Carroll Smith (1932–2003) was a successful professional race car driver, engineer, and author.
Planning, evaluation, reasoning and establishing prioritites are all more important than brilliance - either behind the wheel or at the drawing board.
The necessary fiddling about and moving things can be greatly facilitated by a bit of forethought.
Until we have established reliability there is no sense at all in wasting time trying to make the thing go faster.
Knowledge and ideas tend to be a bit like experience - nice, but not necessarily useful. Clear thinking, logical priorities and the ability to reason will beat bright ideas and unassisted experience everytime.
We normally learn at least as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. The best development driverengineer I ever knew once told me that he reckoned that about 20% of his bright ideas worked.
He who understands, as always, can make his car work better than he who does not.
The visibility at the best of times is liable to be a bit haxy due to clouds of ignorance.
Nothing good has ever been written about the full rotation of a racecar about its roll axis.
There are lots of people out there who prefer tinkering to winning - it gives them a good excuse.
Balance, or drivability, and the ability to accelerate while cornering are more important than maximum cornering power - every time. Until you reach teh top levels of professional motor racing you will achieve more results by optimizing the package that you have than by redesigning it.
In order to win, you have to be aggressive - with your car, with the racetrack, and with the competition. But you don't have to be stupid about it.
If you have complete control over the damned thing, you're not going fast enough.
Nothing is ever in such short supply at a race track as time. It doesn't seem to matter whether we are at the track for a race meeting or for testing - there is never enough time.
Horsepower sells motorcars and torque wins motor races.
You must learn to define the problem before you attempt to cure it.
The price for men in motion is the occasional collision.
The racing driver needs to be fed a diet of other racing drivers.
At some point in every racer's life he has to make his peace with cheating. I do not approve of cheating. . . at all. Of course, like every successful racer, I differentiate between taking advantage of loopholes in the regulations, stretching the grey areas and outright cheating. In any given racing series I will not start the cheating. If someone else starts it, I will appeal to them and to the officials to stop it. If my efforts do not succeed, then I'll show them how it is done.
There are many different types of prioritites in Motor Racing, the first. . . being how much you are willing to sacrifice in order to get to where you want to go.