 I'm pretty excited to talk today. I'm a physio, I'll go over that shortly. But for once I don't have to talk about musculoskeletal injuries. It's really cool. What makes a high performance driver, I don't know whether anybody knows this fellow. He's probably the most successful motorsport driver in history. His name's Sebastian Loeb. I'm going to talk about rallying today. Rally drivers are better than Formula One drivers. If anyone saw the Formula One last week, Kimmy Reichenan who's just come back to Formula One actually has been in rallying for the last few years and he said that. So it's not sort of baseless. Sebastian Loeb has won eight World Championships which is phenomenal. It's just amazing. He's competed in I think 153 World Rally events over the past 10 years and out of 153 this bloke's been on the podium so he's finishing the top three 105 times which is just insane. He's won I think 65 of the 105 events so if we want to look and model on what makes up a high performance driver this is a guy to look at. He started life off as an elite gymnast. Whether that factors in much towards the attributes of a high performance driver we could debate that all day. I think it probably does. He's disciplined. He has a personality type that is always striving for improvement and they're two things that any form of motorsport needs but particularly rallying. So I'm going to talk today about the sort of attributes that build this bloke into what he is. What I was going to show you is some in-car footage of a guy driving an old car like a 1980 model Ford Escort and he's very talented this bloke and you'll see the interaction between co-driver and driver. The concentration the driver's obviously concentrating on what he's doing but also the information that he's receiving from his co-driver. The co-driver is talking absolutely flat out at giving him the notes of what's coming up and this guy's cognitively receiving it processing it and he's doing about ten other things at once. It's quite fascinating. A little bit about me. I'm a musculoskeletal physio. When I was preparing the talk the other day my wife was sort of asking what are you doing. I hadn't told her I'm involved in this. So when I told her that I was talking about high performance driving she said why would you want to know about that. And as I sort of prepared the talk I kind of realised that there's a lot of things that these guys have that are obviously very very high level skills that drivers of all age groups need every day. So just as we go through the talk try and sort of reflect back to the sorts of people that you guys see each day and you'll see that these skills need to be present in everybody. My 4A into motorsport started a lot of years ago. I'm not a motorhead. I'm not a bogan. It's the most addictive drug of ever. Not that I take drugs but it's the most addictive sport activity I've ever been involved in. In 2008 we won a Victorian championship me as a co-driver and in 2010 I won a Victorian club championship as a driver. I'm not professing to say I'm a guru driver but over the years I've really I think I've sat down and worked out what attributes good drivers have and what it takes to improve your performance. So if we go back to Sebastian there's 3 key things 3 simple I like schemas. There's 3 key things that make up a driver and obviously how good they are is determined by to what extent each of these 3 things are advanced. So if we look at technical skill first obviously the video before showed this unbelievable amount of technical skill. There's 5 key things and I think again we all need that when we're driving on the road. As a rally driver vision and I'm not just talking about the level of eyesight, an eye testing vision for a rally driver is being able to sort of take in entire surrounds in front of you in a split second and work out what you've got to do for that next 50 or 100 metres. So vision is a skill that needs to be pretty well developed in a rally driver. Feel. I've sat with lots of people that can drive very quickly. They've got some of these other skills but they don't have feel. They usually end up breaking their vehicles or breaking their vehicle and then hitting something. So feel is an intuitive thing. I actually think some people don't have the ability to develop it very much. Someone like Sebastian Loeb has incredible feel. He knows as soon as something's wrong with his car and he adjusts his driving. The video before showed this old car which has no modern technology, traction control, all of the sort of things that are in the modern rally cars this bloke didn't have. So his feel is incredible. Richard talked before about speed. Respect to intersections and approaching intersections where accidents happen. Race drivers, rally drivers have unbelievable speed judgement based on what surface they're on. They know when to break. It's a bit different to a racetrack. After 300 laps of a racetrack you get to know the exact point that you should be touching that brake pedal. In a rally car you've got to go by feel and using your vision. So speed judgement is very important. The reactions, obviously vision, feel and speed are probably the attributes that help to make you react. So if you don't have those first three things, the speed judgement, the feel and the vision, your reactions are probably not going to be good. And then obviously coordination in a rally car a driver will be simultaneously using the three pedals. Handbrake wipers and probably five or six other buttons at once while they're listening to some bozo like me talking at the sort of rate that I'm talking now. So there's a lot of stuff going on. And technical skills is something that takes time to develop. I'm sure we all know skills and becoming an expert in something takes hours and hours and hours. Sebastian Loeb's 153 rallies there's 400 kilometres in a rally. He drives the stages multiple times. So every single week this blokes getting time in the car and also some of these skills even when he's just driving the course and looking at things. Physical fitness I'm a musculoskeletal physio. I treat sports people predominantly. And obviously in traditional sport physical fitness is key. It's certainly important, very important in motorsport and at the elite level it's important. Perhaps not as important as in some other sports but if we look at fitness with respect to driving, what are the sorts of things that drivers do? Predominantly gym and aerobic activity. So most race drivers rally drivers spend probably 2 hours a day, 7 