Make all the mistakes now to be ready for 2027. Hadjar said it to RacingNews365, and he says that’s the mindset of the whole team. I read that and I recognise my method. It’s called a test session.
So I applied it. This morning, my room in Genk, cockpit taking up seventy per cent of it, Spa on the base setup. Objective: make every mistake. Every one. I braked too late at La Source, too early at Les Combes, took the Pouhon apex a metre too far inside, missed the bus stop chicane twice. Reset, reset.
The problem is that after an hour I had no new mistakes left. I was repeating the same ones. Result of the last lap: four tenths quicker than the first. See, learning works.
Verstappen talks about a steep learning curve and says things are already going much better than at the start of the season. That’s exactly my curve from this morning, except his lasts a season and mine lasted a morning.
The difference, in real life, is that they can’t reset. A mistake on track means the pit wall, the mechanics, the data, people watching. Too many variables. In the sim, a mistake costs three seconds of loading.
At the post, a mistake isn’t reset. It is logged.
Red Bull keeps the same two drivers in 2027, the team announced it this week. They’ll have the whole season to finish the list. I finished mine before lunch. All that’s left is to send the file to the team. The job of sim driver exists, I checked. In theory.
It’s true, we checked: RacingNews365.
