Quote:
Originally Posted by TramRam
Time to strap the hard hat on and risk my life!
It's actually fun when the 'lights' go on and the GET IT!!! We all had to learn from SOMEONE!
|
The most difficult "lights" student that I had was one of three assigned to me at an autox school. The kid was driving a Maxima, and 6 seconds slower than the other students at lunch break time. Instead of listening to my instructions on how to improve his driving, he insisted that the reason he was so slow was because of the 30-pound rear seat in his car. His focus was on trying to find someone in the paddock with a tool kit to take the rear seat out, and not on what I was trying to explain to him.
Long story short...I put him in the passenger seat of his Maxima during the lunch break, and put the other two students in the back seat. Drove a run through the course with 300 pounds of student ballast in the back seats and him in the front seat, and ran 8 seconds faster than he did with nobody in the car. (We use the 85% rule when driving student cars, so there was still more left in the car.) Once his eyes were opened by seeing my time in his car with TEN TIMES the weight of the rear seat in the back, he started to listen and ultimately wound up being fastest of my three students that day.
On the other side of the coin, I had fun as a student at a charity track event. People paid $1,000+ to drive two hot laps in track school-owned cars around a road course, with an instructor in the passenger seat. A company that I did a brief side gig for gave me a ticket to the event as a bonus, so I went and pretended that I was a clueless donor. The lead instructor recognized me as I walked into the classroom, and I'm guessing as some hazing ritual set me up with their newest instructor.
He drove two 75% laps around the track, with me in the passenger seat. I had never seen this particular track, but two laps was enough for me to get a good view with all of my autox seat time. We swapped seats, and I pulled out onto the track acting scared and hesitant through the first few corners. Then, I floored the throttle driving into a set of quick S turns. He drove it at ~50 MPH, and I figured that I could easily do it without lifting off the throttle at 57-58 MPH. I'm sure that there was a pucker mark in the passenger seat after that, and he made me go back to the pit road to be yelled at without taking my second lap. The lead instructor did a formal introduction instead of yelling, and I gave my second hot lap to one of the charity's volunteers who I'm sure enjoyed it way more than I would have with all of my previous seat time.....