Eric Thompson: Academy inferno really quite cool

The youngsters will learn how to cope with not only racing cars but also all the ancillary guff. Photo / Supplied

Next month I'm off again to the Elite Motorsport Academy at the New Zealand Academy of Sport (South Island) in Dunedin.

But this time the words, "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.

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.

This year's 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.

Brendon Hartley, Earl Bamber, Shane van Gisbergen, Mark Tapper, Hayden Paddon and Mitch Evans are but a few who have emerged hardened, honed and with great mental skills that have allowed them to go on to bigger and better things.

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 in a myriad different codes, in New Zealand, to shame.

In fact, in general, motorsport people are 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 to impart help and knowledge to the young is something money can't buy and will give the young drivers all the necessary mental skills to become the complete package. And for these young folk, what better skills to learn at an early age in an effort to avoid making basic mistakes. 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.

One thing I was 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.

There are some athletes out there who have been told getting out of bed is their first goal of the day (before someone goes off half cocked about the terminally ill or the disabled, pull your head in, I'm not talking about them), making breakfast the next one, arriving at training in one piece is another, being able to finish training another and on and on and on.

If that was me, I'd be bored rigid with getting all those goals during a day and would lose sight of what I was actually trying to achieve.

The idea is to score a goal - or more than one - but it's the end result you are after. In soccer the keeper's aim is not to pass the ball to the right back, whose aim is to run a bit and then pass it to the mid-field, whose aim is to run around the opposition and get it to the forward, etc. That's their job. The goal is to get the round white thing in the net. To use a favourite John Mitchell phrase, the ball's "journey" down the park is just that - not a goal.

What I have noticed with all the mental skills coaching the squad is receiving, is that it's sound, uncomplicated, albeit cutting-edge, stuff that'll give them an extra advantage. For me, it's slowed down my descent into early senility, but I got the mother of all headaches.