Have Fun. Go Faster.

The counter intuitive secret to breaking through your plateau at the track.

She had been at it for four years. Four years of track days, four years of debriefs, four years of instructors telling her she needed to go faster. She was done.

When she reached out to me, the message was clear: she’d tried everything, nobody was actually helping her improve, and she was ready to quit performance driving altogether.

Before I said a word about technique or lap times, I asked her one question: Why did you start doing this in the first place?

She paused. Then: “Because it was fun. Because it was exciting and unlike anything else I’d ever done.”

“When’s the last time it felt that way?”

She couldn’t remember. Her instructor’s focus on telling her to go faster had drained every ounce of fun out of her driving.

Step 1 — Turn Off the Lap Timer

We went out together and I gave her one job: ignore the data. Then I asked which corners she actually enjoyed. Turn 1 at Watkins Glen came up immediately — she loved it even if she wasn’t fully confident in it. I told her: next time you nail it, yell “OH YEAH!” as loud as you can. Not think it. Yell it.

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. She did it anyway. Something shifted.

Step 2 — Find the Next Corner to Love

I pointed her toward Turn 10. It’s got a lot of camber — commit to the right line and the track grabs the car and slingshots it through. When she got it right, I wanted to hear her from the pit lane.

She came through and I did hear her. A full “OH YEAH!” She’d found another corner to love.

Step 3 — Laugh, Then Go Solo

We did several laps after that — laughing, yelling, celebrating the good ones. The tension that comes from trying too hard, from being watched, from chasing a number, started to dissolve. In its place: presence.

Then I sent her out alone with three rules only: no lap timing, yell loud enough that I could hear her from the side of the track, and have fun.

She came in beaming — then sheepish. “I screwed up,” she said.

“I turned on the lap timer.”

I told her that was a serious infraction. She laughed — then said it wasn’t all bad. She’d done a lot of screaming and celebrating. She’d fallen in love with Turn 10. And then, after a long pause: “I set multiple personal bests in that session.”

I told her yes, she’d definitely screwed up — but that with enough practice at having fun, she might just recover.

“She wasn’t slow because she lacked talent. She was slow because she’d stopped being present — and she’d stopped being present because nobody had given her permission to enjoy herself.”

The Framework: Fun First, Speed Second

In years of coaching — from first-time HPDE students to club racers — this is one of the most consistent patterns I’ve seen. Drivers who plateau aren’t usually missing a technical piece. They’re missing joy. Here’s the sequence:

1. Rediscover the fun. Go back to the beginning. Why did you start? Which corners feel good? Find those moments deliberately.
2. Reinforce the fun. Celebrate good laps out loud. Build a feedback loop around what’s working, not just what went wrong.
3. Find more fun. Expand it. The corner you love — find the next one. Build a relationship with the track built on enjoyment, not just execution.
4. Keep celebrating. As you get faster, resist the urge to immediately raise the bar. The fun is the fuel — protect it.
5. Drive faster. Speed is the byproduct, not the target. When you’re relaxed and genuinely enjoying what you’re doing, your inputs clean up, your vision goes further, and the lap times fall — almost without trying.

Performance driving is hard. It requires real concentration, discipline, and skill. But it also started, for almost everyone, with a moment of pure exhilaration. If you’ve lost that feeling, getting faster isn’t the answer. Getting the fun back is.

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The Science Behind Fun

The coaching approach above isn’t just intuition — it maps directly onto well-established psychology and neuroscience research.

Emotional Imprinting Strengthens Motor Memory

Research published in Frontiers in Psychology (Tyng et al., 2017) shows that emotional arousal during learning significantly enhances long-term memory retention. The amygdala amplifies encoding in the hippocampus — meaning a corner you feel something about gets wired in more durably than one you merely execute. Positive emotional context was specifically shown to improve memory reinstatement in a 2025 Journal of Neuroscience study (Pan et al.).

Sources: Tyng et al. — Frontiers in Psychology  |  Pan et al. — Journal of Neuroscience (2025)

Positive Emotions Improve Athletic Performance

A systematic review and meta-analysis in PLOS One (2025) found that psychological factors including positive emotions have a meaningful association with sports performance — enhancing motivation, attention, self-efficacy, and problem-solving. A separate review specifically on well-being and sport found that pleasant emotional states consistently correlate with better performance outcomes.

Sources: Psychological factors & sport — PLOS One  |  Well-being & sport performance — NIH/PMC

Laughter Reduces Cortisol and Unlocks Flow

A 2023 meta-analysis in PLOS One (Kramer & Leitao) covering 315 participants found that spontaneous laughter reduced cortisol levels by an average of 32% — with even a single session producing a 37% reduction. Lower cortisol means less tension, better motor control, and more cognitive bandwidth. Flow state research (Csikszentmihalyi; Harris et al., 2021) consistently links intrinsic enjoyment as the primary gateway into flow — the state where athletes report everything clicking and performance peaking.

Sources: Laughter & cortisol — PLOS One (2023)  |  Flow states & performance — meta-analysis

The screaming and laughing wasn’t a gimmick. It was neuroscience with a helmet on.

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