Driver Education

EP 0020: Christian “Mental” Ward

From the Three Pedal Mafia and the Everyone Racers podcast (“Mental” Hours #1, 2, & 3, lol)

Mental is one of our earliest friends from racing. We originally “met’ him online when we had been on one episode of the Everyone Racers Podcast. We finally met Mental in person at our first race at NJMP in May of 2018. Our race went exceptionally well. However, his was not one of his favorite races as we discussed in this episode.

Mental is a very accomplished and experienced driver who has competed in many types of racing series and disciplines as well as being an instructor. He is very skilled but self deprecating and extremely approachable. If you ever bump into him on the track, please say hello. But only if you have a few minutes to talk, lol.

Alan, Vicki and Bill talked with Mental for over three hours for this episode. Unfortunately, some of Alan’s audio was lost so his “English brother Alan” stepped in for him a few times. But, still we ended up with our longest episode by far at just under 3 hours. So if you want a podcast to listen to on the way to work, we may have covered your whole week’s commute with this one.

We covered a wide variety of topics and many, many stories, some of which even applied to racing. We hope you feel like you know him a little better after this episode and we are very happy to call him a friend.

EP 0020: Christian “Mental” Ward – Special Guest Racing Driver

EP 0019: Annika Carter

Our Special Guest Racing Driver

Annika with her MX-5 Mia — Annika with her Spec Miata MX-5 “Mia”

We first noticed Annika Carter on Instagram where her moniker is Not.My.Boyfriends.Car (The best Instagram name ever!) We then noticed she was going to be racing with us at Road Atlanta for our last Lemons race of our 2018 calendar season. She has quickly worked her way up and races as much as she possibly can. She has already earned her racing license through NASA and we know she can drive as she passed us many, many times during our weekend together. Alan, Vicki, and Bill discuss how things have been going as well as upcoming plans and goals. Please welcome Annika to our podcast as this week’s special guest.

Annika Drives Hard with 4 or Three Wheels!

We also added in a brief discussion on the upgrades to our Capri/Camaro transplant oil system, going over oil cooling and the differences between a wet and dry sump system.

Finally, we also discussed whether or not to start a third project race car where we get a low dollar daily driver and convert it into a race car for use on multiple racing series that we are interested in.

We’d love to hear from you if you would be interested in us starting this project and giving updates and progress summaries along the way on our website and of course the podcast.

Mid-pack but not for long — Annika Mid-Pack, but not for very long

Thanks again for listening and please leave a rating and review on whatever your podcast application of choice is along with any questions or requests for guests, questions, or topics you may have.

EP 0019: Annika Carter -Our Special Guest Racing Driver

Episode 0013: Goals for the GHiT Team 2019

One way to get things done is by using Goals — Setting goals is one way to help make sure to get things done

Alan and Bill review the past week and outline several of their personal and team goals for our racing season next year.

The consistent use of goals, goal setting, and developing a detailed process to achieve them is key to our progress and many other aspects of our lives.

We hope you listen to the episode and it may help you in so many ways, not just in racing.

Also, please let us know what your goals are and we can discuss them or we may be able to help you with them on an upcoming episode.

We had a blast and we hope it shows on the podcasts.

And from the bat cave, Alan discusses various methids and tools to lift you car to make working on it easier.

If there is anything that you would like to know that we may have left out, please send us an email using the link below or even better would be to leave a review on iTunes for our podcast and in the comments section enter any questions or topics you may be interested in us finding an answer for you. Thanks again for coming.

Podcast Episode 0013: Goals for 2019

Performance Driving 101: Our Review

Speed Secrets Driving Education by Ross Bentley

Performance Driving 101 is an entry level driving course that is aimed at improving your understanding of car control, both for on track and everyday driving. It quickly and efficiently summarizes a wide variety of topics and approaches. As the website says, it is a great place for new and inexperienced drivers to begin while also allowing more experienced drivers to reinforce and refresh topics they are likely familiar. However, even more experienced drivers will likely see new perspectives and approaches that will make you think about the topics in a new way or from a new perspective.

The Performance Driving 101 course is presented with short videos and follow up summary points.
Most sections will end with a review question to help assure you get the topics covered.
The presentation is very well done and the quality of the videos is very high.
Each topic covered is complete but is presented in such a way that I can see where each section is prepared for any additions that may come up over time.
If you like Mr. Bentley’s book series “Speed Secrets” or his podcast, you will be familiar with his style and very comfortable with this course.
My biggest takeaway from the course was related to modifying corner apex’s. It is no surprise to those that know me that i am very mathematical, logical, and literal. While a benefit in some areas, this has led to a problem in this area. I had not realized that the geometric apex of a corner was not the ideal apex for many corners and that by modifying the apex and the line, I could go faster than the geometry says I can. Essentially, I had never thought of late apexing and its potential impact on a course and overall time. I know this is a fairly basic concept to most, but i had missed it through my training and experience to this point. Filling that gap alone made the course worthwhile to me.

The Performance Driving 101 course is a bit shorter than I would have liked. It probably takes between 1 hour and two hours to complete and absorb the information. However, it is an introductory course with a 201 version that i am also taking (but not yet) so that may be better for me.
I found the questions a little confusing in some instances. It felt like a tricky college multiple choice test. However, it may be that I have taken way too many of those in the past and I am being too sensitive.

