An Agile Approach to Motor Racing

I remember going to an Agile conference in London in 2017 where Belinda Waldock talked about how she'd used the Scrum framework to write her book. Recently, it occurred to me that I could take some of the things I loved about Agility and Scrum and apply those to my Karting career. After a bit of thought, I decided that I wanted to take the 3 pillars of Scrum - transparency, inspection and adaption and apply them to racing. It seemed clear to me that using data would help me improve - it works for my engineers after all.

The first challenge was to collect some data. In hire karts, there's practically nothing available so I had to invest a lot of time into collecting it myself - racing once a month, it took me about 6 months to get a reliable setup using a GoPro Silver, my iPhone 6 and a Dual GPS receiver I got second hand on eBay. Using these I was able to record video as well as speed, position on track, steering and acceleration. Through an app on my phone I could superimpose the data onto the video and through a separate desktop app I could use proper data, collected at race tracks to analyse my performance - directly comparing the data from one lap overlaid on to another. What was so good about my fastest lap - what had I done differently? What was the affect of changing my braking point in a particular corner? Now I could answer those questions. I'm using empirical data to drive continual improvement in my driving.

One of the first problems I identified in my racing was an inconsistency in my preparation for a meeting. As we already now, great engineering teams are built on discipline and great racing drivers are no different. How to enforce discipline in my preparation? The same way as with an engineering team - I wrote myself both a Definition of Ready and a Definition of Done. As you can see below, they're pretty simple but they get the job done - just like the ones we use with engineering teams. I keep them in a template in Notion along with other notes so I can cross them off as they're done.

For the transparency pillar I decided that I'd share what I learned at each meeting through the normal social channels as well as my website: https://www.dougidleracing.co.uk. By writing it down I would show others what I was doing and could also hold myself to account. I'd also share race replays from the GoPro and, later from my PS4 with a detailed commentary on my website.

Another item I borrowed from Scrum was the idea of the retrospective. I treated every race meeting as an iteration and retrospected on it. Sometimes I used a simple method - other times I went a bit more funky like my story cube retro. By looking at each meeting soon after it ended I could use both the data and how I felt about it to change how I drove. And yes, each retrospective resulted in a set of actions that I had to carry out.

In February I decided to take part in Racing Mentors #FastFeb. It was a guided set of social media posts designed to increase engagement across the various platforms. One particular day, the topic was brand. I started to think about what my brand was when it came to racing. I struggled to define it initially until I came back to the Agile Manifesto.... so I wrote my own manifesto for racing.

Not content with that I wrote my own set of principles too. I couldn't drag it out to 12 so 9 will have to do!

At the end of the championship season I looked at the data provided by the circuits I'd raced at and used the data to try and define how I had improved over the season and establish some KPIs that I could use to measure performance for the 2020 season. There was a lot of number crunching involved but was immensely satisfying to see the improvement in my driving as indisputable facts.

Following my approach I've seen my performances improve massively. When I started, I was qualifying at my local track, Bayford Meadows in Kent, around p10. A year later and with a lot of data and hard work behind me I am consistently qualifying in the top 3 although I have yet to bag a pole position. My finishing positions are similar - no wins yet but more than a few P3s.

Since the lockdown I've been doing a lot of sim-racing on my PS4 on Gran Turismo. There's a limited amount of data available on the platform but it has helped to keep my hand in. I've loved driving that Corvette around some of the greatest tracks in the world and it has started me thinking about sponsorship and taking my journey further. Perhaps one day I can drive a real Corvette around Le Mans as a gentleman driver rather than just on my PS4?

If you read this far - then thanks! For more information and content my racing journey can be followed on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/dougidleracing/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/dougidleracing/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkpaZfcdZg7Hfn1DMkgW_w) as well as my website https://www.dougidleracing.co.uk.