I Offered A Bunch Of Amateurs $5,000 Of My Own Money If They Could Drive Faster Than Me

If you’re a motorsports fan—or even a casual car enthusiast—be honest: You’ve watched F1, NASCAR, or another racing series and had the thought, ‘I could do that; all they’re doing is driving a car!’

Well, as professional drivers, we’ve always dealt with this by rolling our eyes and attempting to explain that driving your street car isn’t even using 1% of its capability. I always found this to be an inadequate way to try to prove it’s not as simple as it looks and that professionals make it look far easier than it is.

I rarely watch players on the PGA Tour plop a ball inches from the cup on a green, or Patrick Mahomes throw a touchdown and think, “How hard can that be?” Like many others who played these sports as kids, I know exactly how hard it is. But because almost everyone drives a car, they assume driving race cars must be easy—that these select few professionals somehow just got lucky enough to get paid to drive in circles.

Then, last year, a gaming company conducted a poll called “Where Everyday Americans Think They Could Compete with the Pros.” Number one on this poll, with 32.89% of the vote, was “Driving a racing lap without crashing” An additional 6.24% thought they could win a NASCAR race—which is insane.

This got me thinking: how could we give people this delusional a chance to prove they are as fast as they believe? And how could we make it entertaining to watch? Because, as you know, without years of experience and millions in funding, they’ll never get an actual chance to compete in a NASCAR race.

I am a NASCAR driver, and I have access to Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, CT. So, with help from my friends at The Autopian and Lucid—who graciously allowed us to use their car for a review and for this challenge—we attempted to see how total amateurs stack up against me and my 15 years as a professional NASCAR driver.

Oh, and to make it even more interesting, I offered a prize pool of $5,000 of my own money.

Meet The Competitors

I spent months finding friends who had the bravado to think they could compete against me, who I could trust not to do something very stupid, and who wouldn’t mind a bit of public humiliation.

The four competitors who agreed were:

My friends Austin and Tara Nelson have become some of the biggest NASCAR fans I know. They currently reside in Aspen, CO, where Austin works for one of Aspen’s favorite skiing outfitters and Tara works in real estate. Rick Cadotte is the VP of Growth at a coffee company. He has loved racing since he was a kid. His dad worked on NASCAR teams, and he even has one of my old racing simulators, which I’m told his entire family enjoys competing on during the holidays.

Lastly, my older brother, Bard Kligerman. This may seem odd, but who doesn’t love a little sibling rivalry? For years, I’ve had to hear him drone on about how he could beat me if given the chance to race, which is funny because we do not come from a racing family. Until I discovered racing on TV at nine years old, my family didn’t even know motorsports existed. Bard is six years my senior, and his only exposure to racing has been watching me. It was also an interesting thought experiment to see if driving skills are learned or possibly hereditary. His day job is as the CEO of a real estate company.

Now that we had competitors, the next question was how we could do this in a way that was fair but also ramped up in difficulty while stacking the deck against me, so it wasn’t just a cakewalk.

The format became clear: the competitors would go against each other, with the fastest among them winning a prize. But they’d win double the award if they were quicker than me. To make things more challenging for me, each competitor would get multiple attempts at the challenges, and I would only get one.

We settled on three challenges, increasing in difficulty, allowing competitors to experience the car’s limits in braking and cornering before combining these skills in the final challenge.

Challenge One: Stop in a Box

You’ve probably seen this in video games or racing schools. The premise is to feel the limits of braking ability and learn brake modulation. Now, in the Lucid Air, with its ABS, the brake modulation part is very different from what you experience in most race cars, but it still lets drivers feel the car’s maximum braking capability.

In racing terms, this would be a “Threshold braking” challenge. You’re trying to achieve the maximum braking force available (like a straight braking zone at the end of a long straight into a tight hairpin). To do this in a race car without ABS, you want to get the tires to their grip threshold and then let off the brake as the vehicle slows. This gets a lot more complex with high-downforce cars, but for the sake of brevity, this is a standard first step in learning to be a race car driver–knowing how to slow the car down properly. When done wrong, this is when you see race cars with puffs of smoke off the tires in a brake zone as a tire locks and is then sliding, which means you’ve gone past its threshold for braking performance.

In our version of this challenge, the competitors started far enough back to reach around 60-70 MPH (the Lucid Air Grand Touring reaches this speed in about 3 seconds) and then had to slam on the brakes to stop in a box barely larger than the car. A timing loop triggered past the start point and ended right as the vehicle entered the box. The time was invalid if any part of the car was outside the box.

Sounds easy? Let’s just say it didn’t go exactly as I hoped.

Challenge Two: Max Cornering Ability

This challenge was designed to let these amateur drivers feel the limits of the car and tires through a corner. We utilized the skid pad at Lime Rock not to get sideways but to use the limit of tire adhesion to go around the skid pad as fast as possible.

From a standing start, drivers would trip the timing line right as they entered the skid pad and drive three-quarters of the way around before crossing the finish line, almost back where they started. Some of you might think, “well duh, that’s NASCAR,” but it’s trickier because it’s a continuous turn.

You can either maintain consistent speed or “diamond” the corner to straighten the car at the exit for maximum speed. This is also probably one of the most essential skills for a race car driver–feeling the tires and the feedback they give you to get them to their ultimate grip limit but not exceeding that, where you end up sliding and losing time through a corner. When you go over their limit, this is where you see race cars get sideways or go straight past a corner because the speed the driver is taking through that corner is far past the available grip of the tires. Often in racing, we joke about how this is when the driver’s enthusiasm surpasses the grip level!

The video shows several different approaches, some definitely not ideal for cornering but excellent for destroying tires.

Challenge Three: A Corner Complex

The final challenge combined all these skills into what we in racing call a “corner complex”—a set of linked corners that require sacrificing speed in some areas to gain more speed overall.

On the Lime Rock FCP Euro Proving Grounds autocross course, we had the perfect set of corners: a not-so-straight straightaway into a double-apex right-hander, quickly connecting to a double-apex left-hander over a blind crest.

This meant competitors needed maximum braking capability, correct apex speed placement, careful throttle management between corners, and visual references when cresting the hill to accelerate correctly across the finish line.

This is where I should have had the most significant advantage. Even with all the driver aids in the Lucid Air, navigating these corners should have separated me from anyone who hasn’t tackled racetracks for over half their life.

The Results And Future Events

As you’ll see, my brother was freakishly good—maybe there’s something to that whole hereditary thing—and the format seemed to work. At least it wasn’t a cakewalk for me!

Regarding the car, the advanced electronic aids closed the gap by preventing significant mistakes. But my brother might have just been a weird outlier because, compared to the other three, I would have comfortably won all three challenges.

I plan to do many more of these in the future. There are nearly unlimited ways we can see who secretly has the skills of a race car driver. We can change the car, challenges, and track, and even get creative in designing ways to mimic moments and skills professional drivers use.

I hope you enjoy what we created. If you have feedback, ideas on improving this, or suggestions for future videos, let me know in the comments. And if you think you deserve a shot, tell us! We hope to feature some Autopian members in future episodes.

But first, I need to win more races to afford all that!

[Ed note: But you won Daytona!?! – MH]