Driving Talent: Nature or Nurture?

By David Smith
February 22, 2012

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“Certain players are predisposed to creativity and decision making and I guess I’m one of them. I do believe that, to an extent, point guards are born, not made. But you have to make yourself better. You have to take those natural gifts and expand them.”

-- Steve Nash, point guard for the Phoenix Suns and two-time NBA Most Valuable Player


So, how does one go about creating a great racecar driver? Is it no different than developing an athlete in another sport? Or developing a musician? Or a Rhodes scholar?

Perhaps one must be a natural to drive a racecar at harrowing speeds in a competive environment. Sure, everyone can learn how to drive a car and, in the case of New York City cab drivers, drive quickly while also being reckless in tight spaces; however, conventional wisdom would suggest that the naturals have a distinct advantage over everyone.

And at what point do nature and nurture intersect? When does a natural stop being motivated? When does a nurtured talent run out of … talent?

If Steve Nash, a six-foot-tall Caucasian Canadian with average foot speed who is a former NBA MVP, says that to become a player with equal ability to his, one must be a combination of both nature and nurture, should we not listen?

Nature vs. nurture is a debate that transcends auto racing. There might not ever be a definitive verdict, but there is certainly quite the spread of food for thought.

In the critically acclaimed best-seller Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell leaned towards the side of nurture, suggesting, “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

Gladwell points to a theory by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson who, in the 1990s, theorized that someone who spends 10,000 hours of his or her life in sustained, focused practice on one thing will become a master at – or achieve world class status in – that one thing. Thanks to Outliers and his lectures on the subject, the 10,000 Hour Rule1 has become a relevant theory, especially in sports.

To explain his theory, Gladwell went outside of the sports world and discussed how a novice rock group in Liverpool, England became The Beatles. Before they were the Fab Four2, The Beatles made five pilgrimmages from Liverpool to Hamburg, Germany between 1960 and 1962. During their lenghty stays in Hamburg they would often play eight-hour – eight-hour! – sets, seven days a week. This forced them to build their on-stage stamina and perfect their entire catalogue, choose covers to perform and craft new material.

John Lennon, one of the two front men of the group along with Paul McCartney, thought the experience made them stronger, better performers.

Lennon was quoted as saying, “We got better and got more confident. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them (the Hamburg audience) being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

“In Liverpool, we’d only do one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”

Lennon more or less suggested that the success of one of the greatest groups in rock history was nurtured.

Advantage, nurture.


Prodigies exist.

A column from The New York Times last November points to a Vanderbilt University study that debunked the “studying makes you smarter” myth. And real life examples exist in the sports world.

LeBron James was in middle school when he was first solicited for autographs on a regular basis. There is plenty of reason to believe he had yet to hit the 10,000 hour marker as a 12 or 13-year-old. As it turns out, the hype surrounding the Akron tween became substantiated with his performance at the professional level.

Kyle Busch is no different. When brother Kurt was enjoying the infancy of his success in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, the younger Kyle had been the talk of the Legends Car racing scene in Las Vegas. When he himself hit the Truck Series level before the age of 16, his on-track talent was evident. The future appeared bright and from a pure driving standpoint, that potential is now being tapped.

While Busch is a good example, the best example of a prodigy in auto racing might be three-time Formula 1 champion Ayrton Senna. Often described as a genius, especially in rainy racing conditions, the late Senna is regarded – and still revered – as a natural talent.

Ron Dennis, Senna’s team manager at McLaren, always admired Senna’s ability to find ways to will himself towards excellence, but also noted that something else was integral in pinpointing exactly why Senna was a great racecar driver.

“As I watched Ayrton’s early career, it was very apparent his pace and his dedication,” said Dennis. “But in the end, what you’re looking for is an intellect and I thought, ‘This guy’s got what it takes.’”

While bombastic comments by team managers in regards to scouting talent are not uncommon, Dennis was right about this one. The intellect he refers to is not a general intelligence that translates to other subjects.

It is the genius in driving a racecar. Senna was a savant.

At the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, ESPN basketball analyst and former coach Jeff Van Gundy discussed the difference in two of his former players, Charles Oakley and Chris Dudley, on a panel titled “Birth to Stardom: Developing the Modern Athlete in 10,000 Hours.”

Van Gundy spoke highly of Dudley’s general intelligence. A graduate of Yale, he went on to run for Governor in Oregon (and lost), but on the basketball court, he could not understand basic center play and had to be banished to the bench for the majority of his career. As Van Gundy put it, if he placed a newspaper in front of Dudley, Dudley would have reached for the front page.

Van Gundy spoke even more highly of Oakley and his high “basketball IQ,” calling Oakley, a graduate of Virginia Union, a “rocket scientist on the court” who “never made mistakes.” An enforcing low-post player, Oakley was named to the All Star team once and the NBA’s All Defensive team twice. He was a player that Van Gundy said would have reached for the sports section first. Oakley was a basketball savant.

