Today I was in Hastings, NE attending Driver's Instructor training at MPH. Instructors assist driver's who are attending track weekends for the first time. Today's training was a combination of classroom and role playing on the track. There were 6 other candidates also attending the instruction. The classroom training was from a corporate Porsche employee who does this training nation-wide. Then instructor candidates were assigned an existing instructor who played the role of a new student and the candidates worked with them on the track. The "new students" would exhibit all kinds of bad behavior to see how candidates reacted & assisted / corrected the student.
I was asked to attend today's training back in April. I have been looking forward to today since then, but I was also nervous. The last time I felt this nervous was when I was the student attending my first track w/e. My "student" happened to be the head instructor of our region and I felt very comfortable working with him. In our first session, he was role playing as someone who had never driven on the track but wanted to go fast. The second session, he was someone who had never driven on a track but was an excellent street drifter. Our third session had him as someone who had track experience but wanted to work on improving in a couple of the 13 corners. In addition to "teaching" him about track in, apex, and track out, he also did things like play with the radio, ask if he could answer his cell phone, ask if he should tailgate the slower car in front of him, point people by in non-passing zones, ask how those skid marks off the track occurred (I said the driver was probably distracted - hint, hint), and sawed on the steering wheel. During our third session, he started cutting some very good (and fast) laps. I reminded him we were doing our sessions w/o helmets. The red mist cleared and he slowed down. After ea session, he said I had done very well.
The final session was with a different instructor / "student". My new instructor is a lady who races a 944 in Club Races and was the person who initially asked me to attend the training. Her role play was someone who was driving her husband's Porsche on the track for the first time and was a bit reluctant. For some reason I was a bit nervous and was a bit slow with my instructions. She said she was going to pick up the pace and I'd have to react faster. That got me back into the instructor mode and back to helping her along. She went into a corner too fast and said "opps, I blew it". I said "that's OK, we survived". Afterwards, she said that was a perfect answer. She said I did great.
After everyone's 4th session, the instructors went over all the notes they had taken after ea session to see how we did. I did a few laps in my Cayman while they reviewed their notes. I saw the lady after they were done and she said I passed with flying colors. I'm now able to mold new drivers on the proper and safe way to have fun on a track. There are certainly things taught in the classroom that I can incorporate in my training, but I had a lot of "problems" thrown at me today that I was able to overcome. I'm looking forward to my first DE as an instructor in Aug.
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