Race drivers have extremely fine senses for how the car is handling, and what makes it handle. While there is a degree of preference for the most part engineer

Race drivers have extremely fine senses for how the car is handling, and what makes it handle. While there is a degree of preference for the most part engineers use professional drivers as more of a highly refined sensor to tell them how to make the car corner faster and accelerate quicker. There's a famous anecdote by Indy champion Rick Mears[1] who could correct the car's 'stagger', the (small) air pressure difference in each tire, just by driving it in precisely the right way to heat up a single tire by a few degrees. TLDR; drivers are precision instrumentation coupled with deep domain knowledge. [1] https://949racing.com/using-a-tire-pyrometer-949-Racing.aspx https://949racing.com/using-a-tire-pyrometer-949-Racing.aspx