Many drivers think speed comes from heroic courage, big corrections, or braking later and harder. That belief leads to dramatic driving filled with aggressive inputs, busy hands, cooked tires and inconsistent lap times. If you watch the fastest of the fast, especially the ones who make it look too easy, you’ll notice something surprising. They don’t appear to be working all that hard. They’re practicing arbitrage to find hidden advantages that other drivers don’t notice.
What is Driving Arbitrage?
Arbitrage means taking advantage of a mismatch that others don’t notice, finding speed where others leave it on the table. In finance, it’s buying something cheap in one place and selling it for more somewhere else, like buying a case of Coke at Costco and reselling it on a hot beach.
In driving, arbitrage means finding speed where others aren’t looking or leaving it on the table. It’s not about pushing harder, but rather finding places where attention, effort or knowledge is mismatched between drivers. You can be in the same car on the same tires but have wildly different results by exploiting small differences.
Vision Arbitrage: Seeing Earlier Than Others
Many drivers get “tunnel vision” and fixate straight ahead, looking where the car is. Fast drivers look where the car will be. When you get ahead of the car mentally, everything slows down and decisions become easier. Inputs get cleaner and mistakes decrease. This isn’t about talent, either, but about bandwidth. Drivers who deliberately practice vision free up mental capacity, and that capacity translates into speed.
Drill: Change Your Focal Points by Scanning Ahead
- Before every braking zone, notice if you’re fixating straight ahead. Is your head aimed forward, eyes trying to figure out when to start braking? If so, catch yourself and get those eyes up.
- Force yourself to look beyond your brake marker and glance forward to your end-of-braking point — just for a split second. Predict where you need to be when you start releasing the brake pedal and start turning in.
- Then, try to locate the apex — even if you are just looking “through” a blind corner — glance for a split second.
- Last, try to glance at the exit, even if you can’t see it. Visualize the path your car must take to arrive at the exit point you are seeking.
You can do this on any winding road or curvy freeway, too. I do it all the time when driving, forcing myself to follow steps 1-4 and being especially diligent about catching myself if I’m zoning out and staring at the car directly in front of me.
Brake-Release Arbitrage: Where Most Drivers Lose Time
Ask drivers what they’re working on, and you’ll hear a lot about braking later or harder. Almost no one talks about how they come off the brake pedal.
Novices tend to brake too lightly at first from street-driving habits. “Intermediates” tend to stab the brakes hard, then abruptly release them. The front tires lose load suddenly, the car resists turning, and more steering gets added to compensate.
Fast drivers treat brake release like gently turning a knob rather than flipping a switch. The release is gradual, with an ever-more-gradual tapering off at the end, creating a “long tail” of brake pressure that keeps just a hint of weight on the nose of the car. Stay on the brakes just long enough to keep the front tires engaged as the car obediently carves to the apex.
Throttle Arbitrage: Steering With Your Feet
In a road car at grocery-getting speeds, the steering wheel is the primary tool for changing direction. On the track, though, the throttle often has more influence than the wheel, especially once the car is loaded into a corner. The arbitrage comes from steering less with your hands and more with your feet.
By lifting slightly in a corner, load shifts forward and the car wants to turn more. By squeezing the throttle, the car pushes a bit wider, all while holding the steering wheel fixed. Drivers who understand this end up steering less. Their hands are quieter because their feet are doing more of the work, dancing on the throttle to adjust the car’s attitude.
Focus on steering more with your right foot. Less steering angle means less tire scrub, better balance, and sharper exits, all without trying harder with your hands.
Input Arbitrage: Being Less Busy in the Cockpit
Fast driving need not look busy. In rally driving or drifting – yes. In road-course driving – not so much. Speed comes from input economy, which means using the fewest, cleanest inputs possible with the fewest corrections.
“Busy” drivers often overlap commands aggressively: braking while steering assertively, stabbing throttle before the car is settled, constantly causing mistakes and correcting them.
VIDEO
Before the 2025 NASA Championships had come to a close, lots of lap records had fallen, but none more significant than the smooth TTU lap logged by NASA Great Lakes driver Jonathan Finstrom. Finstrom set the new overall track record at Ozarks International Raceway at 2:08.639, some 2 seconds quicker than the Formula Atlantic car that once held the record.
Fast drivers artfully blend inputs and emphasize one main input at a time. They focus on adding one input while subtracting another. For example, when exiting a corner, as throttle increases, steering must decrease, also known as “unwinding” the wheel. The same goes for corner entry: As you gradually reduce brake pressure by trail-braking, you can gradually increase the steering. Think of it as an inverse relationship between your feet and hands. More hands requires less feet, and vice versa.
The arbitrage occurs from the delicate blend of your inputs, by not overdoing two things at any one time, by doing less of one thing as you do more of another, smoothly mixing the two inputs together.
Tire-Management Arbitrage: Play the Long Game
Lots of drivers can be fast for one lap, but suffer during the long game. Fast racers play arbitrage by sacrificing a hint of speed early to come on strong at the end. Drivers who push too hard early in a race or push too hard on every lap of a TT, often spend the rest of the session chasing grip that already evaporated.
Meanwhile, the driver who stayed just under the absolute limit suddenly looks like the hero. The arbitrage comes from understanding that grip is a finite resource, and activating too much slip angle in the tires causes them to overheat and become “greasy.” Every tire requires some degree of “slip angle” to turn. The tires must stretch, just enough, to compensate for the lateral loads applied during a turn. They “dig” into the pavement, but if you ask them to dig too much, and stretch too much, they’ll scream in protest, start sliding, force a correction and overheat.
VIDEO
NASA Northeast Time Trial 5 driver Nathan Young shows how it’s done on the Thunderbolt course at New Jersey Motorsports Park in June. Young lays down a nice smooth lap using every last square foot of racing surface in his S2000, tripping the official lap timer at 1:28.939, which was good enough for the TT5 win at the NASA Northeast June Jam event.
The fastest drivers feel the tire stretching and flexing, just at the precipice of outright sliding. They stay just inside the comfort zone until they need to pounce at the end of a race.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to drive harder to drive faster. You need to drive smarter. Every lap is full of small mismatches between what the car can do and what the driver is asking of it. Learn to spot those gaps, and speed starts to show up without exerting more effort. That’s arbitrage. Same car and track. Less effort, but more speed.
Good article. As an HPDE driver I sometimes feel like I need to drive harder and more aggressively to lower my lap times. I’ll be working on keeping my eyes up and driving more smoothly. This article makes a lot of sense.
Don’t forget left foot steering as a way to turn the car, while using less steering input.
A series of VERY gentle left foot brush/taps on the brake will progressively walk the car nose tighter in to the apex, like in T8 8A at Sears.