Road & Track on PCA DE

[Phokaioglaukos]

DRIVER’S ED
TRACK TEACHERS
HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE GETTING GOOD INSTRUCTION.

If you just can’t work with your instructor, don’t hesitate to request a change. Nobody will be upset. It happens all the time.

I CAN STILL REMEMBER my worst experience with a track-day instructor. It happened at my first Porsche Club of America lapping day. Although I’d recently won a race at that particular track, the PCA region considered me a rookie because I had no PCA track-day experience. So they put me in the “green” group with the rest of the rookies and paired me with an instructor.

The instructor they assigned me was a noncompetitive driver who had gone up through the PCA ladder and had eventually been promoted to instructor. Like most track-day instructors, she was a volunteer. She knew how to coach absolute novices. She was not in any way ready to sit right seat with somebody driving at club-racing speeds, so she spent most of our session together curled up in the seat, screaming through her helmet. There was no second session; they promoted me to the “black” solo-driving group, because she refused to get back in the car with me.

My experience illustrates a general point: Track-day instructors are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. If you still have things to learn—and most of us do—how do you evaluate an instructor before taking a single lap? And if you end up with someone who’s a poor fit for your place on the learning curve, how do you make the most of the situation, safely, without wasting anyone’s time?

A good instructor will be on time, or early, for your session. He or she will be almost eerily calm, even though you are about to risk both your lives for 20 minutes or more. They will ask you specific questions about your experience, both in general and on that track. And you will discuss your goals.

You should have answers prepared. In particular, you should be able to convey your goal for that session. It should be concise and achievable. “I wanna go fast” is not a solid goal. “I want to fix my braking into Turn 5” is, because it’s the kind you can probably achieve, or at least work on, in a single session. Note: If it’s your first time on a racetrack, then your goal is to survive the session, and you should articulate that clearly.

After you answer your instructor’s questions, you should ask a few of your own. Ask for your instructor’s history and background. If he has no racing history, or if she is new to instructing, or if he gives you some vague answer like “I’ve been doing this forever,” be on alert that you might have to filter out some misleading information. Conversely, if your instructor is concerned only with speed and aggression, ask yourself if that’s a good fit for your needs. If you’re simply there to have fun and chase proper form, it won’t help to have someone aggressively harping on picking up the throttle and chasing tenths.

Before you leave the pit lane, ask your instructor for examples of the directions he or she will be giving you. Hand signals? Will he tell you when to start braking? When to stop? Will he be forcing you to drive “his” line, or will you be free to choose your own? Ask for a list of verbal commands used, and agree on what each means; at 150 mph down Virginia International Raceway’s back straight, you don’t want surprises.

Once the session begins, don’t be afraid to pull back into pit lane if you’re confused or unsure about what you’re being told. It’s worth losing a couple laps’ worth of track time if it keeps you from damaging your car or being injured. Feel free to make specific requests about what you want to hear and when. And if you just can’t work with your instructor, don’t hesitate to go to the event organizer and request a change. Nobody will be upset. It happens all the time.

Sometimes you’ll get an instructor who is safe and sane and reasonable, but you just can’t seem to learn anything. In that case, you can always do what driving coach Ross Bentley calls a “sensory input session.” Instead of trying to follow your instructor’s every command, you can spend your time focusing on just one of your senses. You can focus on vision by looking around the track more. You can listen to the engine and how it revs when you unwind from a corner. You can concentrate on how the wheel moves in your hands. If you really zero in on the data you get from one of your senses, you’ll see results in your speed.

In a perfect world, we would all have a private driving coach who would monitor our progress and guide our development, but most of us can’t afford that. So imagine that you’ve hired yourself for that job. Interview your instructors. Set well-defined goals.

If you do all of that, someday you might be in the right seat yourself.

—JACK BARUTH, ILLUSTRATION BY DREW BARDANA

[cmac]

Good article!