Nothing really ugly to report here. Overall, a well done course that is really good for new drivers on a path towards racing or just new drivers in general.

We would have liked an option to have our team take the course, but it is currently set up for individual/personal licenses.

The Performance Driving 101 course is great for new drivers, new racing drivers, and for anyone looking to take an HPDE class/event. All the information is presented very clearly and is readily understandable. It is not aimed at drivers with a lot of experience, but we bought it as a package with the 201 course and wanted to make sure our fundamentals were solid and in place before taking the advanced course. I would add this onto the driver training regimen our team recommends for drivers with a new driver permit or who may have recently taken their driving test. It applies very well to everyday driving around the local roads and highways. As always, the goal is to raise our children to eventually become responsible adults and driving is another skill they need to be proficient at and hopefully master.

Overall Grade: B for racers, A for new or recent drivers.

Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!

Learn to Race versus Learn to Drive a Race Car

When we first went out on the race track, we expected to be slow relative to the other drivers. We viewed our first race as an opportunity to learn to race a car. We had all raced go carts, most of us many, many times. But we weren’t expecting the amount of information that we were being presented. Both the pace and volume of information was overwhelming. There were “rumors” that some of us had already driven faster than we ever went on the race track but there we were on the track and we had to:

Drive safely
Drive quickly
Learn the track and plan our racing “line”
Watch out for traffic ahead of us
Watch out for faster traffic from behind
Monitor the track for debris
Modify line and speed as a result of any changes incurred from above
Learn to race other cars

And on top of that, we also had to monitor the “hidden” flag stations that were along the track. This was simply no longer anything like rush hour traffic. (Even though the Capri was travelling at fairly low speeds, at NJMP, rarely above 60 mph/100 kph)

What we did learn at our first race was considerable. Eventually, things seemed to slow down, even though our car was going faster. Race traffic wasn’t as large of a problem. Racing line and the needed adjustments came a bit more naturally. we even began to see every flag station on every single lap. However, while we were faster, we still weren’t all that fast. We ended the race almost in the exact middle, but it was largely a reflection of our car prep more than any driving “speed”. There was a lot to learn and we started to look for ways to improve. After all, we are Garage Heroes In Training, with the emphasis on the “In Training”.

Admittedly, I like learning and I like books, so I went and looked into many books and bought a few. Ross Bentley’s Speed Secret Series was recommended highly so we picked it up. We also picked up a book by Ben Collins and another by Paul Gerrard (maybe I have a thing for former “Stig’s”). We also looked into YouTube resources, but they varied in quality and the information was less reliable on being correct on what we should do. Another issue was that admittedly reading isn’t the most exciting thing to do and we all ended up getting sucked into the race car fixing and race weekend preparation throughout the summer and most of the pages have yet to see my eyes. I also looked on audible and none of them seemed to be available on audio book formats. Too bad, learning to drive while listening to the book while driving seems like an awesome way to do it. (Open hint/request to the authors)

We also did some HPDE driving classes and go cart racing practices. Both were good, but I still felt like there was more that could be done and it was obvious we had a lot of room to improve so we weren’t talking about the last little bit, we all had large open chunks of things we were doing wrong and plenty things to learn to race cars more efficiently and effectively, especially in traffic..

So what options remained? Private coaching seemed like a good plan. Cost, availability, travel requirements , restricted time availability made that a bit more challenging to perform frequently to really get better. HPDE courses also fell into a similar list of restrictions. What we were trying to avoid was reinforcing bad habits over and over, so like in golf bad practice is worse than no practice at all for reinforcing bad habits. This concern has led to us towards discounting I-racing/simulators. While we could see our lap times go down and potentially learn the race course, we could also reinforce bad habits that may impact our driving. What we needed was a more frequent, higher repetition method that we could do at home or while driving regularly day to day.

Some more internet sleuthing and Google-Fu led to two things we are going to try. The first is a digital track walk of an upcoming race track that I have never seen in person. While the two in person track walks we have done with the Three Pedal Mafia have been tremendously helpful, and we will continue to do them at every track that we can, they can only transpire while we are both at a track and usually at the end of the practice day or first race day when the track allows us out there. This video track walk looks to give us a large percentage of that experience, but we can view it at home, before we get to the track and even look at it repeatedly. We wont have good feedback until we race at Road Atlanta in December, but I will definitely report back.

Also, to augment this, we purchased two online video courses from Ross Bentley for Performance Driving 101 and Inner Speed Secrets 201 as a bundle. These will hopefully help us identify what we are doing wrong or missing and reinforce what we are already doing correctly. In addition, we can hopefully use these principals to practice on the road and maybe even while cart racing and on simulators. Again, we don’t know how this will go, but for less than the cost of a single day at most High Performance Driving Education/Experience classes we are going to give it a shot. I hope to report back in the coming weeks with our progress, in addition to the usual race summaries we have for our upcoming races at Hew Hampshire in October and Road Atlanta in December. With both of these the goals remain the same. We are all looking to learn to drive better and also to learn to race cars better.

If you have any questions that I may not have covered already, please let us know. I can add it into this article or respond through email. There is even talk amongst our team of starting up a podcast to help everyone learn along with us. Hopefully, we can help you to get into this sport we love with your friends and family. Once you do, you will have a ton of new friends as well.

So Come Out with Us and Enjoy the Ride!