buckle-up

It really doesn’t matter how well you prepare for a weekend at the track, it’s not until you roll out of the hot pits and onto the track for the first session before you can tell whether the preparation was worth it. You can watch a lot of videos of other drivers, and feel as prepared as you can be, but there’s never any substitute for getting in the car and just “having a go” by yourself. It is the first weekend of the new calendar year and the setting was the main track at Willow Springs – better known as Big Willow - just a little to the west of Rosamond, CA. It’s on the edge of the Mojave Desert and with spring still weeks away, the daytime temperatures were on the chilly side – perfect for any “forced-air induction” engines. And the C6 ‘Vette we take to the track has a very big forced-air induction engine. Conditions couldn’t be better! The picture at the top of the page is of cars in pre-grid prior to one of the afternoon races and it was the first time I could recall s...

When one year’s program comes to an end and there’s a break between the last event of year that’s ended and the first outing of the New Year, there’s scarcely a time when you are not thinking about your car, and about your own capabilities as a driver. Will the experience gained in one season automatically carry into the next? When you return to the track, even a familiar one, will lessons learnt be forgotten or will it just be a case of picking up where you left off the year before? I sure hope it will be just like with riding a bicycle: somehow it all comes back to me each time I pick one up! If it were only that easy! I suspect that with just one year of experience under our belts, and with so much more to learn, it will be slow going for the first couple of sessions. There’s a reason why the High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) program conducted by the National Auto Sport Association (NASA) starts with a Novice program (HPDE 1) before you move on up to the Beginners program...