Robert Henriksen

You don't?

Al P.

SundayDriver

I started instructing because I wanted to both give something back and wanted to get more. Teaching forces the teacher to become a better student.

I got in one car with 5 points and after tightening the belts pushed forward and the shoulder harness moved. It was threaded wrong.
A friend pulled the shoulder adjuster and the harness came loose.
I adjusted one set and it hit the adjustment limit way before it was tight.
I saw photos of belts mounted to conduit - hidden behind panels so no one could see.
I have seen 5-6 very poor installation jobs on belts or roll bars.

I no longer instruct unless I know the person, and know who prepared the car (and they are someone I would trust with my life). Otherwise, I do not instruct any longer mostly due to those safety concerns. Additionally the race car takes far too much time between sessions to both instruct and do what I need to do.

Bill Gregory

You mean you haven't been watching the grid girls thread in offtopic? Isn't that standard fare at all events?

Honkity Hank

I am fairly new to the instructor ranks but can say that I do enjoy it for several reasons. I agree with most of the reasons stated above like giving back and of course the hot chicks. Good thing my wife won't come near the track with all those babes hanging on every word and breath we take!!<-- (yeh right)

One other reason for me is it gives me something else to do beside shoot the **** in the tent. There is a fair amount of down time between sessions and this gives me something to do besides check my tire pressure for the upteenth time. Not that I don't like chatting it up, I can do that all day, but the track is the reason we are there.I might get tired of it eventually or wind up with some brown undershorts unexpectively but in the long run it is what makes the track day worth it.

zffnhsn

I instruct because it's good for the club and it defers some of the costs of my track habit. Plus I learn a lot from the students and I enjoy the comraderie.

One of my first experiences instructing was with a totally inexperienced student in a Mitsu 3000GT w/100,000 miles on the clock. 24 valve, V6, twin turbo, all wheel steering, five speed. A pretty awesome car actually. It might have been better if it didn't have the orginal shocks. The driver was a good listener, he followed instructions, and he had *****, I was able to get him aclimated quickly. We were having a great time wringing out the car. Midway through the last run of the first day, at speed, setting up for turn one at Putnam the students yells...NO BRAKES!! His pedal went to the floor. I yelled back DIVE INTO THE TURN, FLOOR THE THROTTLE. He did it!! At the apex I yelled, STRAIGHTEN THE WHEEL, LIFT THE THROTTLE, DOWNSHIFT TO 3RD. He complied. The car slowed a little, I yelled DIVE INTO THE TURN, FLOOR THE THROTTLE. He did it again. LIFT! Then he lifted and we managed to slow enough going into 3 & 4 that we were able to manage without incident. Just before entering pit lane he said he had some brake pedal again. We creeped into the paddock where his brakes failed again and he knocked over his chair and cooler before I could pull the e-brake. Although he had paid for a brake flush, what he recieved was a reservior flush, the fluid in the calipers had boiled. He spent the evening flushing his system with the help of strangers and do-gooders at the DE and was back to the track the following morning. It was an interesting experience but a valuable one too. But I hope I don't have to do it again anytime soon.

Eric in Chicago

I do it to exp. off track excursions in someone else's car (eh zffnhsn? )
Really, it is something to give back to the sport/hobby that I enjoy so much. Like Sunday, I now instruct less unless the club is in a pinch, too much test and tune to do to race car and some of people I have driven with have scared the hell out of me
(not you Pete, that was fun!!)


And in Chicago, we get really cool instructor jackets!

zffnhsn

Eric,

Off track excursions are universally considered an error on the part of the instructor. By the way, did you ever break down and buy an in car communicator? Those hand signals you use aren't very effective. Hmmmm I forget, now remind me again, which signal means faster and which one means slower??

Robert Henriksen

My main theme when teaching from the right seat is vision. Nag, nag, nag. Then when I'm out driving, I start nagging myself to do as I say. It helps! It's funny, certain turns I've got a bad habit of not looking far enough through the turn, even though I'll use good vision in other turns. Made good progress on the bad-habit turns last weekend.

MikeF

Guess I'll take this down a different path. I've successfully avoided it for two reasons:

1. I do DE's purely for fun and enjoy the downtime between sessions. I'd rather not spend the weekend rushing from my car to a students without time to unwind, relax, play with my car, and enjoy the day at an easy pace. As one of the very few escapes from reality that I get to enjoy...my goal is to indulge myself for a few short weekends each year.

2. Motion sickness. I don't know about you, but if I get a little green, even once...I'm definately not 100% for the rest of the day. That's a big negative, especially when my car and my life are at stake. Even worse if you know you have to subject yourself to the passenger seat over and over.

I truly appreciate those that do it....but it's not for me.

