if you're teaching, when you're teaching students, forget, forget the people. And maybe this is below your pay grade since you're so well known for training pros at this point. But let's say we've got someone who's a, who's moved from beginner to intermediate at the, at the track day.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

They've done five to ten track days in their weekend sports car. They own their own helmet, but you know what I mean? But maybe they've only done track days on their one local track.

[Ross Bentley]

So I was doing that three weeks ago.

[Matt Farah]

Okay, so what, what is the biggest hurdle for that person to move into the mid intermediate, maybe expert open passing group in the next 12 months?

[Ross Bentley]

I don't know. But if it's the single main thing. But certainly bad habits in terms of.

[Matt Farah]

Getting rid of them.

[Ross Bentley]

Getting rid of them.

[Matt Farah]

Getting rid of them.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

What are the worst habits?

[Ross Bentley]

Worst habit is probably vision related, you know, because we drive around in traffic staring at those bright shiny objects in front of us. You know, we tend to look just that far ahead. And on the track, it's not just look farther ahead, but it's. Move your eyes more.

[Matt Farah]

Sure.

[Ross Bentley]

So I think that's the very first thing. And then there's some, just some basic. I'm going to say the next thing would be. Most people when they come to a corner on the street, they come up to a traffic light, their foot goes on the brake pedal and then they get to that point and they go. And their foot pops off the brake pedal. And as you know, it's. It's a ease off, it's a release, it's a blend. It's all that kind of stuff. And it's that fine, subtle stuff that makes a difference. Going from that level to the next.

[Matt Farah]

Level and blending of control. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. More than one thing. When I'm on, I make. There's videos of me on track. There's a lot of them. And you can. I leave it in the videos. I scream at myself. Eyes up.

[Zach Klapman]

All the time.

[Matt Farah]

I do it all. I still do it.

[Ross Bentley]

Brilliant.

[Matt Farah]

I still do it. And I still have to remind myself to do it. Every single time I'm on a racetrack, I scream eyes up at myself at least once.

[Zach Klapman]

Is talking to oneself while learning a common thing in driving? And then does it go away when the skill level reaches a certain point?

[Ross Bentley]

I think if you're talking to yourself in your sleep, that might be a. That's a different.

[Sam Smith]

What about all the three? What about the 300 voices in my head that all say different things and one of them is walk out into traffic with no pants on?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Smith]

How many of those voices am I supposed to.

[Ross Bentley]

I think it depends on which voice.

[Matt Farah]

In a racetrack is supposed to quiet those down, Sam.

[Ross Bentley]

That was the idea.

[Sam Smith]

It just makes them all louder.

[Ross Bentley]

I'm going to say it's all over the place. I've had people that talk to themselves. I have people that play music. I've had people that don't do anything. So I'm a big, big believer in the triggers. You know, there are little cues that kind of trigger some little habit. And the habit of eyes up just gets you to do that. So I'm a big fan of that kind of stuff. And I have a number of drivers that say, hey, when I'm driving the truck, I hear your voice in my head. That's weird.

[Matt Farah]

No, that's okay. That's okay.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess it depends on whose voice it is and what it's saying.

[Zach Klapman]

What it's saying is very important. Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

So I got to use my. It depends.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, God. Ross's answer. A lot of what we talk about on our show is like the weird mental game of making yourself uncomfortable and how there are no easy answers. And, like, you know, a lot of what we pull apart is, you know, history and things that have happened yesterday or 30 years ago and why people make the choices they do. But so much of it just comes down to these big gray areas. And then Ross just looks at me and grins and makes some dad joke and says something like, it depends because the answer is always. There are no hard answers with it ever. And that's what makes it interesting.

[Matt Farah]

We get so often it's like, should I buy car A or car B? And it's like, well, what about cars see through infinity that also exist in this world?

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, right.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

What's your budget? What are you looking for?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

You know how many people.

[Matt Farah]

Very often it's like, should I buy a 911 or a. A G Wagon? AMG and it's like, well, there's a series of yes, we could make a yes, no tree for this. You Know if this, then that and very quickly end up on one side or the other.

[Ross Bentley]

So you can answer that with yes. Yeah, just buy both of them.

[Matt Farah]

Get both.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

You should take out an enormous loan at a very high APR and just really fuck your life up. Two of these vehicles.

[Ross Bentley]

Where are you going to store them all, though?

[Matt Farah]

I can think of somewhere. Yes. That's all. I don't care which car you buy, as long as you keep it here.

[Zach Klapman]

The more the better.

[Matt Farah]

Oversize. Please send me all your oversized cars. So the. Okay, now we're blending. Now we're blending and now we're looking up. Now you're an advanced track day driver. You're in the open passing group. You've moved from a BRZ to a GT3 or a GT4. You're doing 10, 15 days a year. You're considering maybe a membership at the Thermal Club or one of these other places. What's the next level from that of skills to go from pretty good to.

[Ross Bentley]

Great skills or decisions? Because I kind of go decision is go back to the BRZ because you're going to learn more than you are in the GT3. No. Okay, true.

[Matt Farah]

You're not wrong.

[Ross Bentley]

I'm going to say the next thing is knowing where to go fast and where to go slow. And obviously slow is. Both of those are relative terms, right? Sure. It's, you know, the classic is I'm going to whale this car into the corner and then they're slow coming out of it or not knowing that if I sacrifice a little bit in this corner, I can gain more in that corner or trying to get fast in both of those corners where. No, you're better off just to sacrifice a bit here. So I think that's the next thing is making those decisions around where to really try to go fast and where to have some patience. And. And then I'm going to say somewhere in there, it's the managing the. Well, managing that fear thing of the. I've worked with drivers who are. They've got all the skill to go faster, but they kind of get up against that plateau of their mental speed.

[Matt Farah]

Stops at a certain lap time and adding horsepower or tire, they won't go any faster. This is what. You ever been to the Concourse Club in Miami? No, I recommend it. Yeah, we were just down there. In fact, we just put up a video. I got to have a go in a Diablo svr, which is a very interesting experience at the Concourse Club. Oh, there it was. There was the photo of it.

[Ross Bentley]

It's a private track I've seen pictures and stuff of it.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, it's very well executed. But what you're looking at here in the photo is pretty much the whole track. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly small, club focused track.

[Ross Bentley]

What's the length?

[Matt Farah]

It's either just under or just over 2. It's not that long. Maybe, maybe it's 1.8 or 1.9, but technical.

[Ross Bentley]

And great technical.

[Matt Farah]

Good. Tarmac.

[Zach Klapman]

2 miles.

[Matt Farah]

2 miles.

[Ross Bentley]

2 miles. Okay.

[Matt Farah]

But Aaron Weiss, who runs the joint, is a lovely guy. Shout out to him, he says all the time, you know, people buy memberships and they ask him, you know, what car should they buy for the track. And he's really big on these, these M2 club sport things. Two series.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

And he pretty much says, you know, everyone will buy one of those. They'll run it for like a year and then they'll get like a 4, 5, 8 challenge or a GT, a cup car or something. And predictably, what happens? Right. Their lap times are the same.

[Ross Bentley]

I was going to say they're slower or the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Farah]

So what, what, what is the, what is the trick to get through that hurt hurdle?

[Ross Bentley]

Well, the quick fix is have that person ride with somebody else. That shows them this is what the car is capable of. Because a lot of times it's just really. Yeah, that car can do that.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

So it's getting through that part of it. I think about that. As you know, that is a quick fix in my coaching, I think a lot of times around. Yeah, I can help you right now. Like, if that's what you want. You just want to go faster right here on this track this day. I can help you do that. But I would rather teach you things that you can apply to any track you go to for as long as you want. So while it might take a little bit longer, I might put somebody through a series of exercises or drills that helps them start to understand where those limits are and they learn them themselves rather than a. You know, I always say it's like the difference between learning from the outside in. Me come along and just say, do this, copy this versus you. Learning from the inside out.

[Matt Farah]

You experience something, how to detect where that limit is for yourself.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes. Yeah. So some of it, you know, some of it. And part as a coach, you know, my first thing is, what's your purpose? What's your objective here? And if it's like, you know, I'm gonna. This is my latest sport. I'm gonna do this for a little while. They may not say this, but I'm gonna do this for a little while. I bought this cool car. I want to go and blast around. I want to be fast. I'm gonna go with the quick fix. If it's like, no, I want to. This is my life now. That's my takeaway. They're in this for a while. I would rather help them learn that on their own and maybe give them a few hints of what it looks like, but not just copy me.

[Zach Klapman]

Well, you also can't always grab a faster person either to put them in a car, because not every car you deal with has two seats. And you work with a lot of people that are at the top or very near the top of a professional sport. So you can't call the person in first place and go, hey, will you mind coming down and showing 8th place how to do. Do this track? Like, that won't go very well.

[Ross Bentley]

Could you help me with that? Like, I'd really like to be able to have that access to doing that. Yeah. No, and you're absolutely right. Is Max Checo would love to have a ride along. Yeah, there's an idea. No. So that's dead on, right? Is you can't. And if all you do is learn how to copy somebody else, have you really learned how to do it? And, you know, I don't want to sound like they. Well, back in the day, you know, we didn't have Data systems and YouTube videos and stuff to watch we had to figure out on. Did Mario Andretti and AJ Foyt compare data? Yeah, there was no data. They followed each other a little bit and went, what's he doing? I can do that better.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Their girlfriends were using fucking stopwatches and clipboards, and that was just acceptable race results.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

You ever see that shit?

[Sam Smith]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

Jackie Stewart was like, yes. What's his miss's name?

