The one piece of advice I remember the most is from my first
instructor (You know who you are). It was at an event in my second year. I
asked him what I was doing wrong, since I wasn't doing very well. His
response "Just go faster!". I knew that in his words this meant I was
dragging my butt and "dogging" my way around the course. Sometimes knowing
that you are disappointing your instructor (And yourself when you look back
later) helps you to focus and remember what they taught you.
I also will always remember the piece of driving advice given to me
by a friend when I first started running my MR2. It was a lot different than
running my old E-Stock Street Tire 81 VW Scirocco and I wasn't used to
having so much horsepower and torque. He said "Horsepower is your friend
when you use it right", followed by "Horsepower good, John Bad, not using
Horsepower".
John Moore
1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R (STS)
1993 Toyota MR2 NA (CS) For Sale !
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Sirota [SMTP:msirota@isc.upenn.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 12:26 PM
> To: Jeff Cashmore
> Cc: autox@autox.team.net
> Subject: Re: No skirts in this email
>
> Jeff Cashmore wrote:
> > As an instructor, I find myself repeating the same things to students
> > over and over. Below are the lines I use most often.
>
> Here's mine. I'll allow some overlap with Jeff and Rocky, since the
> novices on the list will benefit from the repetition.
>
> (1) "Look ahead." I believe that almost everything else is
> secondary, including lines. If a driver has a good academic/
> intellectual understanding of lines, and looks ahead, the lines will
> come naturally.
>
> (1a) "Don't stop turning your head when you get to the A-pillars. It's
> okay to look out the side windows." It's interesting to ride with
> novices and see them do this. Happens all the time.
>
> (2) "Go slower in the slow parts, and faster in the fast parts."
> It's almost universally true that novices go too fast in the slow
> parts and too slow in the fast parts. Of course, a key component of
> this is developing the skill to recognize the slow parts and the fast
> parts.
>
> (3) "Spend as little time in the corner as possible." Mostly applies
> to hairpins and other long, slow corners. People think about
> maximizing speed, rather than minimizing time.
>
> (4) "Try driving at 9/10ths. That's more like everyone else's
> 10/10ths." I say this to people who chronically overdrive, and I've
> had pretty good results. (John Thomas actually said this to me at the
> McKamey Phase II school.)
>
> (5) "If you can't tell where to make up time, the answer is usually
> 'a little bit everywhere' or 'a tenth in each maneuver.'" Pick up a
> tenth in each of 20 manuevers, and suddenly you've picked up two
> seconds!
>
> (6) "What are you going to do differently on the next run?" Far too
> many novices don't put enough of their attention span into paying
> attention to what happened. Without doing that, there's no way they
> can make adjustments for the next run.
>
> (7) "If you have a choice between slowing down here and slowing
> down in the next manuever, slow down here." It's almost always
> better to give up earlier rather than later.
>
> There's more, I'm sure, but this is what pops into my brain at the
> moment. Perhaps someone ought to assemble the responses to this into
> a web page or something.
>
> Mark
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