Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:00:06] Mark Boudreau: You're listening to the Motorsport Prospects Podcast.
Hey, it's Mark from Motorsport Prospects and welcome to the Motorsport Prospects podcast. This is where we dive into the world of motorsport with the people who live and breathe it. From driver coaches and sponsorship experts, to team owners, pro drivers and more. You'll hear real stories, practical advice and insights you can actually use, whether you're just starting out or already chasing success on the track.
Now, if you've been listening to this podcast, you know, and I bring this up all the time, but it's important. The reason I found in Motorsport Prospects and the Verified by Motorsport Prospects designation is I continuously hear both from aspiring drivers, from independent drivers, from their parents, from their advisors, everybody in that ecosystem. The question's always, who can I trust? They're never sure who they can quite trust with their money and their career. So I created Motorsport Prospects to help them make informed decisions. The professionals I feature on this podcast represent that trust.
These are the professionals that are setting the bar for what Motorsport Prospects is all about.
So if you work with drivers or racing teams, building trust clearly is one of the most important things you can do. Over the years, I've found that being clear about what you offer, following through on your promises, and genuinely caring about your clients goals makes all the difference. I put together some practical advice and a free white paper called the Three Essentials for Motorsport Business Owners, which share simple ways to strengthen relationships, attract the right clients and grow your motorsport business. Now naturally, you can find it in the show Notes or@motorsport prospects.com so let's get started with this week's guest.
My guest today is Jim Leo. Jim is the founder and CEO of pitfit, an internationally renowned company focusing on motorsports, human performance and safety. They are a pioneer in the human performance side of motorsports and they support some of the most well known drivers in teams worldwide.
Welcome to the Motorsport Prospects Podcast. Jim, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.
[00:02:18] Jim Leo: Great, Mark, great to be on here.
[00:02:20] Mark Boudreau: Now, you have extensive motorsport experience with pitfit and I've even seen you do things literally in the pits with drivers.
And I remember Robbie Wickens in particular.
So based on your experience, what would be the one most important piece of advice you could offer a current or aspiring race driver?
[00:02:49] Jim Leo: You know, it's a good question. I think it's a, it's a very broad question and when you kind of presented this to me, I could obviously you could ask that question of various different professionals in this field and they could provide whatever's in their Background along with what they feel might be another background. You know, my background is in human performance, so I kind of want to stay in that wheelhouse for the most part.
[00:03:14] Mark Boudreau: Yep.
[00:03:14] Jim Leo: I mean, you know, I think the thing that's important for young drivers is to basically train your brain and your body to perform under stress, to get specific. That's a critical element of what we do here.
You know, racing isn't about being good when you're fresh. It's. It's about being elite when you're fatigued. Right.
And so, okay, a lot of drivers, they focus on their skill actually driving the car. And, you know, that's, that's, that's not my background. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tell you about hitting apexes and, and, and, you know, brake application and cornering and such.
There's plenty of great driver coaches out there that we, you know, we use a lot of them, as a matter of fact, and we farm these questions out to those people.
[00:04:01] Mark Boudreau: Right.
[00:04:02] Jim Leo: But I think, you know what, Too many drivers focus on the skill of driving alone.
Everyone can drive. Right. The reason you got into racing is because you like to race cars. There's no question about it. You know, how to drive, how good you are.
That's up to speculation, I guess. But what separates the best is their ability to make precise decisions, maintain vision, and kind of execute flawlessly. When their heart rate is elevated, the forearms are burning, pressure is highest. You know, all those physical and environmental situations going on around them that they, that people in other sports don't often have to encounter. And so, you know, that's.
That's what I would say. Looking for something specific? Yeah, I could say, get yourself in better shape. Okay, that's, you know, that's, that's. I don't think it's a. It's a mystery that driving a race car is very physical and very athletic. Whatever you're driving, it's. There's going to be. There's going to be physiological responses to the stress put upon you.
Doesn't matter what you race. That's going to happen from sim racing to Formula one to whatever.
But I mean, what I would suggest is don't train to get stronger or fitter.
Train to think clearly at 175 beats per minute.
You know, that's a very different situation. And you see brain training drills and games that people play at rest, and that's fantastic. There's plenty of research to show that these drills and these games, there's the cognitive benefit to that.
But can you do that same thing with an elevated heart rate in a heated environment like a sauna or outside for the that point so that you know that can you think clearly at 170 beats per minute. Right. I mean, another thing would be maintain visual focus when fatigued. So can you visually focus on something when your body is fatigued? You know, we have a saying around here. It's an old quote from Vince Lombardi, who was a Green Bay packers coach from, from the 60s.