CMMTracknut

I instruct for a number of reasons;
1. My first instructor was hoorrrrrible. If it was not for the fact that I love cars and I great friend of mine was there, I would have been terribly turned off.
2. I have a lot of laps. I have at least 2-3K laps at a number of our tracks in the midwest and I want to pass on any knowledge I can.
3. I really enjoy teaching/learning. When a student "gets it" it is a wonderful feeling. You really enjoy their enthusiasm as your own, and can remember when you were there yourself.
4. My instructor buddies are just an awesome group of people. Some of the finest I have ever known. I look forward to seeing them, bull****ting with them and chasing them around the track.

After spending as much money on track stuff as we do, it is not just the $$$. It is nice to a break on the fees (esp if you do 30 events in one season) but it not a deal breaker.

As far a exciting stories, how about instructing a Lotus Elise with slicks, or a Superformance Cobra with an AL 427, or a 2002 Cup Car. I have tons of stories. Luckily no bad ones.

I hope this helps
C

RedlineMan

This says it pretty well for me. Well, the last part is up to me, and taken care of in the pre-run interview.

I will add and freely admit that I enjoy and take pride in being an instructor and instructor mentor. I will go even further and state that I WANT to be known as a good one. Reputation is everything. It is important to me that I do it to the best of my ability. Like my driving, it is an intensely personal and internal thing. That is plenty of enducement for me to give the most that I have, and try to continually improve.

Stories? I had a young lady once... in a car... I mean as a student... OF DRIVING I mean! Driving her uncle's 993 TIP Cab. I knew quickly that she had little concept of what we were doing and why. She really had no business being out there because she did not have clue one. Oh well. I was trying to get her to stay at a slow pace and build some car feel and instinct, to very little effect. I think she thought it was a carnival ride or a video game.

I guess she felt it had been boring up till then even though I knew she was over her limit of understanding of consequences. So we go into "The 90" at Watkins Glen this one time, and she decides to take a real flier. She gets off the gas and starts to brake, and then just lets off and turns in.

Now, we were not going all that fast, and a good driver could have made it a perfect turn very easily, but not this twit. With no warning whatever, I could do little more than bark "throttle, throttle, throttle!" Hoping she would be able to set the rear of the car back down and make it through. She does nothing! She froze.

So the rear end starts to pass us, of course, and I'm yelling "Full Brake, Full Brake." We're spinning and she's doing nothing. We do a complete and clean 360 in the middle of the track, and then when we are just rolling along in a cloud of tire smoke, miraculously heading in exactly the right direction toward Turn 2, she finally puts on the brake gently and stops us dead in the center of the track.

Count one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, and she busts out bawling like a scared little kid. There she sits with a death grip on the wheel, sobbing her brains out, huge crocodile tears. I didn't know whether to cry with her, or bust out laughing! In the end all I could do was shake my head, roll my eyes, and wonder privately how she would ever survive life.

Her uncle (a huge track junkie and longtime friend) came over a little later and informed me that she would not be participating further in the driving event. I said that I would gladly help her get past this now that she had found out about consequences, but he said her withdrawal was probably a good idea. Later, I even tried to correspond via e-mail to help her learn the lessons within, but she never responded.

Some people should stick to filing their nails.

Robert Henriksen

John, I had no idea you were capable of such non-PC thought. Shame, shame, shame!

sjanes

When I started my instructor training at the beginning of last summer, I was still a little unsure if instructing was for me. I "thought" I wanted to be an instructor, mostly so I could start giving back to the club and pass on what I have learned to the new crop of drivers coming along, but I wasn't sure.

One of the first things I did during my training was to help teach at the ground school where we run a speed limited mini-DE type of event to show new students what it's like. So my first student is a mid-30's guy and seemed pretty excited about getting into DE with his 911, and he listened and made a pretty good student. We had fun, and I started thinking, "yeah, this instructing thing is for me". Then as we are finishing our run, he starts telling me how he convinced his wife to try it as well, but she's really nervous. Since the instructors pick the car to get into at the ground school, I went over to talk to her when we got into the paddock to see if she wanted to chat before going out. For the next 10 minutes, we sat in her car in the paddock talking about everything about shifting a 915 to how to get our young kids to stop throwing food

When it was our turn to go out on the track, I got her to just drive around in the center of the track to show there is no boggie man out here, and that it's really just a oneway road that goes nowhere. After a few laps, when she is comfortable driving around, I started to bring her closer to being on line, and start introducing basic concepts. The first time she hit the double apex, she said "wow, this is soo cool". By the end of the run, she was laughing and doing the double and late apex on her own.

Seeing her "get it" and have more fun than she thought she would made me realize that this instructing thing is for me.

Robert Henriksen

That's a great idea - I need to start doing that.