[Ross Bentley]

Helen. Helen.

[Matt Farah]

Helen was down there with the clipboard.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

There was a period in F1 where that's where all the official times came from.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

The wives and the girlfriends submitted that stuff to timing and scoring, and that was the result.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, they had, like, models during the fucking scoring at Watkins Glen.

[Sam Smith]

You could be like, well, Graham was five seconds slower today. But, you know, Mrs. Graham is very attractive today. She wrote these numbers and I believe them.

[Matt Farah]

It doesn't matter.

[Zach Klapman]

He's on fight.

[Matt Farah]

She sneezed right as he crossed the line. And I. I'm not really sure.

[Zach Klapman]

They're mid divorce, so his times have really slipped. Even though he's driving exactly the same.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. There's some room here. Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

So this is interesting, right? So we've talked. You and I have talked about this. Matt. Like, Zach, we've talked about this. Ross, one of the things that. When I got. I've known you since, I guess since about halfway through my time at road and track. So I was there eight, nine years. That's roughly 10 years ago. But early on, we started talking about, like, what separates the pros from. From normal people. And a lot of that isn't just ability, but it's how comfortable they are with being uncomfortable and putting themselves into that situation. And what shocked me was how, like, you know, I just assumed for the longest time, like, embarrassingly, that you get to a certain level, and things are like, you've just kind of solved for it. But it turns out that, like, there are guys cruising around India every year who get up to a certain speed, and that, like, 211 is fine. 212 is, like. And they don't know how to do it. And at the top level, there are still people who struggle with, like, am I good enough? How do I get faster? I don't know. Why is it that the dude in front of me is better? And I can try that, and it makes me real uncomfortable, and I'm not okay with it. Like, how often is, like, normal people you work with, how often are they just stuck on that level where they can't make themselves uncomfortable?

[Matt Farah]

I imagine it's got to be more frequently than you think.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Matt Farah]

So many people have personal limits of how fast is too fast, and it stops mattering what car they're driving or even just the same speed, putting themselves.

[Sam Smith]

Like, learning, like, getting into that zone that doesn't have anything to do with speed where you're just like, I don't know how to get better, and I'm not okay with it.

[Zach Klapman]

Like a neuroplasticity thing. Do you find that? Can you tell? Because you've told a story on your show about a gentleman driver who I think started driving, like, five years ago, and he's one of your best students ever. And now he's. What did he win?

[Ross Bentley]

He's won Le Mans.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

There's a little race in France.

[Sam Smith]

I've done nothing with my life. It's fine. No, sure.

[Zach Klapman]

Have you seen things with. I mean, we know that neuroplasticity mostly slows down as people age, but are there people like him or other folks who just seem to have that skill of picking things up and truly learning them more quickly than other people. Or is it more about dedication and work?

[Ross Bentley]

Yes, it depends. So for sure, neuroplasticity is this whole thing around our brains are plastic and can be continued to mold and learn things. And you know, the thing used to be, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Right. That's been proven wrong in that we can keep learning throughout our entire life. A big part of that is, what's your mindset? And if your mindset is, well, you know, I'm old, I can't do this anymore. You're right. If your mindset is, I can keep learning, my mind can keep growing, then you're more likely to do that. So Stephen Thomas is a fellow that I met just, well, in December. It'll be six years this time. Six years ago, I don't think he knew how to spell race car. He'd never really seen a race car. He bought a Cadillac. What's the Cadillac? What's the BMW version of a Cadillac ctsv? Yes. Bought one of those. Got a track day, went, I want to do more of this. Friend introduced us. Next thing I know, I got him out at Streets of Willow. It poured rain for two days. Of Willow for two days straight.

[Matt Farah]

What a treat.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes. It was awesome. And we basically spent two days driving around with me kind of just explaining the basics of driving. I said, you know, really go off and do some race school. So he did that. And then he came back and said, okay, I did that. Now what do you want me to do? And then it was like, well, okay, I want you to drive a bunch of different cars. So got him in doing all sorts of different stuff. First year he drove, he drove like in AER and wrl, like endurance stuff.

[Matt Farah]

Just to get lots of endurance racing.

[Ross Bentley]

Yep. Cheap endurance racing. Yep. Absolutely. Had him in a radical, had him in a Formula, a Formula 4 open wheel car. Had him in a porsche, whatever, the GT4 something or other that year. Just had him driving a bunch of different things. And then at the end of that year, I got him in an LMP3 car and wow. At the time people were kind of like, really? And I was like, yeah, he's ready now. He's exceptional in that he's got an athletic background, his mind is off the charts, brilliant. Processes information super quickly. But more importantly, his work ethic is unbelievable for a guy in his 50s. You know, he was. This was.

[Matt Farah]

This sounds exactly like my father.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay.

[Matt Farah]

My father picked up a golf club when he was 32 and by the time he was 42, he was a scratch golfer. Wow. And he maintained that until he was six.

[Sam Smith]

Really?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. And my dad had never picked up a shotgun until he was 55. He picked up a shotgun at 55, started shooting skeet and trap, and by his 60th birthday he was the club champion.

[Sam Smith]

What is it about how he looks at stuff that does.

[Matt Farah]

He's incredibly focused on practicing and learning and absorbing. He is athletic, naturally. He's 65 and you know, 220. And he has just a level of focus when he's passionate about something.

[Ross Bentley]

How do you do that? My guess is he doesn't have any preconceived limits around. Well, I'm 50, I'm 32, I'm.

[Matt Farah]

Whatever it is, he's not racing Le Mans, he's playing golf and shooting guns. So there are physical limitations. But yeah, not otherwise.

[Ross Bentley]

And with Stephen, there's a. We've had the conversation around at some point, physically, an LMP2 car. Yeah, it's really hard on the body and you know, he's worked pretty hard at fitness and his weight and everything else. Like he's done all that stuff. But he's also, I mean, here's an interesting thing. The week that we started at Willow Springs, he bought a high end simulator and it's installed at his house not far down the road here. And a lot of people start with a simulator and then they get into cars. A lot of people start in cars and they get into simulators. If you've ever been around anybody that started in cars and got into a simulator, they go simulator. This thing is crap. Yeah, it nothing like a real car. Well, he started at the same time, so his calibration to his simulator is perhaps. And perhaps that's part of his advantage because we do a lot of stuff on the sim. We've got it set up. So I'm at home, I'm watching what he's watching on his VR and I'm watching telemetry, real time telemetry. I've got a camera that's looking over his shoulder. I got a camera that's pointing at his feet. Literally I'm sitting in the car beside him when he's driving an LMP2 car on the simulator. And as we're going around I can go, you know, release the brakes slower here, get your eyes up, like some basic stuff. But then, you know, we practice. We practice what it's like under a full course car. We practice leaving pit lane at Daytona at 3:00 in the Morning with hot brakes and cold tires.

[Matt Farah]

Wow.

[Ross Bentley]

And so we practice all this stuff. So, you know, what's made him so good? Some of it is just his work ethic. And, you know, I tell this story all the time of probably about two years in. You know, I'd have this. We would be on the. The way his schedule worked. We would get up at 5:00 in the morning and spend two hours, probably four days a week. And on the simulator.

[Matt Farah]

In the simulator.

[Ross Bentley]

On the simulator.

[Zach Klapman]

Wow.

[Ross Bentley]

And then it'd be like one of my rare weekends at home. And it's Sunday morning and it's 7 o'clock and my phone starts buzzing and my wife goes, how many? And I go, there has been six text messages from Stephen this morning saying, I've done this, I've done that, I've done this. What do you want me to do next?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Now, I've only ever seen. I've only ever worked with one other driver with that level of commitment to doing what it takes. And that was Colin Brown. No surprise. Right. So it's amazing how these guys with a lot of talent and a lot of ability just are all natural, but they work really hard at it.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah. I think that is the fallacy, right? Yeah. The whole, like, natural talent thing.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

And even if you're a person starting out in tractor, I mean, I had this when I was like, in my 20s. I was like, oh, I'm a good driver. And it was not natural talent. It was experience through life, driving in different things. And then, of course, I rode with a pro and I go, no, I'm not. I'm a terrible driver. Like, I can't do any of the things this person's doing. And then, like, the educational process starts. But no one, like, you can have maybe some. I don't even think, like, the natural connection between your brain and your body and the physical stuff is natural. I think if you're a kid and you're active, you learn, you develop those skills, the dialogue with the different parts of your body, it's just all like your past experience.

[Ross Bentley]

I think you said something really important, Zach, is the. You realized you weren't the best. I think if a driver goes along for a while and they're getting success and they start to think it's my natural talent that limits them. It's this whole thing. I mean, this whole study around mindset. Dr. Carol Dweck from Stanford did all this stuff around growth versus a fixed mindset. And a fixed mindset is essentially what I'm Doing is because of my natural talent. A growth mindset is wherever I'm at now, I can improve. And it was the what I did, the hard work I put in to get here to do that. So I can remember as a kid, you know, thinking, yeah, I'm a good driver, I'm a good driver, I'm a good driver. And then I rode with a guy who was the driver that was driving the race car that my dad was preparing, and I rode with him and I went, oh, yeah. Oh, there's another level here. And I think that was maybe one of the most important things that ever happened to me because I went, there's more.

[Matt Farah]

Right. When you, you know, I think we both agree that anything you want to learn about driving, you could learn in a BRZ or a Miata. And you don't need a Ferrari or a GT3 to learn those skills. Right. To what degree, if at all or not at all, does that translate to the quality of your simulator?

