Reviews & Muses

Formula 1 drivers are great athletes and deserve plenty of credit for their abilities. But one of those abilities is not fast reaction times, and it bothers me to no end that people continually act as though F1 drivers have supernatural reflexes. They have regular human reaction times like the rest of us, and the fact that people think otherwise says a lot about their misunderstanding of expertise in general.

The average person has a reaction time of 200-300 milliseconds. The Human Benchmark website says the average score on its reaction time test is 273 ms, though it likely skews high due to interface latency (I scored an average of 171 ms).

F1 drivers are in the same ballpark. The race broadcast often shows the time it takes for drivers to react to the starting lights, and the top starters are usually in the 200-250 ms range. Yet a lot of fuss is made about their reaction times, as though they're part of what it takes to drive a twitchy, 200-mph racing car. And not only is that wrong, it undermines the actual skill that F1 drivers do have.

The true skill is anticipation, and accurate anticipation comes with expertise. All professional athletes seem to have incredible reflexes when applied to their discipline. That is the product of being expertly aware of many possible scenarios, and of being trained to act appropriately in these scenarios. This enables experts to be prepared to act when something does occur. To the untrained eye, that preparedness can very easily look like natural reflexes.

When a car unexpectedly comes across an F1 driver, and that driver seems to react with supernatural speed to evade the accident, a casual viewer may be stunned at the quick reaction. Yet that is only because the viewer is operating with far less information than the driver. The driver would have been far more likely to see the incident coming, due to his superior ability to read his surroundings and predict other drivers' movements. In other words, he sees things that the casual viewer does not.

Casual viewers, blind to what they does not see, too often make the mistake of assuming they are operating on the same level of awareness as the driver. Thus they conclude that the driver's superior ability to react to a situation comes from his superior reaction times, rather than his superior awareness of said situation. But in situations where just a few milliseconds can make a difference, if you are at the point of purely reacting, it probably means you weren't paying enough attention to begin with, and you are already too late.

You can apply this to your own driving on regular public roads. If you are attentive to your surroundings and paying attention to other drivers, and if you have a good sense of how your vehicle behaves, how to control it, and how other vehicles can behave, then you will be much better at anticipating potential trouble; consequently, you will be a lot more adept at handling that trouble.

If your awareness helps you avoid an incident on the road with passengers on board, they might then commend you on your good reflexes, rather than the effort you put into being a good driver. This is because people have an inaccurate tendency to attribute skill to natural talent rather than to work and discipline. As mentioned above, this is because they can only see the situation from their own point of view — from the point of view of a layman, not from that of an expert who has put in the work. Therefore, in their shoes, to do what the expert seems to have done, it would have taken exceptional reflexes. But to do what the expert has actually done, it would take an entirely different brain.