Kat Bryce writes...
>Oh, please. This can't be the LAST ONE.... more
>more more..
Okay, I'll try! :)
The title of this story is "Looking Ahead: My Story"
by Katie Kelly
I had this really interesting teaching experience, if you can call it that,
just recently. A couple of events ago, a friend at an autocross let me
co-drive her Audi S4, and the pay back was that I give her some tips. Well,
she was a good sport about it, because I think my tips were awful. I was
struggling to find the words, because I seldom think about this stuff, and
the look on her face by the end of it all conveyed to me that she was
disappointed with my confusing and long winded dissertations on late apexing
and early accelerating, laws of physics, blah blah blah. "Um, yeah, thanks,
Katie," she said. "I learned a lot." Nice words, but I knew that she was
more confused than ever.
I blew it again!
Later, a girlfriend had taken a lap with her boyfriend in the passenger seat
(Mistake #1). The look on her face told me that he was having about as much
success as I did with my first experiment. Now's my chance to redeem myself!
I thought, and I asked if I could ride with her.
All I did, and I can't believe how well this worked, was do what Jean Kinser
and Brian Priebe did for me at the McKamey Autocross School. I seriously
just sat in the car and said, "Look over there, look over there," pointing
way ahead on the course. She was left to figure out the braking,
accelerating, and lines on her own.
She dropped several seconds, and was ecstatic. The next run, she tried a
certain section flat out, because she was looking so far ahead. She of
course spun out, but it was like this major revelation. I was completely
blown away, because prior and after the spin, she was accelerating so early,
the rear end was sliding out, she was unwinding the wheel, she was
*drifting*, she was doing all of these supposedly "difficult" things, and
here it was like her second autocross, and all I was saying was, "Duh huh,
look ahead."
Encouraged by this success (though I could hardly call it my own) I tried
this same approach with this kid at a NASA event who had DNF'ed his first
three runs, had only one more chance, and couldn't even understand where he
drove off the course. "I think it's because I didn't walk the course," he
said.
Probably, but I tried the same thing. I didn't say a word, other than this
Look Ahead mantra thing. He totally nailed the part he had DNF'ed three
times before, was totally aggressive, and SMOOTH! I was just sitting there,
in both cases, totally amazed by what awesome drivers these people were, and
I hadn't told them a thing, other than, "Look over there, look over there."
The rest, the perfect lines, the aggression, the smoothness, they all did
completely on their own. I was like their training wheels, if anything.
Nothing I did was magical.
ANYBODY can do this, that's the beauty of it. It's so much easier to look
ahead as a passenger, because you're not doing anything but sitting there.
Get someone to ride with you, to act as your training wheels, to physically
point out the window to help you train yourself to "Look over there."
There are of course all sorts of things you can do, different tips and
things, and most of these you can read in a book. Thinking about them too
much will slow you down, however. Looking ahead is perhaps one of the
simplest concepts yet so hard to master. It makes figuring out what lines to
take, braking points, all that complicated stuff so much more conquerable.
I'm just thinking, if I could somehow package this and sell it, I'd make a
mint. I think I'll call it the Revolution Performance Driving School.
That's my really long tip for the day. It's the only tip that I have.
Katie K.
For more info about training yourself to look ahead, see
http://autocross.com/mckameyschool/
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