[Sam Smith]

Ooh, interesting.

[Matt Farah]

So do you need to go spend if you really want to? I mean, look, we can acknowledge that an entry level sim setup that goes through a PlayStation or an Xbox like we have here, basic wheel pedals, maybe a shifter, you can learn something from that and you can have fun. But how? What is sort of the baseline for really improving real world skills using a simulator?

[Ross Bentley]

So really, really good question. In, you know, your cheap steering wheel and pedals in a Forza or PlayStation or whatever, you can learn which way a track goes. Sure, but which is a helpful skill. It is. But if you want to work on your technique, you really need better pedals first and then better steering wheel. And with that, then you start getting into graphics cards and refresh rates, all this kind of stuff that. To make that better. But the most important thing is a good brake pedal that gives you some kind of feel.

[Matt Farah]

You know, the good ones are like hydraulic now, right?

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Now They've got this SimuCube wound that's programmable. You can program brake fade into it. Yeah. Like, it is just bizarre, but like four grand for the brake pedal. So do you need that to start? Absolutely not. But you just do need a pedal that gives you some kind of a feel. More than the brake pedal is an on off switch.

[Matt Farah]

Right. Maybe one that has like an ABS module built into it of some kind.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah. So you don't need to spend a lot of money on that. But, you know, if I was going to spend anything right now, that would be the very first thing it would be on a Good brake pedal and then a direct drive steering wheel wheel that gives some good feedback through it. Those would be the two things when you start getting to motion and all that other kind of stuff. I'm. I don't buy the. You need. And Stephen, by the way, has motion simulator. And I went three years ago, I was in Indianapolis, Dallar asked me to come in and I spent a couple hours in their 10, 20 million dollar simulator.

[Matt Farah]

That's the one where you sit in like a car.

[Ross Bentley]

You sit in the car, it's on this platform, the big things and it's moving up and down. And I drove that. And then two days later, are you.

[Matt Farah]

In a wraparound screen or you got.

[Ross Bentley]

VR goggles, wrap around screen. That's kind of.

[Matt Farah]

That because of the size, it's like spherical, right?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's the size of a 747 flight simulator.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. You know, so it's probably the same hardware under.

[Ross Bentley]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's a massive. And you know, it's 10, 20 million. Some. Some crazy amount of money. A couple days later I'm in LA, I go see Stephen and I try his SIM, which is I don't know, 50, 75.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. If it's a full motion home setup, it's probably 50 to 70 grand.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Which is a ton.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. And I went, you know what? I would not spend a penny more for the Dallara simulator.

[Matt Farah]

Really?

[Ross Bentley]

Because it was not that much better. And in fact it was just. It was hard to tell the difference.

[Matt Farah]

And how much better is his. Sorry, Zach, is his home set up. Than not having motion? How much does motion get you then?

[Ross Bentley]

That's the next thing is I then said turn the motion off. Yeah, I prefer it without motion, really. And there's a thing where. And I've read some research studies on this and I somebody that did some work on super high end simulator for a manufacturer who said that the research has shown that if you have motion and you know, the thing about motion is you can start the feeling of G loads but you can't sustain them.

[Matt Farah]

Right.

[Ross Bentley]

So you kind of. It moves you a little bit and you feel. And your brain goes that's not real. And it doesn't. Your brain then doesn't do a good job of filling in the rest. If you have no motion but you have visual and auditory, your brain says we need to imagine that. And your brain does a better job of filling that in than.

[Matt Farah]

That's interesting.

[Ross Bentley]

And I'm not saying that motion is Terrible. I drove at PRI show last year. Simcraft has this six axis, axis thing and it, I mean, it's. I had. It was interesting because a couple, three weeks earlier I'd driven a GT4 Club Sport at Sebring. And then I got in the Simcraft unit at PRI and they said, which car? And I said, put me at Sebring in that car. And it was really, really, really good. But I'm still not sure whether if it was $10 more.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Get the motion.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. But it doubles it. If not more.

[Ross Bentley]

If not more.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And so depending on what you're trying to achieve with the sim, I'm not sure personally, and there's probably somebody out there right now going, oh, I sell motion simulators.

[Zach Klapman]

You know someone. Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Well, they're running my business.

[Matt Farah]

There's a difference, right, between this is cool and fun and this portion will actually make me faster versus the rest of it.

[Ross Bentley]

I would say what's more important is what you do with it.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

You can have a really, really basic SIM unit, not a whole lot different than what you've got sitting out here. And if you use it the right way, it can be just as effective as having a hundred thousand dollar motion simulator in your home. Now, if you want to have your buddies come over and say, drive my simulator. And this thing's moving around, they're going, you know, two of them are driving it and one other one's over in the bathroom throwing up because of the motion. You know, that's. It depends on why.

[Matt Farah]

That would be me with the VR goggles. I don't. The VR goggles do not give me the curved screen.

[Zach Klapman]

There's footage of Verstappen doing a lot of sim racing, like sometimes too late at night, and he gets in trouble for that. But his rig doesn't have motion.

[Ross Bentley]

No.

[Zach Klapman]

And he definitely has $20 million.

[Ross Bentley]

He could spend that.

[Zach Klapman]

He could spend it. But it's interesting. Like Matt said, the motion is fun. And anytime we've gone to CXC and experienced it, you go, ooh, this is cool. But it's nice to know that it's not a better tool for the education if that's what the goal is.

[Matt Farah]

And if you're doing it for hours and hours like your client is, it might make you more tired than it needs to. It might exert you physically without a reciprocal benefit.

[Ross Bentley]

And they can hurt. Actually, we got hurt on.

[Zach Klapman]

Oh, yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Well, I guess if you crash and your hands are on the wheel, it could probably break your thumbs.

[Ross Bentley]

I know of guys who have broken thumbs.

[Matt Farah]

Do you? Yes.

[Ross Bentley]

From a direct drive hitting the wall and the thing just comes back up.

[Matt Farah]

Imagine the embarrassment of explaining that injury to somebody. Yeah, yeah. I broke my thumbs and how it crashed into the wall. No way. Where? My living room.

[Ross Bentley]

Simulated broken thumbnail.

[Sam Smith]

It's like the racing equivalent of ending up in the hospital with, like, you know, the guy who sprained his dick or whatever. And one of those things, you're just like, yeah, I have this. This happened to me. I don't want to talk about, dude.

[Matt Farah]

My friend just turned 40 and, like, the day after his 40th birthday, he injured himself in his sleep. And I was like, welcome to your 40s. Wow. Like, he, like, woke up and is like. He like, I can't move my neck.

[Zach Klapman]

I don't know.

[Matt Farah]

I was like, are you 40 yet? He's like, two days ago. I'm like, you've arrived. Welcome to injuring yourself while sleeping.

[Sam Smith]

The switch flip, Right?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does all right. Good. Well, it's good. I mean, it's good to know that, like, there's a lot of people that might consider buying a sim, but they think to get any actual result, they have to go spend 25, 30, 40, $50,000. But the truth is they don't.

[Ross Bentley]

They. They don't.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And again, I mean, you know, I have this menu that we work. That I work with, with Stephen or any somebody else. I mean, I've got this whole Simracer Academy thing. And it's just. It's. Here's how to become a better sim racer. And it does not have anything to do with, you know, gotta go out and spend $10,000 on this.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

It's just a. Here's a plan of how to do things.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And you work on the right. My whole thing is just this whole thing around deliberate practice. You know, the Tiger woods thing. Tiger woods practiced differently that he changed the way golfers practice.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. You gotta hit balls for hours and then just bang. The trashiest Vegas hoes.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Possible. And you will find success. It's very important. You will.

[Ross Bentley]

You sound like you've done research on this.

[Matt Farah]

Well, I was there.

[Ross Bentley]

Matt's really good at golf.

[Matt Farah]

It's funny, I have an imbalance in my training schedule.

[Sam Smith]

It's the worst Tony Robbins seminar.

[Ross Bentley]

But the difference is that he. Where most golfers would go and hit, you know, they'd hit out of the sand trap. Tiger woods would drop a ball in the sand trap, step on the ball and hit out. Like, he'd make it harder. He Would drop a ball behind the tree and try to hit out from there. Yeah, like he practiced. He made practice harder.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, well, it's like he's practicing contingencies, whereas everyone else is just like practicing under ideal situation. I'm just gonna get off the tee and hopefully everything goes well. But you have to, because it cause those anomalies or those problems will happen. So it's like going to drift school. And then if you're trying to be a formula driver, but you need to do that so you understand what happens when the car moves.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, that's another thing my old man does.

[Sam Smith]

Drifting.

[Ross Bentley]

What?

[Matt Farah]

No, not drifting. I tried to take him to track days. I tried to take him to the PC. I tried. He didn't. He does not like race cars.

[Sam Smith]

Why doesn't he like it?

[Matt Farah]

I don't think he likes, like, the G forces and the motion. He doesn't deal with that type of it very well. And I think his live for like. Like we were saying with people's speed that they're willing to go. I think his is pretty low. But he does. When we go bird hunting, we go hunting for quail and stuff. He shoots with a much smaller gun. Really, to make it harder.

[Sam Smith]

So many jokes in there. I have no euphemisms to this at all whatsoever.

[Matt Farah]

But he shoots with. He shoots a little gun, so it makes it harder to hit birds.

[Ross Bentley]

So can I ask questions? Yeah, because kind of the podcast that we do is around sort of the. What's going on behind people? And so how did you get interested in cars? And it sounds like your father is not.

[Matt Farah]

I was a fat kid who couldn't run very fast.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay.

