2011 Novice School

Our morning starts early. Jason and I are there right at 6 am when the site opened to get things going. We had to check signage, make sure the porta-potties have been located to the correct place, all elements are still intact and start building the full course. We also had to get registration set up, brief the instructors, give the drivers meeting and handle other logistical issues that may crop up. Hats off to Lisa for doing this by herself. I'm very glad I wasn't doing this alone. Having Jason as co-chair to help coordinate was a key to making this event possible.




All things considered, the event managed to get off to a reasonable start with the toughest part getting through the drivers meeting, making sure that everybody got enough information without information overload (like when I first went to school). From the feedback, it sounds like more information could have been provided and we'll take that into consideration.

For the most part, the event ran smoothly. As the day progressed, the first delay was lunch. 30 minutes had been allocated for lunch and it took a little over an hour to get everybody fed. Fortunately, the schedule had been planned in a way to allow some leeway for delays and we ended the day about 40 minutes late.

At lunch time, we also gave out the goodies that Bridgestone had provided. It was quite a sight seeing so many red Bridgestone baseball caps on site at the same time.

The next place where we had a delay was in the course walk. There were just too many people to have one instructor leading the walk - though it did make a pretty nice picture seeing a sea of red Bridgestone hats walking course.




We had a figure 8/skid pad for the students to work on, a threshold braking exercise and a slalom. Consistently, everybody finished the threshold braking exercise early and folks wanted to keep going on the slalom. At the end of the day, the students were set free on a full course where they had a chance to drive while half the students worked. The students did a great job on course. Everybody went home tired on Saturday.

Sunday was a beautiful day that started out by running late with the majority of students arriving late. I was very tempted to eject some students for being late on both days (after being warned on Saturday). We had wanted to leave the slalom up for students to practice on while others ran the full course, but the nature of the location necessitated shutting the cars down to allow cars to drive to the slalom. This idea was shelved and the students were requested to minimize leaving the site to keep the event going. This worked well for a bit, but starting around lunch time, traffic leaving increased. This didn't resolve itself even with our reminders about the event running late. Eventually, to keep the event from finishing too late, all access was stopped. Nobody was allowed to leave until the end of the day. This worked tremendously and kept the event from getting any later.

One school event finished without any major mishaps. I believe every student learned something about themselves, their car and their driving. A good event ended and carmageddon was not to be - at least I didn't hear of anybody being affected by it.