Eric Thompson: What a week for Kiwi racers

Richie Stanaway is contesting the German F3 champs. Photo / Supplied

I have been watching an incredible weekend of motorsport and, in particular, the Kiwis racing on three different continents - check out Kiwi racers showcase their talent on this page, to see who was on show.

Other rising stars who had their feet up this weekend are young Mitch Evans, who races in the GP3 class, and Richie Stanaway, who's contesting the German F3 championship.

For a small country to have that many drivers racing internationally, and winning, is fantastic.

All bar two of them, Scott Dixon and Matt Halliday, have come through the Elite Motorsport Academy at the New Zealand Academy of Sport (South Island) in Dunedin, which has an intake every year in July.

The academy has been so successful that the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) has requested, and been given, our blueprint and has now set up its own based on the New Zealand model.

I have been fortunate, or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, to have participated in the week's hell and now lecture to help the graduates understand a few things, none motorsport-based. And I'm off there again this year to help as much as I can because past graduates are proving just how important the week is in their development as race car drivers.

"Their sighs, lamentations and loud wailings resounded through the starless air, so that at first, it made me weep. Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, words of pain, tones of anger, voices shrill and faint, and beating hands, all went to make a tumult that will whirl forever," will not be ringing in my ears this time. Old Dante and his best mate, Tomas de Torquemada, will not be getting their mitts on me this year.

An unfit middle-aged man has no place trying to keep up with a bunch of manic, competitive and very fit young men being put through physical and mental hoops.

The 2011 intake of elite motorsport youngsters will be put through a week of being prodded, probed, poked, twisted, run ragged, analysed, profiled and pushed to near-death experiences (well, in my case anyway) to give them that cutting edge which will enable them to rise above their closest competitors. I didn't think there were any teenagers left in the country who have the manners, decorum, bearing, articulation and sensibilities of each year's intake
and I'm looking forward to meeting the most recent crop of young Kiwi drivers.

These blokes put just about every other sportsman I've ever met to shame.

Motorsport people are quite genuine and humble - bar F1, but that's a place for enormous egos, run by the mad, squabbling over nothing, with a self-importance bordering on psychotic.

What the Elite Motorsport Academy and the Sports Academy have cherry-picked from Otago University, and other parts of New Zealand, is mind-boggling.

To have access to some of the best minds and to impart help and knowledge on the young is something money can't buy and will give the young drivers all the necessary mental skills to become the complete package.

They will learn how to cope with the pressure of not only racing cars but also all the ancillary guff that swirls around them on race weekends, and things like nutrition and chasing sponsorship.

One thing I have been very pleased to note is that there's not too much "goal setting". My personal view is you should have only one goal, not a whole series of them - and make sure it's a bloody big one. A goal is a goal, not a pathway to a goal.

To use an analogy, in soccer the keeper's goal is not to pass the ball to the right back whose goal is to run a bit and then pass it to the mid-field whose goal is to run around the opposition and get it to the forward ... that's their job.

The goal is to get the round white thing in the net.

What I have noticed with all the mental skills coaching the squad is receiving is that it's good, sound, uncomplicated stuff that'll give them an advantage. That is, it's a tool, not the whole bloody toolbox.