Fatigue makes cowards of us all. Well, when your body fatigues, a lot of things happen that will be a detriment to what your performance in the race car.
Your vision can be impaired somewhat.
So focus on being able to visually focus on something mentally and visually when you're fatigued.
Another thing would be being able to control your breathing under pressure. I don't think people realize that breathing is a very important component of racing a car.
We focus quite a bit on what we call loaded breathing at pitfit, which basically teaches the driver to breathe under the load of G load.
You know, when you.
[00:06:59] Mark Boudreau: Oh, okay.
[00:06:59] Jim Leo: When you go. If you ever get a chance, not many people do, but if you ever get a chance to get in a two seater of an Indy car or something with very high grip, you'll know right away what it feels like. Even a cart and some cars, high grip. But being able to breathe throughout a corner, being able to breathe throughout a lap properly is very important. So I would say that's a very important.
Another point, and a big one is staying composed when, when things hit the fan, so to speak. You know, that's a, that's a critical.
[00:07:36] Mark Boudreau: Right? Yeah.
[00:07:37] Jim Leo: And you see it all the time.
You know, I'm, I'm, I'm guilty of it myself in my, my limited sim racing career that I've undertaken the last few months and, But I think you'll see that when you, you make a mistake or something comes up on track, you have to kind of switch that off and focus on focus. They use the term focus forward.
We'll have drivers using a. You know, one of the fun things I do with drivers is I tell them when they encounter something on track in that moment, think of the goofiest thing you can think of. Pink elephant. Just in your head, say pink elephant. And that split second takes your mind off of the task at hand and then you come back to it and all of a sudden it's not as stressful.
I know, I hear the sports psychologists will have, you know, cue words and something like that. I Think that gets redundant. And at some point it's less effective because you, you could say the word anytime. It has less effect coming up with something. I know some engineers I've talked to have done that with drivers. They'll completely ask them, how was your weekend on? You know, and the driver just says, why are you asking about my week? Well, because that split second, you forgot about the guy that just passed you and almost put you into the wall, and then you kind of refocus.
[00:08:52] Mark Boudreau: Right.
[00:08:53] Jim Leo: You know, but that's hard to do. Staying composed when everything is chaotic is. It's a mark of a champion.
But, you know, it's. It's certainly something that I would emphasize. So, I mean, those are, you know, that's where races are. One, if you can get operated a high level when, when kind of others are breaking down around you, you become very hard to beat.
So, you know, keep your, Your, your physical and mental fitness at the highest level will certainly benefit you quite a bit.
Those are.
[00:09:22] Mark Boudreau: And, and is that something, Is that something that you can, I'm assuming that you can train to achieve?
[00:09:30] Jim Leo: Yes, you can.
We do quite a bit of work of trying to replicate the physiological response of racing with our, with our clients and having them perform drills and tasks that are going to train those neural pathways to be more efficient.
Can we put the same exact stress on a driver in the gym as they would have in the car? Well, no, it doesn't work that way. We can't put them at 150 miles an hour and, you know, three GS in the corner and someone shattered in their ear and it's 100 degrees out. We can't. But what we do is we take the basic fundamentals of those stresses and duplicate those as close as we can, and then make them perform drills, tasks, reaction, cognitive drills while they're under that stress condition. And what it does is it trains the brain kind of the neural pathways. It learns to process data.
Data comes in. Your brain basically processes that data, sends a signal out to whatever anatomical limb needs to move or turn the car, whatever, and then it responds. So we do that as much as possible, you know, and over time, what happens is those skills can be translated to being in the race car as close as possible.
And we hear that, you know, we don't have.
We have anecdotal evidence from our drivers telling us these things, you know, so I don't think there's a lot of research out there showing that all of these things apply.
We just take, like we've done for you know, 25 years, we listen to our drivers, so.
[00:11:21] Mark Boudreau: Okay, right. That makes sense.
[00:11:22] Jim Leo: You can train the body and. And the mind to kind of be in a more relaxed state under stressful conditions.
[00:11:31] Mark Boudreau: Okay, tell me a little bit about pitfit, where you're located, how people can get a hold of you and, you know, kind of your facilities, how that all works out.
[00:11:42] Jim Leo: I started doing this back in the kind of the mid to early 90s.
