| " If it looks right, it most probably is right." ~Mark Donahue "Planning, evaluation, reasoning and establishing prioritites are all more important than brilliance - either behind the wheel or at the drawing board." ~Carroll Smith "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." ~Carroll Smith "...Success will never result from attempting a program or project that is beyond our ability to accomplish...Since time and money are both finite, we have to ensure that we are getting the most performance per unit effort." ~Carroll Smith "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." ~Carroll Smith "Horsepower sells motorcars and torque wins motor races." ~Carroll Smith "There are lots of people out there who prefer tinkering to winning - it gives them a good excuse." ~Carroll Smith "The price of winning is always the reduction, if not the elimination, of play time. However, since racing is basically playing any way you want to look at it (real people make their livings by doing something that they hate), we can't bitch too much." ~Carroll Smith Anybody can build a car, but only those that manage their time and resources successfully will make it to the starting grid. And that's only the first hurdle. ~David Mazer '03 "If you have complete control over the damned thing, you're not going fast enough." ~Carroll Smith "Elapsed time is the name of the game that we play. Don't ever forget it." ~Carroll Smith "We normally learn at least as much from our mistakes as we do from our successes. The best development driver/engineer I ever knew once told me that he reckoned that about 20% of his bright ideas worked." ~Carroll Smith "You must learn to define the problem before you attempt to cure it." ~Carroll Smith "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." ~Carroll Smith "He who understands, as always, can make his car work better than he who does not." ~Carroll Smith "Racing is a contest between men, not between machines, and hard work and good engineering will produce a superior sedan just as they will produce a superior open wheeler or sports racing car." ~Carroll Smith "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." ~Carroll Smith "Until we have established reliability there is no sense at all in wasting time trying to make the thing go faster." ~Carroll Smith "You will never run out of ideas to be tried - and it you ever run even a couple laps of testing without learning something, then someone is not doing his job." ~Carroll Smith "What he does need to be is willing and able to take the car deliberately into never never land, bring it back in one piece and then, very objectively, tell someone how it behaved on its way to the limit, while it was there, and on its way back. He must also be willing to believe the stopwatch rather than the seat of his Nomex." ~Carroll Smith "The necessary fiddling about and moving things can be greatly facilitated by a bit of forethought." ~Carroll Smith "The visibility at the best of times is liable to be a bit haxy due to clouds of ignorance." ~Carroll Smith |
| Racing Quotes |