[Matt Farah]

So I realized.

[Ross Bentley]

And your dad was chasing you? No.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Yeah. No.

[Zach Klapman]

But I realized, oh, this is way easier.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, Yeah. I realized with go karting when I was a little kid, like, oh, I was actually kind of good at this. And I could do something that made me fast without being fast, without, like, being able to run fast.

[Ross Bentley]

But did. Did looking at a car because, you know, I mean, some people look at the shape of a car and go, yeah, I also. Beautiful thing in the world.

[Matt Farah]

I thought cars were really.

[Ross Bentley]

Is that a refrigerator?

[Matt Farah]

No. No. I also liked studying the cars also. But there was. There was one branch of it that was about studying the car and learning about all the specs and all that kind of stuff. Reading the road and tracks. Those. Those. Yeah, you know, the tech spec things at the end of the articles, which they still do. And. And the other part of it was about the. The Driving. And so when I got a go kart for my eighth birthday, it was like, game on. Yeah. Yeah. And. And it was. It was. It was. That was like life after that.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. But it never. It did not come directly from my old man. No. He was always, like, supportive, but it was not a thing. He was passionate.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Zach.

[Zach Klapman]

I think it might. I don't really know. My dad's not into cars, to answer that question. He got into them after I was into them. So. I'm adopted. And I recently read this, like, literally two weeks ago, read this sheet that my biological father had filled out. What are your interests? And it was cars and firearms. And my dad who adopted me has zero interest in either one. He got into cars because I did. But where did that sheet.

[Matt Farah]

Have you had that sheet the whole time?

[Zach Klapman]

My mom had it.

[Matt Farah]

She just, like, found it.

[Zach Klapman]

My mom, I think, likes to keep me coming home by just slowly rolling out information and getting more and more important as she gets older.

[Matt Farah]

It's so funny.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah. It's always like, oh, you need this. I'm like, where was this 30 years ago? And she's like, I just like to slow play it.

[Matt Farah]

No rush. But we like to talk about your inheritance. Do you mind coming home first?

[Zach Klapman]

We did that like a month ago. We had to go over a bunch of their will stuff.

[Ross Bentley]

So you said cars and guns. Like, are you into drive by shootings?

[Matt Farah]

Yes.

[Zach Klapman]

Look, we all need a second hustle in this economy.

[Matt Farah]

Morality is one thing, but can we at least admit they're fun as shit? I mean, let's.

[Zach Klapman]

The firearm discussion is a very long one, and I am not the gun nuts. I just. I was interested in them almost because of movies, but for car. Cars, I don't know. When I was five, I liked the shape of them, and my parents got me, like a Crayola car design kit thing, and I used it up in like a day.

[Ross Bentley]

It was like, you still use those?

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, I just really like crayon for some reason. And I really liked driving and going.

[Matt Farah]

Ferrari F80 actually done in crayon.

[Zach Klapman]

It just connected with me.

[Matt Farah]

The cybertruck was definitely done in crayon. Yeah. That's funny that you're. What else did you learn about your biological.

[Zach Klapman]

That info sheet was literally that short. I was like, they need more questions.

[Matt Farah]

It was really likes guns, cars, dislikes having children of my own.

[Ross Bentley]

And I.

[Zach Klapman]

Share all of those pictures. That's a great joke. That's a great joke.

[Sam Smith]

So true.

[Matt Farah]

Fucking. You know, Zach is now a married man. He Was married this weekend. And the wedding was amazing. It was great fun. It was, like, really, really, really a really. Just awesome. Even if I was, like, not one of Zach's best friends, it was still an awesome wedding. Food was really good, Music was great, Venue was awesome.

[Ross Bentley]

I saw a photo.

[Matt Farah]

It was. It was superb. But Zach's mom's speech. I have never in my entire life laughed as hard my wife filmed me is how hard I was laughing.

[Sam Smith]

It was amazing. And I was one.

[Matt Farah]

She say the word YouTube pluralized, was it? Your YouTubes are so professional. I think that was the phrase where I lost it.

[Sam Smith]

I was one table over, looking at you, watching you just, like, face down on the table, laughing. Right around the time that she said, what was it that your Uranus was? There was something about the size of your Uranus. And I.

[Zach Klapman]

For people most people don't know, my mom is like, my parents are from the hippie generation, as most of our parents are. But my mom is into astrology and is getting more into it as she gets older. Like, and it's a. It's. Her speed is increasing, you know, exponentially. And she sent us her whole speech before she read it. Cause we wanted to make sure it didn't go too long. And most of it was, like, so nice and caring. And then there was. As soon as I read down to the paragraph, it was like, Sarah's Venus. And I went, here we go. Anyone who's not met my parents is gonna meet them. Like, all of them. And it was so funny between her and my dad. Like, their speeches were very warm and interesting, but the different groups of friends that came up and were like, your dad, can we print that? And it was like, all right, you four. That makes sense. And the women that came up and were like, your mom's astrology reading moved me. I was like, it makes a lot of sense that you're saying this.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

Like, I love you guys. It was just so funny with who it landed. But I looked over, I saw Matt's head on the table because he's met both of them. And I was like, yeah, it was fucking crazy.

[Sam Smith]

It was the sweetest thing.

[Matt Farah]

It was. She started with the astrology, and I started laughing because. Yeah. But then she said. She pluralized YouTube to refer, not like your YouTube videos. She said, your YouTubes. And I was like, I had, like, you know, eight fucking bourbons. And so I had. I completely broke down and turned to a fucking wedding.

[Zach Klapman]

It was great, but I wouldn't want to laugh too hard. I didn't want to make her feel bad, but, like, you were definitely laughing for the both of us. And what did I say? I was like, she wrote it. She spelled it U, T, U, B, E, S and somehow pronounced it that way. Like, it was different than Y, O.

[Sam Smith]

U, T, U. I do need.

[Ross Bentley]

I'm.

[Matt Farah]

It's on video. I'm sure I need to go. I need to relive what she actually said because I was laughing so hard. I don't even remember what she said. It was excellent. It was. It was.

[Sam Smith]

It was a neat day. It was a really neat thing.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. And I like that there was that. Corey brought a prop car that we didn't do anything with. It just, like, sat in vip.

[Zach Klapman]

A lot of people took photos with it.

[Sam Smith]

Okay. Is that the Bronco?

[Matt Farah]

The Bronco.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, I wondered why that was.

[Matt Farah]

It was a press car. Corey brought it. He was like, do you want, like, a prop car? And we're like, yeah, okay, sure.

[Zach Klapman]

It was cool. He was like, they had that, and in the con garage, and they had a, like, F100 street truck, but it was. It was black. And I was like, well, that might not photograph as well. That's more challenging.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

But the Bronco. Everyone loved the Bronco. Like, nice spec. Looked good.

[Sam Smith]

Also, the pie was excellent. I ate, like, three pieces of pie, and I was eating three piece of pie because that was a good four brownies.

[Matt Farah]

Although something did. Did you see the weird thing that happened with the pie? So you were this. It's nothing. Nothing, like, bad happened. But in one of the weird logistical, like, huh. I wonder who chose this. There was the table where the desserts ultimately ended up, like, the cookies and all that, before they put all that shit out the. There was. It was a table. It said. I think it said desserts or something on it. There was just one pie there.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, that was for us to cut.

[Matt Farah]

Okay. Oh. There was a visual of cutting the pie.

[Zach Klapman]

You know, like some people do like the cake cutting. And we didn't want to stop traffic for that because who cares, in my opinion? But they were like, well, we want to get a photo of you cutting a pie. We're like, fine. And so we grabbed us, Sarah and I cut a pie.

[Matt Farah]

I get it.

[Zach Klapman]

The share thing. And then it was like, all right, now let people eat this.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. So it was just this one. This one table with this one pie.

[Zach Klapman]

Everyone has to fight.

[Matt Farah]

There's, like, 150 people here. And we're like, so who gets the pie?

[Sam Smith]

It's amazing because you walk by it and you're like, well, who's gonna eat the pie? And I walked by, I'm like, that is the most ominous fucking thing I've ever seen.

[Matt Farah]

We're all gonna die.

[Sam Smith]

It's a sign.

[Zach Klapman]

Like, it's the pie of everyone eats one equal piece. You can't leave it looked.

[Matt Farah]

Turns out there was about 75 more pies that were being cut in the back. But, like, for half an, me and Hannah are just staring at this going, the story of this pie. I don't. We cannot figure.

[Zach Klapman]

There was supposed to be like a picture pie topper that I guess didn't make it. That would have. That would have explained it to me. That would have explained the pie.

[Sam Smith]

What was going to go on the pie?

[Zach Klapman]

Well, I mean, we had like a picture of us doing something like, you.

[Matt Farah]

Know how you have the figurine.

[Zach Klapman]

We didn't want the wedding and all that. So, like, we'll just do. You can do like a steak with a picture on it. And it would have made a lot more sense to everybody.

[Ross Bentley]

Not a piece of meat. Steak.

[Matt Farah]

Yes.

[Ross Bentley]

No, because that would be really.

[Matt Farah]

Listen, your brain is always going. And the next time I'm celebrating, I'm going to prop up a photo of myself with a T bone on meat on a pie and really get people guessing.

[Zach Klapman]

It symbolizes how keto diet is actually on top of the carb diet that the government has presented to us for decades.

[Matt Farah]

100%. Yeah. Sam, you're at the Intercooler now.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, among other places.

