Spotlight 12 www.aftermarketonline.net OCTOBER 2026 What really makes driving a thrill? Castrol has published the findings of a study looking at what actually makes driving exciting – and the results suggest it has much more to do with being focused and in control than simply going fast. Working with UK neuroscience company Brainbox, Castrol put drivers through five very different experiences at the PalmerSport facility in Bedfordshire. While they were behind the wheel, or, in one test, sitting in the passenger seat, equipment monitored their brain activity, heart rate, skin response and eye movements. The driving ranged from tackling an off-road course in a Land Rover Defender and driving single-seat karts to getting behind the wheel of a McLaren Artura GT4 race car. Participants also drove a JP-LM race car, a Le Mans-style opencockpit two-seater sports prototype, before experiencing a high-speed run in the passenger seat with a professional driver in control. What the researchers found was that the thrill of driving appears to come from three things working together: physical stimulation, how mentally engaged the driver is and their emotional response to what is happening. Get that combination right, and the driver can enter what researchers call a ‘flow state’, essentially that feeling of being completely absorbed in the drive, highly focused on what is happening and confident that everything remains under control. Perhaps unsurprisingly, driving the McLaren Artura GT4 produced the strongest overall response. Brain and body activity increased, but at the same time the drivers showed strong signs of concentration and control. The eye-tracking results were particularly interesting. When driving the McLaren, participants averaged 70 ‘apex-lock’ fixations per minute as they concentrated on the racing line. Their blink rate also dropped to just 2.5 times per minute, compared with a typical resting rate of around 15 to 20. But the research also showed that speed isn’t necessarily what makes driving exciting. The karting session produced strong signs of engagement despite the much lower speeds involved, while even the slow off-road course generated a positive response. The difference became clearer when the participants swapped the driver’s seat for the passenger seat. During the high-speed JP-LM passenger run, the monitoring equipment picked up signs more closely associated with stress and anxiety than enjoyment. Instead of the concentrated gaze seen when participants were driving the McLaren, their eye movements became much more reactive. Blink rates increased to around 40 per minute and researchers recorded 190 separate eye fixations while the car was cornering. Heart rate didn’t tell the whole story either. Both fear and excitement can send it upwards, so researchers looked at the different measurements together to work out whether a participant was enjoying the experience or becoming overwhelmed by it. Dan Phillips, Co-founder and Director at Brainbox, said no single measurement defines the thrill of driving. Instead, it appears when physical arousal combines with mental and emotional involvement while the driver still feels in control. For anyone who enjoys driving, the overall conclusion probably won’t come as too much of a surprise. A fast car can certainly help get the heart going, but speed by itself isn’t enough. A twisting road, a kart track or even a challenging off-road course can provide plenty of involvement when the driver has something to concentrate on and feels connected with what the vehicle is doing.
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