How to Breathe for Car Racing

Video Transcript

"TINA STULL: Hi. I'm Tina Stull, and I drive the Top Dragster for Interstate Batteries. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to share my thoughts on being mentally prepared for a run. One thing that I know that a lot of drivers don't do is when they get all tensed up and they belted down in those pressure, they don't breath. So, I would go through kind of just a--some deep breathing as I'm settling in and just trying to think about my lane. Once you do that, you have--all you can do is let yourself perform. There's so much anxiety that you're going to do something wrong. If you've gone over and over in your head what you're going to do, all the way from your burnout to your staging, you know that you can do it right if you've done it before and you just remember, at that point, that if you let yourself do it that you'll do the right thing. And take that pressure off of you that--"What if I do the wrong thing?" And then, you rely on what you've practiced. And you just go out there and do it. It's always amazing to me how we can do something right time after time and yet we always go back to that one time that maybe we screwed up. So, we need to take those and flush them away, get them out of our head and realize that we know what we're doing. By that point, you're up there, you're staging, you're in your lane, you know your strategy and now, you just got to go deliver what you and your crew chief have already decided."