How To Drive: The perfect lap

I’m not sure the perfect lap actually exists. I suspect even the great Ayrton Senna would have admitted quietly – and perhaps only to himself – that no lap is ever 100 per cent perfect. There’s always somewhere you can brake half a foot later, get on the power one quarter of a tenth earlier, rotate the car more accurately into the apex, and so it goes on. Perfection is something that’s much talked about but rarely attained on a track, if ever. Even by the best of best.

So for us mere mortals to work out how to put, let’s say, a tidy lap together, you need first to be truly comfortable with and aware of your own abilities. And, more importantly, your personal limitations, whatever they might be. You need to be real about what’s achievable and realise that however hard you think you can go, you can always push harder. Always. The skill lies in working out where and when to do so, and where not to do so in order to avoid it all going horribly wrong.

You also need to have a pretty good knowledge of whatever track you’re trying to put the lap together on, and know the idiosyncrasies of whatever car you’re driving inside out.