Driving a car at these insane speeds takes more concentration than you would normally use on a daily basis. It takes an incredible amount of focus, all of it intuitive, not thought based. At the speeds I’m driving, covering almost two football fields per second, there is no time for regular thought-to-action type of behavior. By the time you are made aware that something needs to be done and your brain tells a part of your body to take action, it’s too late. In other words, by the time you think it, it’s too late. Every action has to be reflexive and automatic, without conscious thought as we know it. Counting gears takes conscious thought, and I have not found a way to have both conscious thought and intuitive thought at 366 MPH.
Example: Your vision is transmitted to your brain via two channels; the 3º of vision that you focus on, that you think about, and the other 177º that are peripheral, that is intuitive and takes no conscious thought. Take a look at an object in front of you. What you are looking at, in actuality focusing on and thinking about takes up approximately 3º of your vision. All the rest of the stuff in front of you, which takes up 177º of your peripheral vision is still streaming into your brain, but you’re not thinking about it. Yet if something were to happen in that 177º of vision you would react to it, which means your brain is aware of it, but your conscious mind is not.
This is why when you drive to work, you can look down, tune in a radio station, dig for the pen that fell under the seat, and then when you finally look ahead you say to yourself; “man, I looked away for a long time there but I’m still going in the same direction. Whew”
Well, what was happening there [ and you know it's happened to you many times, it's happened to us all and will continue to happen as long as we drive at such incredibly slow speeds ] is that your brain drove the car based on inputs from your peripheral vision. And you didn’t have to think about it while you were digging for that pen, or tuning the radio, or whatever. You drove your car intuitively based on peripheral inputs you didn’t have to consciously think about.
That in essence is what you need to do, consciously, at 366 MPH, while staring straight ahead. For me, in order to get to that state, I had to finally stop looking at emails and taking phone calls for hours before I was to drive. You have to have confidence in yourself and your team. You absolutely must believe in yourself and your team, or it won’t work.
