President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously told us, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” One wonders if he would have held to that belief had he gotten a chance to wheel his ’39 Lincoln limousine through Turn 2 at Mosport or Road Atlanta’s Turn 12 foot-to-the-floor, downhill right-hander.

Point being, there’s a lot to fear on a racetrack. An incomplete list: Other drivers’ mistakes, your mistakes, mechanical failure, oil on the track, and ultimately, injury or even death. But in spite of the real dangers, the experts echo FDR. To drive a car at its limits, one must learn to control fear.

“If you are afraid, you don’t belong there,” says Mario Andretti. “Fear itself can be quite dangerous in the sense that it would make you tentative. A driver that’s tentative does a disservice to him- or herself.”

Science backs the veteran-racer bravado. “Driving is incredibly precise and very cognitive. When we get too activated, both those things deteriorate,” says Tom George, assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Michigan. Fear, George explains, triggers changes throughout the body—nerves tingle, muscles tense, the field of vision narrows. A certain amount of this stimulation is helpful. That’s why coaches sometimes yell at and threaten athletes. But too much makes you jerky, tense—the opposite of what’s needed to deliver the smooth, controlled inputs required for a fast lap.

Read the entire article on Road and Track by David Zenlea here: http://myumi.ch/Lql8W