A member in an endurance racing team? It all started as a kid. My favorite toy was a Hot Wheels cars or a Matchbox car or especially a Johnny Lightning car. This was very cool since my mother worked for Topper Toys and she got the Johnny Lightning ones for free.
Fast forward another 34 years and my son is fascinated by Hot Wheels and then moves on to the Transformers, cars especially of course.
Fast forward again, my son now has his permit. How do you train a new driver. Well it all started with hundreds of hours at various go kart tracks across the country, but what to do now that it really matters? We had a very extensive process, (we can elaborate in detail if anyone is ever interested) but a HPDE (high performance driving education) course seemed like a great idea. So it turns out his firt time ever driving alone is on the high banked turns and infield course at Pocono raceway. Being a good dad, I had to share the experience as well in another car, lol.
Once we completed this, we made a deal. Don’t drive like a jerk/idiot/dummy/etc on the road and we will do other track day driving to enjoy periodically.
There were two other key steps in the path towards amateur endurance racing. Number one was a podcast and TV show called “Everyday Driver” that had an episode on Lemons racing in Washington. Second was another podcast called “Everyone Racers” that is hosted by four members of the Three Pedal Mafia lemons racing team (who became our good friends later). Â
So lets skip to the present day. We are an amateur endurance racing team. We have a ton of friends at the races and find more every single race. We have 2.5 race cars for lemons. We have raced in two lemons races so far and are registered for at least two more this year. Our team name is Garage Heroes (In training) and at this point, the emphasis is on the “In Training” part of our moniker. Â
We have a team of 8 drivers and growing. Two of which learned to drive a manual transmission just to race in the last race. In total, we have 3 high school teen drivers and 5 parents, with at least two more younger kids in training to get into the car ASAP and a bunch of other high school friends chomping at the bit to get in. We all know we are way closer to the beginning of our journey into driving and working on race cars, but we are all enthusiastic about it and looking to learn as much as we can as fast as we can.
So hopefully we can accomplish one or more of our goals here for you.
- Help motivate you and your potential team to give this a shot
- Help you learn along with us and ideally learn from you as well
- Help save you some learning lessons and hopefully save you time or money, likely at our expense
- Entertain you with the process, our ups and downs, and hopeful improvement.
Who says that none of the kids care about driving? Or that no one cares about driving! Perhaps when you do more than steer a care it becomes a bit more exciting. There is a vast difference between steering a car and driving one.
Welcome aboard and enjoy the ride!