This year during the regular series, my wife Wil ran 8 events with me in
Street Tire class. She is a complete novice with NO other high performance
driving experience. She chose to run STL at the same time as me and she
wanted me in the car to instruct for every run. So I did 3 runs as a
passenger/instructor interspersed with my competition runs at those
events. I personally found it more difficult to do my runs because I
didn't have total concentration on my driving, but was also thinking about
how to instruct her. I was convinced that instructing REDUCED my
performance. So I just did a quick calculation to check. I looked up the
results for my Street Tire events and compared results for those events
when I instructed her and those I did not:
7 events with riding 3 runs: average finish position 1.7, average event PAX 32
8 events without riding: average finish position 1.3, average event PAX 34
The differences here are not statistically significant. Although the sample
size is small, I'd now have to conclude that there wasn't much effect of
riding either way, but I was probably more consistent in the events I did
without riding.
Dave
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