[Matt Farah]

Among other places. And you came in, you were like, I don't know what we're going to talk about. I haven't driven a press car in like a year, but. Yeah. And yet you still find something to say every week.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah. I don't know. It kind of made. So is it. I was at road and track for eight, nine years. And then I got your job. I know. Which is amazing.

[Matt Farah]

With aj. Ew. Ew.

[Sam Smith]

No, you should. And Jethro, it's like. It's like the Highlander. Matt. There can be only one. You just have to take care of him. Just lop his head.

[Matt Farah]

You just have to beat the shit out of the other ones, though.

[Sam Smith]

But no, it left her on track. Went to Hagerty for a couple years and kind of took a sabbatical and stepped back. Had a bunch of things I wanted to do last spring. Wanted to get a book of my writing out. Had a couple of projects wanted to take care of and just kind of didn't spend a lot of time driving press cars, which means I don't know what anything feels like anymore, but is that. It's weird.

[Matt Farah]

Refreshing.

[Sam Smith]

Yes, Completely. I see the Nissan, I don't know, party boy 200 in traffic and I'm like, I don't care. What?

[Matt Farah]

You haven't driven the party boy 200.

[Sam Smith]

I know. What about the Party Boy?

[Zach Klapman]

That's a Japanese name for the Ford Z, by the way.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, for. Well, that's what Nissan would have sold a car under in the 80s. In the 80s, a Japanese car would have been called the Party Boy, to be frank.

[Sam Smith]

Like, we would have bought the Party Boy. We would have bought the Party Boy V spec. We would have bought the Party Boy V spec and been like, from Volkswagen Midnight Purple. Yeah. But no, I don't know. I've stepped back from it and it's been deeply refreshing. And it's not. That car is bad. It's not that, like Sam. Not Sam anymore. I just. There's. It's easier to be curious about so many more things. It's weird. I mean, do you. When you go stints without driving stuff, what happens to your brain?

[Zach Klapman]

Way to turn it around to someone else, Sam.

[Sam Smith]

I don't like talking about myself, though.

[Matt Farah]

I don't. I drive too many things. I drive so many things that I can't think about them in the level of depth that Sam thinks about what he's going to have for lunch.

[Sam Smith]

Sam. Sam has thoughts.

[Matt Farah]

You know what I mean? Sam has thoughts that I don't get to. Because I have to drive next fucking thing.

[Sam Smith]

The secret is, Matt, you don't want those thoughts. I don't want those thoughts. No one wants those thoughts.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, people pay for those thoughts, it turns out.

[Sam Smith]

But no. So it's been interesting at the moment. I read a very infrequent monthly column for the Intercooler on driving in America. Intercooler is, if you don't know, it's a British app run by two great journals.

[Matt Farah]

Worth paying for.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, it's super worth paying for. A guy named Andrew Frankel, who's a legend in the business, and a guy named Dan Prosser, who. Who is. He's like you and me. He's not a legend in the business. He's just been around a bit.

[Matt Farah]

He's just very good.

[Sam Smith]

He's very, very good.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

And it's interesting. It's kind of where all of the writing that used to end up in the type of stories that used to get done in Evo and car and all the British, you know, the British mags that ran the business for the longest time kind of petered out.

[Matt Farah]

But the, it's funny to be like hired by this British site, site, app, whatever we want to call it, the intercooler. And them to be like, okay, we're going to hire an American and your job is to write about America. Like it's literally. It's about speeding, it's about drive throughs, it's about American events that you attend. And you are able to write about driving in America every week without driving anything new.

[Sam Smith]

Well, every month. But yeah, it kicked off. So this was, I guess the last time I went to the LA auto show was two years ago, three years ago. And I met Frankel and we were there for. What was the Mission R, Mission Re.

[Matt Farah]

The electric Porsche thing.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, that was kind of a GT car, but not really a race car. And they had a bunch of journals in to drive it at pec and we were there for it. And at the end of the day, the British, it was a British trip. And the Brits, the Brit PR guy took like six Brits and me to downtown LA to one of the Brazilian steakhouses. And I got to watch like six dudes with really thick accents just be served endless pockypucks of meat by a man with a sword. And they just, it kept coming. And Frankl looks at me at one point, he's like, what do I do with this? I'm like, wait, I mean, you can eat it. He's like, america has so much meat. I'm like, I know, isn't it great? And it just kept coming and we ended up having a bunch of conversations about that, just about the. I mean, you know, it's like any other cultural difference, the stuff that you and I think is entirely normal. Everybody who isn't from here looks and goes, wait, what? You have eaten liquor stores with drive throughs?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Like people really do this shit.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. We are weird.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, super weird. Deeply weird.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Yeah. It's. Anytime I've been in one of the press trips where I end up hanging out with a bunch of Brits, I realize how inferior an automotive journalist I am.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, same.

[Matt Farah]

Because I just don't have their vocabulary.

[Sam Smith]

And I never will same.

[Matt Farah]

And if I tried to have their vocabulary, it would probably sound stupid and like I was just flagrantly copying them.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

And then they seemed to have this depth of history. I think this is based more on the fact that a lot of these guys have been writing about cars since the 90s professionally. Their depth of knowledge of not just facts and figures of a car, but, like, who the guy was who ran the press fleet for Skoda in 1993. And I'm like. And I'm so lost, you know, And I'm like. And so that's why it kind of seems like, to me, just outsider looking in that, like, working with those guys would be such an interesting experience. Although, are you more just, like, you know, by yourself and sending it in?

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, I'm a freelancer who is. They're kind enough to ask me to do things that it's a privilege to be attached to it. But most of it is. What I find really interesting about those cats is that all of them, they look at cars and motorsport and the history behind it the same way that people in middle America, in this country, look at Mike Ditka. There are people in Illinois who know just as much about the 89 Chicago Bears as Prosser knows about what happened at Bentley from August to September of 1982. And part of it's Ross. We talk about this all the time. Like, the culture and the fact that motorsport just means something different over there in the way that football, like American football, means something different.

[Matt Farah]

I think that's why Top Gear, like, that's why Top Gear could have only been successful in the uk, because driving is a different thing there. Yeah, it's a different level of importance. It's so much more expensive. You know, like, when a quart of oil is like, you know, 35 pounds or something, you know, it takes on a different weight. And what car you choose is such an important thing compared to here. But it's funny that, like, it's not that weird for, like, an American outlet, like road and track or whatever, to have one or two British journalists work for them, like, that's normal. But to be an American working for a. It's like. It's a very fun. The same thing happened with top gear when LeBlanc. When LeBlanc went over to Top Gear and then they were gonna rebrand it, and they kept Chris. And I was like, hey, Chris Harris. I was like, hey, Chris, how about looking out for your boy? Maybe you get me in front of the. I was like, we've worked together. Here's. There's funny films. And they go, they really want it to be a British guy. They don't want another American.

[Zach Klapman]

Brexit happened and messed up their trade thing. But then when Biden administration.

[Matt Farah]

I couldn't get the visa.

[Zach Klapman]

Biden administration helped Sam do the switcheroo.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, it was a trade deal.

[Sam Smith]

No, it's great. It's really cool. But it is funny, right? Because there's just this culture over there. And even down to the, like. I remember the first time 20 years ago, I went over there and drove anything. And just the notion that, like, literally anywhere you go in that country, you can take two steps backward and you fall into a B road. You fall into, like, something that we would drive two states to get to that, like, if you live in la, looks like a canyon road, but also goes through hedges and, like, might drive through the middle of a sheep. And every ounce of it is working the suspension and your brain and the tire and doing things to the car that, you know, I 80 in Nebraska just doesn't. And so many of the people here. So many people.

[Matt Farah]

You know, it's funny, Northeast gets close. I mean, it's funny that, like, you know, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut. That's not totally unlike driving in England.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

But we don't produce the same quality of content out of those states as we do in England.

[Sam Smith]

And to be fair. Right. Like, there is some incredible driving here. Right. California, the Appalachians, like the Northeast, all the stuff up near where Ross lives in Seattle, like the Northwest. But it's just, you know, it's by percentage of the country. It's just. It's a fraction of it.

[Matt Farah]

But yeah, it just.

[Sam Smith]

I mean, who knows why it developed one way and out the other. You know, there are. What is it? It's something like 10,000 circle tracks in America, and most of them aren't listed.

[Matt Farah]

Well, there are. I think England has most racetracks. I don't know if it's most racetracks per capita or most racetracks per. By land area, it might be square mile because of all the decommissioned air military bases and stuff that became racetracks.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah. Makes total sense.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

But I don't know.

[Matt Farah]

But the Intercooler and the Road Rat are the only two publications that I actually pay for. I pay some people on substack for their newsletters and whatever.

[Sam Smith]

Same. But.

[Matt Farah]

But other than that. And road and track, of course. Sure. Because Hearst wouldn't give me a subscription, which is fucking crazy, dude.

[Sam Smith]

When I worked there, the years where I did not live in the office, getting that place to send me a magazine was like. You'd call up and they'd be like, who are you again? I'm like, oh, I'm on the masthead in the paper. Like, can you prove it? I'm like, this is my face on the paper.

[Matt Farah]

Wow. We're not sure, but they wouldn't send me a digital subscription. They wouldn't make me a fucking login. And it's like, do you remember when part of my job was to promote the articles that I write for you? And I need to be able to get that link and post it, place it like, what are you doing?

[Zach Klapman]

We would try to show it up. We try to show stories on the podcast and it would be like. And then the box pops up and like, please log in.