days a week. So I think I've got at the bottom 10 to 15 hours a week working on their fitness. Lots of them are involved in triathlon which is quite a disciplined sport as well. Triathlon involves fluid intake, carbohydrate management, heart rate control and a lot of these things come back to performance driving as well. I also love bike riding. Mountain biking is probably a classic thing that drivers do and it's probably helping to keep their visual sort of field and their visual skills up to standard. Obviously improving strength and endurance is one of the key things in a car. Dehydration is something that we know very well in cycling and running and we probably don't think that much about it in the context of driving. Maybe someone later will be talking about that. In motorsport it's critical. We know physiologically that a 1.5 to 2% reduction in body weight due to sweat loss will significantly alter both physical and mental function, mental performance. In rally driving and in V8 supercars, temperatures get commonly up to 50 degrees inside a car. You've also got a big dirty helmet, a balaclava, a big suit, driving suit, gloves, underwear, so they're all compulsory things. Wouldn't be wearing them. Love them along John. Even in short events it's quite common that if you don't drink you lose 3%. Hydration is critical and a lot of accidents do occur due to a loss of concentration associated with that. Carbohydrate intake associated with fitness is critical. Again athletes, runners and triathletes know very very well how much intake people need to take. Blood glucose levels obviously drops as you keep driving. A lot of these guys will be consuming drinks through fluid systems that have got carbohydrates involved. Probably the most important thing is mental fitness. I like the word mental fitness because it sort of implies that it's a trait or a skill that can be developed or regressed if you're not working on it. And obviously central to mental fitness is concentration. Not trying to blow my own trumpet. Rally drivers and performance drivers have the most amazing concentration and looking at concentration as a single entity is probably not that fruitful. Concentration involves lots of different things so this schema shows a width and a depth to concentration and you need all of them and I'll talk about it in a second but concentrating on one thing and one thing only in a rally car will have you into the side of a tree pretty quickly so there's a lot of things you need to be adjusting for. So if we look at the dimensions, the internal and the external, you get these sort of, and this is quite sports psychological I don't know if there's any psychologists here. Sports psychology is very very commonly used in driving. Psychology is critical how we're thinking and what's going on is really critical. If you break these things up into quadrants you've got these sort of traits I guess and a driver needs to be able to swap between analysing, rehearsing, focusing and scanning all the time continually. So an example of analysing would be looking at sort of the big picture, how you're performing through a stage, how you're comparing to the driver in front of you, looking at the whole big picture and thinking about it. In terms of rehearsing we do this a lot. There's a lot of thinking, especially when you bug something up, it jogs your memory back into thinking okay I've got to get my car in a better position, I've got to hit my brakes at this certain point so that's the rehearsal aspect. Down the bottom there's the two sort of external attributes that people need to show. When someone's driving I talk before about scanning a road, that's critical. You've got to know what's coming up 200 metres up the road and what that crest looks like it's doing if the road's going to go left or right, that's scanning. And then focusing is probably looking at the immediate thing in front of you. The big rock that's sitting right on the driving line that you're about to hit. So all of those four things are used all the time and if you just use one you're going to get yourself into trouble. So if we look at concentration and what affects it, three emotional traits very very commonly affect concentration. I had a massive accident in 2008 and it was pretty much caused because I was angry and it was totally my fault. I had a problem with the car. I had a problem with the car in front of me. It was dusty. It was night time. I couldn't really see what was going on and I was trying to make up time from the previous stage. And there was a crest coming up and I looked at the road and thought yep the tree line cuts away to the right. So I threw or set the car up over this crest probably at 120k an hour and the road went left. I hadn't been angry. If I had have controlled my emotions honestly I don't think it would have happened. So with respect to accidents and poor outcomes with motorsport emotions are very commonly involved and we need to be able to control them. And down the bottom I've just got the physiology influences which we talked about before. So hydration, blood glucose levels and obviously muscle fatigue. We change gears 10 times a kilometre and there's a lot of work on the arms and the legs and even just keeping yourself stable. So muscle fatigue is a common thing. And that would be the other video highlighting Sebastian last year. Actually it's quite a fascinating video. Just to finish off as I said this guy is the best driver in the world. He crashed his car in Australia last year and it showed some footage of it happening in real time. It was very quick. And when the reporters got to him and said so what happened he said well I got distracted on the dash by a split time. These guys have times coming up on their dashboard all the time. And he looked at the split time momentarily and got the car, I don't know, three inches across to the left hit a bank and roll over six times. So it was just a quite a graphic example of how concentration in our sport plays out. Fuck I said, what happened Mark? What happened is that we went on the road like you can see I just entered a bit too fast in the right end here and because I've done a mistake I saw a split time on the dash. I was this concentrated didn't break enough for the corner and then I was a bit too fast. In conclusion, I think this is probably the biggest thing that we should all take, that these three factors certainly in motorsport are critical but I think for anyone driving on the roads they're the three attributes that I'll be looking at. Thank you.