[Ivan Helmrich]

Practice, practice, practice. The biggest improvement I've seen in our drivers over the past few years is the amount and quality of practice they have been getting.

Once they get reasonably proficient, we start practicing with a stop watch. They repeat cycles over and over, looking for small things they can do to shave fractions of a second off any individual action. We have someone log times on a white board as they go. We also take data about our success rate of individual actions so we know how effective we really are. We look for consistency over many trials. This both improves their driving, because they can see that every action they do has measurable results, and instills in them the idea that practice really has benefits.

This also helps with strategy discussions because the drivers already have tried so many different approaches to the game challenges that they can evaluate proposals from other teams. They have become more confident in their own abilities and won't take on approaches that they know they can't accomplish. We try not to burn bridges by overstating what we can do on the field.