[Matt Farah]

Look, you're out of. You're out of free articles. Like, bro, wow. Eventually somebody snuck me the master and. But it was like that. But it wasn't like, oh, eventually they were like, no, no heat. Matt should have a login. Eventually someone was like, this rule is dumb. Here's the master login. So I think I could fucking delete their entire credit card information if I wanted to. But that's crazy. How's the Patreon?

[Ross Bentley]

Good full.

[Zach Klapman]

We have some good chock full.

[Matt Farah]

I figured there'd be a bunch on today's Patreon, so let's go to the people. Patreon.com the Smoking Tire podcast is what is going to keep this show going when the ad sales model completely collapses. So please get in on the game. You can watch the show live. You can ask questions of us and our guests. You can get an extra podcast every month. You can get podcast the podcast the day it's recorded instead of waiting until the air day and on and on and on. That's where you do it. Patreon.com the Smoking Tire podcast get in that game. We should maybe do a end of year like annual sale. Maybe we could drop the. We could do a. Is there a way to do that.

[Zach Klapman]

Where if someone buys an annual investigation.

[Matt Farah]

We could probably have some sort of a thing, right? Yeah. Okay. Have Zach has filtered these for relative relevance. So Ryan says I currently do a handful of track days per year in my Porsche Carrera S. I want to level up my driving skill on both road and track and I have some disposable time and money. Ross, what say you? We kind of covered this before but.

[Ross Bentley]

Best way to go about it.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Work with an instructor, a coach. You're going to get more bang for the buck doing that than anything else.

[Matt Farah]

So as opposed to going to a three day racing school as opposed to.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, if you have like if Skippy for. What is it? What's Skip Arbor for a three day cost?

[Matt Farah]

I don't know. What did Ron. What was Ron fellows for the three day advance.

[Zach Klapman]

It was a two day advance. And it was, it's almost like four grand now. It went up, it was like 3,600 bucks or something.

[Sam Smith]

So you could end up with a couple of days with a lot of coaches for less than that, right?

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, yeah, Damn it.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. So, yeah, but sure, but your own car, Your own car.

[Ross Bentley]

Track.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, the car and the track are a lot of that expense.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, but you know, some of it depends on that level of the driver's hat. If they've gone through that. Because I'm a big, you know, I don't see any problem in ever going back to a school. Like there's something you're going to learn no matter what, no matter what level you're at. But I think there comes a point in time where I think one on one coaching is going to help you more than anything else. And where does one find a coach? That is a really good question because there's a lot of underemployed race drivers who call themselves coaches.

[Matt Farah]

Why isn't there a database of them where people could find them by location and training style?

[Ross Bentley]

You know, that has been tried a few times.

[Matt Farah]

Really?

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, it's been tried a few times. And too niche of a service. No, the biggest problem is that every coach. So I did a program, I did a thing 20 years ago where I trained up 12, 15 coaches and I was like, okay, we're all going to be part of this thing. We're going to basically I sort of become an agency. I was trying to clone myself and it worked for a while until about half a dozen said, I'm just going to take your clients and go off and do my own thing. I think there's a lot of coaches that kind of think very. They're good entrepreneurs. That's a polite way of saying, sure.

[Matt Farah]

Well, this, A similar thing happens with any of these sort of, you know, like there's a, there's a pet sitting one called Rover. And it's like if you get someone off of Rover to watch your pet, the first thing you're gonna say to them is, hey, how much for cash? And we'll cut out this middleman.

[Ross Bentley]

Right, right.

[Matt Farah]

So I get that.

[Ross Bentley]

So, you know, start with a Google search and start just asking around. I don't mind if somebody sends me a message and says, you know, hey, I live in so and so I drive this. This is what I'm trying to do. Do you have any advice or any suggestions for a coach? I know a lot of coaches. I know a lot Of I know a lot of people that call themselves coaches. I know a lot of. I know a few really, really, really good coaches. And I'm happy to make a decision.

[Matt Farah]

When you're coaching, not sim full in a car, are you riding right seat still or are you doing it all digitally?

[Ross Bentley]

I do some of that. So my approach to coaching is whatever it takes. If the best thing is for me to hop in the car and do a few laps to kind of watch and see what's going on, I'll do that. I'm a big fan of then plugging my Garmin catalyst into the car and say, you watch while I stand out here. But what I'm better at is I'm a better strategist. Like I think about it as, as a head coach for a football team.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

They're not necessarily out there working with the passing coach, working on technique of how to throw the ball, but he's thinking more about the, okay, we need the quarterback to be working on this.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Okay.

[Ross Bentley]

And so I do a lot of that. So.

[Matt Farah]

But my coach for professionals, more so than just a amateur who wants to get better at their skills.

[Ross Bentley]

But I work with amateurs too, and I'll go to an HPDE event and do that kind of stuff every and then because part of it is that I don't ever want to forget what it's like for that level of driver because it helps me be better with everybody else. But I will say that if somebody said, hey, can I hire you to coach me? I might go. You know, I'm trying to do less one on one coaching now and do more stuff kind of online and things like that because I can help more drivers and I don't want to get on another airplane for the rest rest of my life.

[Matt Farah]

I have a couple people, Ryan, if you want a coach that I have worked with, you know Kevin Madsen, he's great.

[Ross Bentley]

Kevin.

[Matt Farah]

Kevin is awesome.

[Ross Bentley]

Kevin's near the very top or one of the top guys on my list.

[Matt Farah]

Kevin is great.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

And I would recommend him to coach lately too. Is he too busy to coach?

[Ross Bentley]

No, no.

[Zach Klapman]

I'm just saying he's been like doing really well in racing. He offered. He's like, hey man, if you get a Miata, like I'll meet you at a track. I was like, really?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. He helped me a lot. He was great.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Yeah. My also my other suggestion, rally schools. If you want to improve your all around skill set, go to dirt fish or rally ready. Rally ready in Texas or. Those are great.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

Beyond the limit. Yep. Let's see. Mr. Meowgie. Good username, New patron here. What driver traits best translate from the street to the track? What should a driver not bring from the street? The track? Interesting question.

[Sam Smith]

Your 40 ounce of mad dog.

[Matt Farah]

Your phone.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah. What should you not bring? Is bad habits.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

But what should you bring? I'm gonna say more awareness and attention.

[Matt Farah]

Situational awareness.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Like you should be on the street and the track. You should be able to, at any moment, be able to identify what cars are around you.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Without looking around for them.

[Ross Bentley]

Exactly. I think it's like, you know, we drive, we've got this bubble around us, and the bubble changes shape based on amount of traffic and speed we're going and everything. But you should know at all times, like you said, you shouldn't have to turn your head and go, oh, oh, there's a car there.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. I watched that happen in real time this morning as I was almost hit on my Vespa. When I'm riding a motorcycle around la, the person to stay away from is someone driving aggressively in a car with density all over it. And this dude made a last minute, no blinker lane change, like six, seven cars in front of me. And I watched him. And I go, that guy's problematic. And he went from the left to the right. And as I was passing on the left, I go, be ready for this. And I fucking was. Because he made. He made another last minute, no blinker move back to the left and almost hit me. And. And I went. I hit my horn. I went, what the. And he then aborted that move. What did he do? Crashed into the car in front of him.

[Ross Bentley]

Nice.

[Matt Farah]

He bailed back and rear ended a lawn truck right here this morning on the way here. It was crazy. And I. I saw it 30 seconds before. It's gonna happen. That guy's gonna be a problem.

[Ross Bentley]

Jesus Christ.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

You said Vespa.

[Matt Farah]

I'm on a Vespa. Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

What does your horn sound like on the Vespa?

[Matt Farah]

Italian meat.

[Ross Bentley]

That's good.

[Matt Farah]

So it's not a you're gonna hit me horn. It's. It's meat for espresso at five.

[Ross Bentley]

Right, right.

[Matt Farah]

It's that kind of a horn. But I love Bentley has two horns.

[Sam Smith]

Does it?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Hannah's. It's my wife's favorite fucking feature in the whole car. It's got a loud horn and a polite horn. It's awesome how British. It's so British. You should.

[Sam Smith]

You should put the Bentley horns just get an entire, entire Other set of them.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

And then run, I don't know, run like twice the power through them.

[Zach Klapman]

I'm surprised it doesn't have a third one that apologizes.

[Ross Bentley]

That's. That's the Canadian one.

[Zach Klapman]

Oh, that's true, yes.

[Matt Farah]

Tim says if Ross got to decide the driving laws in America, what law would you change?

[Ross Bentley]

Make it hard to get a driver's license, like put some. Some decent standards in place.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

You know, a few weeks ago, I was in Germany with a group of drivers at Nurburgring and Spa. I'm driving in Germany for a week. I come back, I'm home for one day, and I go to Dallas, Texas, to go to Eagles Canyon. And in. What a culture shock of being on highways in Germany where the left lane you pass, you move out of the way. In Texas, you get in the left lane and you park there.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

And I know it's everywhere. So that would be the. I just put some decent standards in and require proper training to be able to pass those standards.

[Matt Farah]

I don't disagree at all. Make it harder. Bad Gardener says. I'm a coach for a karting team. One area in motorsport that I've not seen much investment in is day of nutrition and day of mindset. In many sports, they take these details very seriously. Have you experienced the same lack and do you have any insight?

[Ross Bentley]

I would say it is not something that's ignored in pro racing today. It's huge. And, yeah, I don't know. Decades ago, nobody ever thought about did. Yeah. Did Mario Andretti think about what he was eating? I don't think so. And his mindset was just drive. But nowadays, pro level drivers, you know, Formula one drivers, have somebody that follows them around the world preparing their meals. So it's a big, big deal. And there are people out there that, you know, fitness programs, fitness trainers that are specific. You know, Pitfit out of Indy and Charlotte are very specific to fitness training. And.