Had, you know, was involved with Roger Penske back in 93, 94. Worked with his. His pit crew for a couple of years, and then kind of moved into more teams, more opportunities in the, you know, the later 90s, and then just kind of grew from there.
I've seen this, the market kind of the field explode in the last probably, probably five to 10 years, where there's a lot more emphasis on what we do than there was definitely when I first got started. But now they're, you know, you have a lot of strength coaches or trainers or whatever they want to call themselves, who now want to specialize in motorsports.
You know, it's a much broader field. So. And that's been good because, you know that I know quite a few of these people helped several of them get started. I think the more, the merrier, the more opportunity out there will grow the field.
That's been fantastic. So, you know, we've done this for quite a bit. I still feel that we're basically the cutting edge of human performance in motorsports.
The one thing about pitfit, which is kind of unique, is that this isn't a. Motorsports is not a component of our business model. You know, we don't have XYZ high school football players over here, and then an hour later, baseball players, and then moms. We don't. It's all motorsports. That's our 100% focus. So it's very rare to find that, especially in this. In this market. We have an office here in Indianapolis, which is our main headquarters. We have an office in Cornelius, North Carolina, which we opened around 2001.
We acquired another business doing what we do, owned by Trey Shannon, who's now a partner in the company and a great, great trainer, great guide. I'm very blessed to have him.
We have that location.
We field emails regularly to open a place in Miami. That's probably the next place we do something, but it takes a little effort to get that done. And then we have a remote coaching program that we work with drivers all over the world. And so we can reach drivers in Abu Dhabi or Australia or the UK and that's all done remotely through our program.
We just hired a guy over in the UK to work with Colton Herta who as you know is. Is heading towards Formula one and so we hired Tom and he's phenomenal, doing a great job with, with Colton over there. So we're kind of expanding our staff internationally as we go.
[00:14:34] Mark Boudreau: Oh, nice. Excellent. And the. So if anybody wants to go to the Pit Fit, do you have a website?
[00:14:41] Jim Leo: I'm assuming just go to pitfit.com yeah. You can reach us that. A lot of information's on there.
You can find our social media and all that stuff. So that's a good way to get a hold of us. Yeah.
[00:14:54] Mark Boudreau: And I recommend anybody listening. I know you have a monthly newsletter that you put out and it's got some pretty good information that anybody would find helpful as a driver. But that remote program and when you mentioned that I'd forgotten about that. So that's excellent. So if you're not in Indianapolis or in North Carolina, you still get the benefit of the pitfit expertise.
[00:15:24] Jim Leo: Yeah. And that's a program that has grown quite a bit.
It started off like a lot of people, you know, PDF files and documents from 10 years ago and now we have a. We partner with a company called Team Builder who we use their platform for our remote coaching program.
Different levels, it's all. Everything's on video and then you know, we work with you directly on calls and such and we're about to launch. We're in the midst of launching some basically pre made template programs, 12 week programs that they're way more cost effective for a driver. They can just buy them and there's different areas they can focus on and then we're getting more involved.
Sorry. We're getting more involved in the world of sim racing. So that's, that's kind of one of our new projects is we're. We're starting to work towards programs with designing programs for, for sim racers.
[00:16:18] Mark Boudreau: Oh, wow. So. And I'll put the link to Pit Fit in the show notes is so that anybody wanting to find out more about all the programs, they'll get the opportunity. Jim, I really appreciate it. Before I let you go, I have to ask this one question.
Favorite racetrack?
Current or historical?
[00:16:40] Jim Leo: I'll be honest, one of my favorite racetracks was the old Vancouver cart track.
I love this city.
[00:16:47] Mark Boudreau: Really. The one that condos killed.
[00:16:49] Jim Leo: I remember going there back when I worked for Pack West Racing several years and I just, I fell in love with the city.
I think that was a great, a great track, great layout. It's a shame it went away, but I know it's probably not, you know, everybody's picking SPA or Le Mans or one of those tracks.
I'm not that vested in some of the historical side of some of the racetracks. You know, for me, it's personal experience. So I would say the old Vancouver kart track of the 90s was definitely near the top of my list.
[00:17:19] Mark Boudreau: Oh, wow, that's great. Well, Jim, I really appreciate you taking the time.
And that's it for this week. This is Mark from Motorsport Prospects, reminding you to stay fast, stay focused, and keep chasing that checkered flag.
Thanks for listening to the Motorsport Prospects podcast. For insights, advice and the latest news racers can use, visit motorsportprospects.com.