Early naturals do sometimes pan out, as was the case with James, Busch, Senna and Oakley. Advantage, nature.


On the same panel, Justin Tuck, the star defensive end for the NFL’s New York Giants, discussed Alabama high school basketball teammate Jamario Moon and Moon’s chief adversary in the area, Gerald Wallace.

As he Tuck put it, Moon was undisputedly the most talented player in the area; nothing on the court was outside the realm of Moon’s abilities, thus providing Moon with a lack of motivation to practice. Wallace, gunning for top dog status, was a fixture in the gym before and after classes. Eventually, nature and nurture intersected; Wallace’s nurtured abilities surpassed Moon’s natural gifts. Moon made it to the NBA, but as a mere undrafted journeyman. Wallace was a NBA All Star in 2010 and is a starter for the Portland Trail Blazers.

Even at a young age, Wallace saw an immediate reason to practice. But what about Moon? What happened to the most naturally talented athlete in his hometown? Per Tuck’s suggestion, it came down to a lack of awareness.

“Being an early ‘natural’ gets in the way of development,” said Tuck. “In a way, things become boring to you … When you have that talent and you have all these people telling you you’re the best thing since sliced bread, it’s easy to be blinded by the (thought) that it’s always going to be that easy.”

Tuck went on to discuss football players that were great at the collegiate level, but plateaued at the professional level. It is not uncommon in the NFL. Is it common, too, in auto racing?

Tom Logano saw natural sporting ability in his son. It was not through stick-and-ball sports, but racing. When, at a young age, Joey Logano would drive a beginner-level go-kart around the family’s driveway, the elder Logano saw it worthwhile to keep Joey’s racing development in motion. But did it come too easy for Joey?

The Logano family made considerable investments into Joey’s racing future. The younger Logano was a winner at each level – Legends Cars, Pro Cup, K&N Pro Series and the NASCAR Nationwide Series – in A-grade equipment, earning the nickname, “Sliced Bread.” When Logano entered the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series at age 19, everything changed.

“I don’t think anyone expected, including myself, how big of a step (the Cup Series) was from the Nationwide Series,” said Logano in a 2011 interview with ESPN’s Marty Smith. “When I first started racing Nationwide, we had the best cars out there. We won every race. I thought, ‘Hey, if I can win in the Nationwide Series against all these guys, why I can’t beat the same guys in a level up?’” There’s a lot, lot, lot more to it than that. The average person doesn't know that. I didn't know that until I did it.”

Was Logano too good, too early? Did the staggering amount of early success hinder his development? Would it have been best if he had learned to struggle and face adversity in lesser equipment, in a smaller series on his way up the NASCAR ladder?

Perhaps Logano has plateaued? Is it possible that an inherently good driver in another, smaller series just cannot translate that success into wins at the Cup Series level?

In the case of Tracy Hines, it is possible. Hines has recorded over 70 wins across the three premier United States Auto Club (USAC) divisions and earned championships in the Silver Crown Series and the National Sprint Car Series; however, he also had an opportunity to compete in the Truck Series and the Nationwide Series. He earned just three top-ten finishes across both series in 69 career starts3. He washed out of NASCAR in 2006 and returned to USAC, continuing his winning ways.

Like Logano, Hines is an example of a good driver at other levels of racing. The difference from Logano is that Hines will turn 40 this year. He started competing in USAC in 1994. It is entirely logical to suggest Hines has surpassed 10,000 hours of racing. The driving style needed to succeed in USAC, an open-wheel racing sanctioning body that runs on both pavement and dirt, requires a different driving discipline than the Stock Cars of NASCAR.

It is possible that Hines’s abilities plateaued. It is also possible that Hines was ill-equipped, lacking the Stock Car driving discipline, to do well in NASCAR; after all, it is likely that he accumulated his 10,000 hours solely in USAC. He mastered a vastly different discipline4.

The debate of nature vs. nurture provokes more questions than answers. It does, however, indicate that while searching for a naturally gifted racer can result in succes, it is likely that there is going to have to be some kind of nurturing process for the prospective driver.

If Steve Nash’s words are, in fact, true, then an informed talent identification process and stringent nurturing period is a must for all raceteams. Do the teams realize this? Does NASCAR?

Part 2 of Driving Talent, coming next week, will focus on the identification of talent and the cultivation process placed upon drivers by teams, series and the drivers themselves.

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More on MotorsportsAnalytics.com:
The Science of the Deal: Contract Extensions
The Science of the Deal: Cup Series Driver Movement
On Pack Drafting and Two-Car Tandems

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David Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Motorsports Analytics. He is also the Director of Talent Development at Spire Sports + Entertainment. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidSmithMA.