OK mate.. It's Hammer time!

Approaching life situations like a F1 Qualifying Lap: 

I am an avid fan of Formula 1 racing. Some of my friends do ask me from time to time on what is so special about it? 'Tel fukaai' (meaning useless burning of fuel) is what a very dear friend calls it to be :) Well, yes these cars need lot of fuel. Others ask me  'hmm... what is the fun in watching cars go around in circles?'. To this question, I imagine myself shouting some swear words in response but in reality I just smile and politely say 'Oh.. there is a lot more to it. You will get it once you start watching' :)

There are lot of things I have observed in F1 and continue to do so - there are lot of things that fascinate as well as inspire me:

Formula 1 is a team sport. It is all about striving for perfection and maximizing performance. Small things matter, period! And I have seen no other sport where the focus is on everyone within the team to perform to the limit. Its not just the Driver but all the mechanics, engineers, pit-crew and strategists. What you see on the outside is just one person driving the car but there is a huge body of work that is performed before the car is brought out to the track.

Rather than dwell into details of preparation - let us stay in context of the title of this post. Let's focus on the race weekend. The Teams arrive at the venue by Wednesday or Thursday. They assemble the car and put it out on track on friday for something called as 'Practice 1'. That's when the driver puts in lots of laps with the car. The team tries out lot of different configurations on the car eg they adjust the angle of front and rear-wings. They also adjust the height of floor, front and rear suspensions, gear-ratios and many more things and gather lots of data about how the car is behaving. They then do two more such sessions to gather more data and analyze it to figure out the most optimal settings for the car and get it ready for Qualifying Session for Saturday.

F1 Qualifying Session is the critical stage that pretty much sets the scene for the race. The drivers get to take their car around the circuit within a specified time period and clock fastest lap that they can. The fastest guy gets to start the race on Sunday at first position (also called as P1), the second-fastest at P2 so on and so forth.

The Drivers need to put in everything for getting the perfect time in any Qualifying session. If you have ever tried running a timed-lap on a computer/video/ps2/xbox game, you will know that every small thing matters - the racing line, braking at the corners, gear shifts at right time etc.

The drivers receive lot of psychological training to deal with stress and yet maintain focus. Among other things they are trained to shut-out everyone and everything whenever they want to. For some drivers, the trigger to shut out the noise is when the seat-belt is fastened - they train their mind to respond to the 'click' noise and as soon as they hear it, they get in 'race-mode' and are not distracted by anything anymore.

Above was a small insight into Formula 1 Qualifying. At this point, let us now jump to our lives and the situations that we deal with. Just like in Formula 1 Qualifying, our ability to succeed in real-life depends on lot of seemingly small things that most of us conveniently choose to ignore. The list of 'small things' is unique from one situation to the other and is not the topic for this post.

F1 drivers approach the qualifying lap as if that is the only chance that they will ever get to make it right. Do you approach your matters with that attitude as well - 'its either now or never'? Wouldn't it make things more exciting if we were to do that? I think it will and it does too. Spend some time thinking over this.

Going with 'its either now or never' has its challenges too. How to handle when things do not go to our liking? Well, since we are comparing with F1, lets see how do the drivers handle when they happen to make a mistake. Whenever the driver makes a mistake e.g. he overshoots the braking point or locks up wheel while braking, his engineer would immediately come on radio and say something like 'OK <drive name>, we are going to give it one more try' and then possibly calls him to the pit to tweak the car and put it back on track for one more attempt of driving flat-out. The drivers go to the track again in 'its either now or never' mode and give it everything that they have.

Just like F1 drivers, all of us also have our 'race-engineer'. For F1 drivers, the race-engineer sits on the pit-wall where as for us, he sits inside our head :). Our 'race-engineer' is the voice that helps us put back on track when we are feeling down - especially when we have put in 100% into something, when we have gone ALL IN but we don't get the desired outcome.

For situations in my life where I go ALL IN and put in everything but still face disappointment, my 'race-engineer' usually tells me 'OK Gaurav, return to the pit please. We will give it one more go... We will give it one more go' and after making the tweaks he then tells me 'Alright mate... its hammer time... you are GO for this lap'. I listen to my 'race-engineer' and subsequently make one more attempt. Sometimes, though, my race-engineer also advises 'sorry mate, we need to abort this - there are far too many problems - we cannot continue'.Knowing when to give-up is also as important and your race-engineer will advise you suitably - listen to him! :)

Are these attitudes of  'its either now or never' and going 'ALL IN', healthy choices? Don't they add up more stress? Well, certainly not all situations demand this mode. But for the ones that do, my 'race-engineer' makes life very exciting to live :)

I will end this post by quoting the most famous radio message from F1 2015 Season:

OK Lewis... it's hammer time!