EDIT- Sorry about the manifesto length… once I get started talking about racing it’s hard to stop. 
Try not to worry too much about ‘results’ because you only have partial control over how any race will go.
It’s pace relative to the winner on any given day that is important. So, my question is how long did it take
you to get to your current pace. For example, did you hop in the kart and boom, you were running the times you run now, or did it take a couple of weekends, or half the season, or ?
Were you able to consolidate these experiences and make them a consistent part of your driving?
I’m asking YOU! 
The “it takes a decent amount of time for me…” observation is a thread that is begging to be pulled.
Elias, you are clearly a very intelligent and analytical young man, but you can only go so far calculating your way around the track. Your feelings (what you feel when driving) contains the information you need to advance, but often, very intellectual people are distrustful of such ‘feelings’ because they can’t be understood or quantified.
Driving, at it’s essence, is a game of two things: Information Processing, and Energy Management.
Intellect can influence many things like:
- Your plan for getting around each turn
- What sensations you pay attention to, when, and to what depth
- How you correlate ‘feelings’ to meaning; e.g. this sensation = not quite at the limit, but THIS sensation = heading over the limit.
However, intellect cannot function in the hear & now with the type of bandwidth needed to gather the huge amount of data from a moment on track, distill that data into useful ‘information’, and interpret what that information means relative to your objectives for that particular location on the track.
Anyway, the point is, to be a really good driver, you must plan with your intellect, and use it to manage (or be the conductor of) the driving process, but the actual ‘driving’ must be done with your feelings or heart, or whatever you want to call it. If you can’t feel ‘it’, or what you are feeling is incomprehensible to you, or has a negative association, then that is your limiting factor for performance.
The good news is that if you understand the driving process, then you can pull the threads your sensations/feelings/experience provide, and you can start to understand what’s happening, and then you can use your intellect for what it excels at… reprogramming your driving process.
Back to the actual issue “it takes a decent amount of time for me…”; if this were my situation I would approach it something like this:
- I would recognize, and acknowledge internally, that this is a big issue that I must/will fix. (This calls the various board of director roles in your head together and lets them know “This is IMPORTANT to me, so FIX IT NOW!”)
- How do you fix it? Find out what’s going on… what changes over the course of a weekend… ask your feelings.
- Does my mental model of the track decay between races… do I forget where the track goes and what I should be feeling? If so, imagery training… drive laps in your head with a stopwatch. Train this way until you can turn laps within a second of your real lap times.
- Do I feel overwhelmed when driving at the beginning of weekends, and gradually mentally settle into the ‘rhythm’ of driving over the weekend?
- Is my resolution of feel for forces and traction lower than at the end of the previous race weekend, and if so, is it lower in breadth, depth, or both?
- Do I start the weekend with low confidence, or questioning my ability, or other negative thoughts?
- And so on…
- This is getting so long, I have to stop here, but basically, whatever you discover (whatever feels like it is the problem, or the biggest contributer) from step 2, you work on fixing. The fix can be as easy as mental laps with a stopwatch, or mentally recognizing and editing negative self talk, to something that requires a bit more work.
This is actually something intellect is really good at, and is a really good exercise in getting your intellect and feeling/hear to work together. For example, let’s say you notice you are consistently turning in early for a particular turn. Before you can fix it, you have to understand why… is it a plan problem, a data processing problem, or a physical driving/energy management problem. Once you know what needs to be changed, and you know how the wrong version felt, then just use your intellect to ‘calculate’, and your ‘feelings’ to simulate, what you would feel if you made the change and drove the way you want.
For, example, let’s say you thought you were turning at the correct point, but after reviewing the video, you now you think it would be better to turn 4’ later, so things you would need to consider for your calculated simulation would be:
- Do I need to brake a bit later to have the same energy/speed at my new turn-in point. If so, ask your feelings, how will that feel… what will feel different?
- If I’m turning later (and aiming for the same apex), then how will that influence how loads will build on the outside front tire, and how will that influence lift of the inside rear tire.
- How will the change in tire loadings influence the kart’s yaw rotation location and intensity… will I also need to adjust when and/or how hard I get on the throttle to check the rotation.
- And, how will all the previous changes influence my line/trajectory through the exit phase of the turn.
Once your intellect and feelings have worked together to mock-up the change you want to make, then you just close your eyes and imagine it… ask your intellect to ‘roll’ the simulation and your feelings to let you experience it. I know that sounds crazy or dumb, but that’s just how it works for me… it really is just that easy.
