Supercars championship-winning engineer Wes McDougall has launched an online resource to upskill the next generation of drivers.
The Complete Race Driver is a course for race drivers that offers insight and advice and is a knowledge base for all levels of drivers.
It consists of 65 lessons, including video and diagrams designed to assist drivers in advancing their race-driving skillset.
Primarily targeted at drivers, the programme may also help engineers better understand the drivers that they work with.
A widely-respected engineer in the Supercars Championship and with nearly 30 years of experience in motorsport, McDougall has worked with elite teams like Stone Brothers Racing, Triple Eight Race Engineering.
He’s worked with over 100 drivers, including Jamie Whincup, Marcos Ambrose, Shane van Gisbergen, Russell Ingall, and James Courtney during his illustrious career.
He has also engineered cars from low-powered single-seaters to high-downforce formula cars, FIA GT cars, GT3 cars and LMP machinery.
He created the concept of The Complete Race Driver when he arrived at a junction in his life.
“After working with Triple Eight Race Engineering, I took some time off at the end of 2021 for health reasons and it gave me time to reflect and look back on my own career,” McDougall said.
“A lot of the times I’ve worked with up-and-coming drivers and then there’s also been times when I’ve worked with established drivers like Marcos Ambrose and Jamie Whincup and looking back I realised that I wanted to be able to give back in a sense.
“The Complete Race Driver programme is the brainchild of those thoughts.
“It’s a resource for drivers to be able to use in their own time and once they sign up, they can keep coming back to it again and again,” he added.
“It’s not like they have to digest all the information in one go and then it expires; they can go at their own pace.
“Some people like to watch videos and others like to read, so it’s set up to cater for several methods of learning.”
McDougall added that the programme caters for drivers at all levels.
“I’ve seen what the best of the best do and how they go about their race craft and I’ve also witnessed firsthand the struggles the rookies and the up-comers go through as they rise through the ranks,” he explained.
“I’ve tried to make it a holistic overview of both the fundamentals of race driving and the practices that you should be doing or thinking about behind the scenes, because so much of motor racing or being a driver is what happens when you’re not sitting in the cockpit, there’s still so much you can do to improve yourself.
“To be a complete race driver requires a combination of technical skill, physical ability, and mental focus and the successful drivers must master all of these principles to compete at the highest level.”
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