[Matt Farah]

And there's stuff you can get online. You know, if you work with a trainer, you. There's specific exercises. Right. You could have your trainer.

[Ross Bentley]

Pitfit does all that and they'll put nutrition programs together for drivers as well. And, you know, the mindset training that's all around the mentor game and that's my sweet spot. And other people are doing it too, so it's out there. Like a lot of things, it's harder to find.

[Matt Farah]

When I talk to real drivers, real pros, they seem to have a plan in place. Guys going to a track day or a young kid who's really good. Maybe not so much, but by the time you're 40 or 50 and doing Daytona or Le Mans, you've got to play.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Farah]

You know?

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

Even I was just a name drop incoming. I was just talking to Dempsey at Luft. Name drop. You got to call the name drop.

[Ross Bentley]

Which Dempsey would that be?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, the other one. Dave Dempsey.

[Ross Bentley]

Dave Dempsey, yeah.

[Matt Farah]

He's. He's running in Formula 7.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

But he was talking about his Le Mans rest hydration, you know, plan. Yeah, and he's a fucking actor. Derek says. Recently moved from indoor electric carts to outdoor electric carts with floating calipers. Needless to say, my braking performance as a driver was subpar at the higher speeds. Any tips to improve braking performance and specifically exercises for developing consistency in pedal modulation? Zach just did a lot of this at the Corvette school.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, true for me. I mean, the graphs helped a lot, or the data helped me a ton. Because my bad habit I came in with, which I knew I had, was increasing brake pressure from driving in canyons where the corners are unknown or somewhat unknown. I go, okay, well, I'm driving at a speed where if I need to slow down more because there's rocks in the road or it tightens more than I thought I could, I can. But obviously that's not what you want to do. It's the opposite of what you want to do. So using data and seeing the prose graph and how mine was inverted from his, it looked like the widening gyre, like the political graph. So I was like, oh, I gotta flip that over. But does that apply to carting? Because I know carts are different because.

[Ross Bentley]

They don't have calipers. Yeah. But basically, yes, I would say the biggest thing is just be specific about how you practice it. You know, most people, if they're going carding, they're going to go out there and what are they going to practice driving fast. And they're going to go, I'm just going to go and see what kind of a lap time I turn. No, take a practice session, and all you do is you go on the track and you work on how hard can you make the initial application without doing something.

[Matt Farah]

Without locking.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, without locking. And then work on how smoothly can you release the brake pedal and just work on that kind of stuff and take multiple sessions to do that. And I'd be shocked if you didn't then end up driving faster overall. But I'd say the single biggest mistake the drivers make is how they practice. I use this analogy all the time, and I'M sorry to repeat this, but if football teams practiced the way most race drivers, kart racers, whoever, practice, they'd show up for practice and they play a game. Yeah, but they don't do that. They do drills. They do blocking drills. They take the game and they break it down into discrete skills and they practice those over and over and, and over again. Do the same thing with your driving. Pretend you're a football team practicing specific skills. Just work on the brake application. Now a session of just working on your brake release. Now work on a session of just looking ahead. Now work on looking ahead and like glancing ahead and moving your eyes more. Work on how you move the wheel. Like, is it a progressive turn in? Is it a digressive turn in? Like, really play around with those things and don't be afraid to experiment with things and, and go, well, that worked. Or I don't know if that worked, but it might work somewhere else. Like you kind of file that away in your database.

[Matt Farah]

Almost everything you just said can be practiced in the street as well.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, there's nothing you didn't say push the car to its absolute limit. But like, you could practice brake pedal feel, downshifts, looking with your eyes, hand position. Any of that can just be practiced every time you get in the car.

[Ross Bentley]

And I would even say that sometimes it's better.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Because the limit, you're not pushing the limits. You're not pushing the brake so hard that you've got that firm brake pedal. So to modulate that pedal, it's actually harder on the street.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

So you get more sensitive to it.

[Matt Farah]

And you're like learning to heel toe with 5% brake pressure is challenging.

[Sam Smith]

Really hard. Doing it at the limit.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Chris Navio, what is something you would change about the racing industry today? Is the racing industry letting you down?

[Sam Smith]

More free rides. For me friends and all of my.

[Ross Bentley]

Other friends, let me tell you about.

[Zach Klapman]

Last minute cautions in nascar though.

[Ross Bentley]

What would I change in the racing industry today? I'm going to say not a whole lot. The whole thing say the whole thing about track limits in Formula one, I find a little frustrating, you know, especially, I mean, I know they've started to do this, but in tennis they use an electronic eye to say in or out. And Formula One's got three old drivers. As Stuart saying, I think he was out. I think he was in.

[Matt Farah]

Well, look, they were using fucking stopwatches for qualifying until about 1977.

[Sam Smith]

Yeah, we proved that.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah. So I'm gonna say I'M gonna say the track limits thing is bit frustrating, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with the form of they set an.

[Matt Farah]

Electronic ruling on that. But it's tough because there's so much of the runoff is tarmac as well that it doesn't seem like consequential to your drive to just cut.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, and I would say to that point is, you know, I'm not going to say let's make the tracks more dangerous. You know, put a electronic motor, you know, if you go drop wheels off. Yeah, but where was it just recently? Last year or this earlier this year, one of the tracks changed from where the curbing ends. I think it was Red Bull Ring where they changed the way. The way the end of the curbing ended. And then there was like a strip of gravel and then there was all that pavement out there.

[Matt Farah]

Oh, okay.

[Ross Bentley]

So there was no.

[Matt Farah]

You didn't really cut it anymore.

[Ross Bentley]

No, there was no benefit to dropping a wheel just outside the curb. I like that. Yeah. I mean, that was like. Oh, that's good thinking. We need to do more of that.

[Matt Farah]

Put a fucking turtle shell there while you're at it.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Matt Farah]

Track days are the best days. Says, what is your favorite race track corner?

[Ross Bentley]

The next one. Yeah, the next one.

[Matt Farah]

Thing my favorite, but also I.

[Ross Bentley]

Okay, Favorite racetrack corner.

[Matt Farah]

Sam, you can have a. You can have a thought on this, too.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, cool.

[Ross Bentley]

Turn two, most port.

[Matt Farah]

Okay. Why?

[Ross Bentley]

Because take this the right way. But when you finish that corner and you've nailed it and you know you're on the ragged edge, you go, I'm a man. I did it today.

[Matt Farah]

I have not died at doing this.

[Ross Bentley]

Yes, it's terrifying. It's scary, it's fast, it's all those things. And the line is not. What I love about corners is I love corners that isn't. Oh, you always drive this line turn to it. Most port. It depends on how the car handles that little bump on the first apex or near the first apex. So the line changes, and you've got to adapt to that, and it's very dependent on the car. And yeah, when you go through there in a fast car, it's you cheated death. And you go, yes, I did it. And I think. I mean, Niki Lauda said, turn to Mo Sport. Hardest corner in the world.

[Matt Farah]

Okay, Sam, do you have one?

[Sam Smith]

I've never been to Mo Sport. Now I want to go to Mo Sport.

[Ross Bentley]

Oh, yeah.

[Sam Smith]

I don't know. I mean, it probably changes every day based on how much coffee I've had, but I Always come back to turn nine at Laguna because it's downhill off Camber. Fast, ballsy changes based on day, wind, weather, traffic. And everything's just a little sketchy there. Right.

[Ross Bentley]

I just said that about turn two at Mo Sport.

[Matt Farah]

Shut up.

[Sam Smith]

Your answers are my answers.

[Zach Klapman]

It's almost like he's from Canada and you're from the United States.

[Sam Smith]

So what's the Canadian version of what I. And the thing. Yeah, that's worse.

[Ross Bentley]

Just add A to the end of it. I'm sorry.

[Sam Smith]

I'm sorry. Decal. And my Celica. No, I love. I love. You know, part of it is because there are 300 separate voices in my brain at any given time. And part of it is because I just. Anything that makes that focus and that weird sense of quiet happen. But I also just love it when a car is forced up on the edge no matter what you want, you know, and it's fast and it's. I like ballsy things. Sense of risk.

[Matt Farah]

The most scared I've ever been in a car happened to turn nine at Laguna. Sega.

[Sam Smith]

Oh.

[Matt Farah]

Not driving right along. Valkyrie AMR Pro with Andy Prio. And he took it flat.

[Sam Smith]

Really?

[Matt Farah]

And I almost. I thought we were going to die. Yeah. I was crazy.

[Sam Smith]

You remember speed, ours, anything we did.

[Matt Farah]

We did a 118 with me in the car, which he says was the fastest passenger lap ever recorded around Laguna. Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Which is insanity moving.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. We hit. He hit the brakes at 188 miles an hour in the end of the front straight.

[Sam Smith]

A buck 88 into 2. Jesus.

[Matt Farah]

Crazy.

[Sam Smith]

You know?

[Matt Farah]

Yeah. It was really, really wild. Yeah. That's very scary.

[Sam Smith]

Wow.

[Matt Farah]

Very, very scary. Yeah, that's where. That's that moment where you go out and you think you could do something pretty fast and then you ride along for a 118. I see. What we've done here is not what I'm used to. Yeah. Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

You're also getting into downforce, which is like a whole new thing for sure.

[Matt Farah]

To go flat through that downhill left hander, that's downforce.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah, for sure. I want to know you guys favorite corner because I find this really interesting.

