Welcome to The Intelligent Driver!

A resource for track-day, HPDE, club, historic and entry level pro sports car drivers stressing the best execution of fundamental skills.

This is The Intelligent Driver, a Substack website and collection of writings and illustrations sharing best practices learned over nearly forty years of working with tens of thousands of drivers.

As a full-time professional instructor and coach, one that focuses one-hundred per cent on helping drivers drive the best they can, I’ve leveraged driver performance measurement technology to quantify what makes drivers fast, safe and smooth.

Private instruction and coaching is now nearly ubiquitous, but it wasn’t seventeen years ago. That was when I sold my Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and historic racing preparation shop and team to plunge full-time into providing private, professional coaching to HPDE and club racing drivers.

I had included that service for more than a decade and a half along with racing and track car preparation, transport and support, as a “package.” When I had an opportunity to explore a new career after the sales of the business, I chose what I had found to be most rewarding in all that I had done previously, working one-on-one with drivers and working with tens of thousands of drivers as a classroom instructor for dozens of marque clubs, racing organizations and professional schools in the US.

My best friend, when he found out my plans, suggested I’d lost my mind and that it would be “a hard sell” to charge people to convey the same information they could get from a car club volunteer at any one of the hundreds of driving schools run every year within an easy drive from central North Carolina, for free! He had a point…

In the beginning, it was not very lucrative, but I had hung my hat on the emerging technology to measure speed, track position, driver “line,” braking and throttle performance and execution that could provide an OBJECTIVE measure of what was going on inside the car, not just my (nor anyone else’s) opinion.

In 2009, Tiger Woods, often cited as one of the greatest golfers of all time, let loose in an interview that he had a “coach.” The coach turned out to be his caddy. An uproar followed. How could the GOAT in golfing be effectively coached by some duffer caddy?

Woods did a good job explaining that he benefitted from another point of view, through review of his performance with another studied colleague, he was able to find more improvement than he could working on his own. All of a sudden, coaching was a “thing.” A desirable thing, at that.

My phone started ringing off the hook, and business accelerated quickly to between 180 and 200 days on the road for the next decade, working at tracks throughout North America with thousands of clients, including several 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Daytona winners and dozens of SCCA, PCA Club Racing, BMWCCA Club Racing and NASA National Champions.

Since just before the pandemic, I’ve stopped traveling and work only a few days a month with drivers at my commercial facility at VIRginia International Raceway. This, along with a few dozen remote data/video coaching evaluation and assessment consultations a month using cloud sharing and providing lengthy reports and prioritized opportunities for improvement, has allowed me more time to do this, reflect and write about a subject truly near and dear to my heart.

The art and science of high performance driving. Always enhanced by being the most Intelligent Driver you can be.

Thank you for signing up and coming along.