Young drivers are never taught how to describe a car

Feedback is a coachable skill with its own vocabulary, and juniors arrive in professional paddocks with none of it.

It understeers. Two words, delivered over the radio, and the engineer now has to guess whether the driver means on entry, at the apex, on the throttle, in slow corners, only when the tyres are cold, or only when he is following somebody. The guess costs a run. Sometimes it costs a session.

Everyone in motorsport treats feedback as a talent you either have or do not. Some drivers are known as good communicators the way some are known as good in the wet. I think that is mostly an excuse for never teaching it, because it is plainly a skill with a structure, and the structure can be taught in a fortnight to a fifteen year old in a kart.

The structure is roughly this. Where in the corner, which phase, which axle, on what input, and how repeatable. Five slots. A driver who fills all five gives an engineer something to work with. The car pushes on entry to the slow left, the front goes away as soon as I add steering with the brake still on, every lap, worse after three laps. That sentence contains a setup direction. It understeers does not.

The counterargument from the engineering side is that a young driver's perception is unreliable, that what he thinks is the front is often the rear stepping out gently and being caught without him noticing, and that too much structure in the vocabulary just makes confident nonsense sound credible. That is a fair worry. It argues for cross checking against data, which happens anyway, and it does not argue for leaving him inarticulate.

The place to teach it is in the sim, where you can deliberately build a car with one specific problem, hand it to the driver blind, and ask him to name it. Do that thirty times and he learns the map between sensation and cause. That is a training programme any junior team could run for the price of the seat time it already buys.

Almost none of them do. Then the driver reaches a professional team, cannot explain the car, and gets described as fast but hard to work with.

He was never taught the words.