[Zach Klapman]

So I, I will piggyback. I also really like nine because I. I grew up in Santa Cruz and we got to go mountain biking and like ride mountain bikes down the track once. And the corkscrew is very exciting on a mountain mountain bike because it's steep, but in a car it's built up. And this is something we've all said. And then you do it. And you're like, oh, it's kind of a low speed thing. There's a lot of compression. It's actually not that scary or exciting. Whereas nine. I mean, I'm the same way. I like feeling the car about to move or move a little bit. And it's far more fun as far as the roller coaster goes, because it's higher speed and everything about it. And there's more consequence you have. I mean, you should be paying attention all the time, but it just feels like. It feels like all the senses go up to 9.9 for that corner if you're going really fast or 11, 10, then you might be in trouble.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

But, yeah, cool.

[Ross Bentley]

Yeah.

[Zach Klapman]

Oh, 11 because of spinal Tap.

[Sam Smith]

There we go.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, sorry, mine goes to 12, so.

[Matt Farah]

There you go, Matt. I mean, I like. I'm not usually shooting for lap times. I'm usually trying to just like have fun and make a car move around little bit. And so it's probably. It's not a special corner at all. But the last corner on Thunderhill west is where we've done three road and track performance cars of the years. And that corner is where I slide every car that we have there and that where I can see reasonably safely what it will do if I fucking huck it in at 60 miles an hour and what will happen past the limit. So in terms of just like learning experiences that I've had on one given corner, that has to be it. In terms of like, just shape of track, I might say, like O rouge. Because it's just incredible, incredibly unique. And the combination of G forces you feel while doing that is. Is a very unique thing.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Never been.

[Matt Farah]

Spa is awesome.

[Ross Bentley]

Spa is awesome.

[Matt Farah]

It's so great. It's what you kind of hope the Nurburgring would be. Really. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Oh, that's cool.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah.

[Sam Smith]

Never heard anybody describe it like that.

[Matt Farah]

It's like when you do acid and you're like, oh, this is what I thought mushrooms were gonna be. It's that. Yeah. Best tarmac in the world spot. Yeah. Michael. Oh, for Sam, which car would you rather have back? Money? No object.E30M3 or Integra type R?

[Sam Smith]

Oh, man, that's an interesting one. Because they're the same. It's the same sandwich on different bread with different cheese.

[Zach Klapman]

Is that the same sandwich?

[Ross Bentley]

Shut up.

[Sam Smith]

It's a great metaphor. It holds up probably an E30 M3. If only because I had a bunch of them used to club race them and I never. They were all really nice and. And I've got to the point in my life where I want everything that I own or use or do to like make sense for the rest of my life. Which means I would probably just take an A30 M3 and it would be the shittiest looking thing. Dents on every panel, rust, glass falling out of it. And then, you know, sell a kidney or a child or something and have, you know.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, you shouldn't have motorbikes.

[Zach Klapman]

No.

[Matt Farah]

You don't do well with nice cars.

[Sam Smith]

No, because I don't use them. I sit there and I look at them and I go, that's really nice. They probably should do anything with it. But if it's scruffy, man, world's your.

[Matt Farah]

All right, last one. Dre in Houston. Just did a track experience in Houston with a non car friend. He took out a Cayman GT4RS and was converted. I could see that happening. I took out a 488 GTB and he asked the question, what is better to buy used a car with 30,000 miles of street use or a car that has 30,000 miles of track use? Definitely street use. 30,000 track miles is a lot.

[Ross Bentley]

That's a lot of miles.

[Sam Smith]

It's like 90,000 street miles or more.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, I mean, we. What were the cars? The. The. And this is not to say anything about Ron, fellow school. The Corvette school is a great school and they maintain their cars really well. How many miles were on the car that you were lapping there?

[Zach Klapman]

I don't remember, but I think tens of thousands.

[Matt Farah]

Really? A lot. Yeah. Well, that's pretty good. But if you were, I mean, I.

[Ross Bentley]

Mean, the only thing I would add to that is it depends on how they were maintained, right?

[Matt Farah]

Sure.

[Zach Klapman]

I mean, well, they have 250 cars there. I mean, they rotate them in and out a lot. Yeah, I don't remember the miles, but it was thousands of miles because those cars are running all the time and sometimes they'll have three schools going at the same time every day for five days, seven days a week, actually.

[Matt Farah]

I mean, it would be pretty hard to find a 30,000 mile street car that is more wear and tear on it than a 30,000 mile track car. I mean, maybe if it's like in Boston, you know, year round salt, like horrible roads, that kind of thing. But if you're talking about a sports car, track miles are hard. Miles.

[Zach Klapman]

Yeah, we see miles a lot more often.

[Ross Bentley]

You know, if it's a track car that's got 30,000 miles, it's had new brakes, it's had new wheels. It's had new, like, it's had everything new, like throughout that. So yeah, hopefully, you know, the chassis might have 30,000 miles on it, the engine may have 30,000 miles. Who knows? It could have been a rebuilt. So I don't know, like, if you've got a car that's got all new running gear or been replaced on a regular basis, is that words?

[Matt Farah]

I'd probably buy a car from like the Porsche Experience center before I'd buy some dude's car that he just had been doing, you know, eight track weekends a year for 10 years.

[Zach Klapman]

I agree with that. But the trackies will always find the weakest link. And there's two stories from two manufacturers. We had a transmission grenade itself during my school on the Corvettes. And I've heard from people in the comments that some C8s are having problems with their transmissions due to track track use. And the Ron fellas, they said it doesn't happen a lot, but they also were like, yeah, okay, bring out another car. And then a friend of mine who is in the Porsche Club in Tampa who met you at a charity event, actually, he and his wife both have GT4 track cars. Both of them blew part of their PDK. I don't remember what part of it, but there is a weak link in the PDK that will go out after a certain amount of time is spent on track. So to your point, you know, the shop might replace those brake pads and everything else might be really new, but whatever is in that kind of deep part of the skeleton of that car might have a problem.

[Ross Bentley]

Right? I think it's the D part of the pdk. I think the D part, the P and the K are pretty good.

[Matt Farah]

Listen, we gotta talk about your D, Ross. Where can people find you most effectively if people want to ask, ask you for coaching?

[Ross Bentley]

Some airplane, no seat 34 D&C Tac. No. 21, row 21.

[Matt Farah]

Speedsecrets.com Speedsecrets.com is where it's at. Yep. Great. And you can read Sam's column monthly on the intercooler. You should spend five bucks a month on that. Might be five pounds, but whatever, it's five somethings.

[Zach Klapman]

Five units of Queen you want to listen to.

[Matt Farah]

You guys and the podcast is.

[Sam Smith]

Podcast is called it's not the Car. We spend most of our time talking about the weird, soft, fuzzy stuff that lives in your skull and how it impacts driving and racing and the people within the sport. Right. History and everything up and down and in and out about it. It's not the Car.com and Spotify, Apple, everywhere else.

[Zach Klapman]

It's a really good show.

[Matt Farah]

Thanks.

[Ross Bentley]

Sam keeps coming up with these really cool crazy ideas I do that. Jeff and I kind of look at each other and go really? We're going to talk about a 1927 land speed record car.

[Sam Smith]

Thank you, Ross. Now no one is going to listen to the show ever.

[Ross Bentley]

And it was one of the best episodes ever. And Jeff and I are like, oh, Sam, more of those kind. So yeah, all sorts of things from.

[Sam Smith]

Well, I mean the core is always like why we do what we do. And the one thing like the thing I love about anything that happens in racing, whether it's yesterday or 100 years ago ago, is that it always comes down to people under pressure making choices. And the people who make choices under pressure in the year 1924 on that episode was about a guy who died trying to break a land speed record on a beach in England because a chain all but decapitated him came off drive axle. Like that. Dude made a bunch of choices and believe it or not, like those choices and the feelings he had are real similar to what happens at Le Mans every June or your track day. Like it's all the same stuff and that's great.

[Ross Bentley]

I wasn't on this latest one but Sam and Jeff did one on cheating. Well, I've done a couple of them on cheating.

[Sam Smith]

Oh yeah, NASCAR cheating stories was great.

[Matt Farah]

Yeah, NASCAR cheating stories had a crew.

[Sam Smith]

Chief on from it. We do that. And another place you can find me is actually earlier this year I put out a book, 20 years of compilation of car writing. It's called Smithology. It's on Amazon. We do sell signed copies on the website but it's just everything I've done kind of condensed down to the best of it. And I don't know, it was weird.

[Matt Farah]

Quote, condensed. Condensed. It's like 350 pages.

[Ross Bentley]

Well, because that's best. I mean his stuff is awesome.

[Matt Farah]

Condensed as condensed can be for Sam.

[Sam Smith]

Figured you do it once, might as well swing the fences.

[Matt Farah]

My man. Thank you guys for stopping by.

[Ross Bentley]

Thank you very much.

[Matt Farah]

Appreciates it. Thanks to our patrons for such good questions. Remember when the ad model totally collapses, which is inevitable, much more so than electric cars are inevitable. Inevitable, right. That will be all that's left is all I'm saying. Eventually this will be a paywalled show when the ad model completely collapses. So you might as well be there now. It's better. Anyway, thanks for everyone to coming down. Today we've got is it tomorrow or the next day.

[Zach Klapman]

I think it's kids in tomorrow.

[Matt Farah]

Tomorrow Simon Kidston will be calling in from England. Rad. He's very cool. Yeah, he's got stories. It's going to be awesome. All right, we'll see you guys then. Bye.