Went on a driving tuition day today at Elvington airfield near York with Driver Skills Limited (
www.driverskills.com).
Morning session consisted of:
1 - briefing on traction and weight transfer.
2 - emergency crash avoidance - steering whilst heavy on the brakes and ABS engaged.
Had about 5 goes building from 40mph to 60mph.
Never been in a situation where I've needed to do this and was amazed what the car (one of their Golf TDI's) was capable of.
3 - skid pan training - inducing lift off oversteer (one of their Focus cars with low grip tyres on) and trying to correct it and drive out of it. Looks a lot easier than it is but got plenty of goes to get it right eventually.
4 - briefing tips on getting out of cars if you end up upside down or on your side etc.
Afternoon session consisted of:
1 - 2 sessions of 7 or 8 laps of a circuit on the airfield in my GTI with the instructor guiding me through each lap.
2 - a "fast lap" with him keeping quiet and letting me make all the decisions.
I can recommend it if you've not done anything like this before.
There were 4 of us to 1 instructor in the morning and 3 to 1 instructor in the afternoon,
so there was a bit of waiting around, but then also a bit of time to talk to others with different cars etc.
Pretty relaxed all round, free tea and coffee all day, on site cafe for lunch.
Lessons:
1 - the driver is probably the weakest link overall.
2 - my car is still standard and its the first time I've pushed it hard'ish - the brakes are probably the cars weakest link. I've still got the original Dunlop tyres on and so can't compare with other tyres, but they seemed OK to me, despite them generally being slated on this forum.
3 - mine's a DSG and I tried 1 session in manual and one in sport mode - should have done it the other way round - get the lines right first without worrying about the gears, then get the shifts right on the second session.
Manual was more rewarding especially as being stock, mine loses grunt at the top end of the rev range so changing up a bit before the S mode would change up just felt better.
But then I don't want to start yet another manual v dsg mass debate...
Hope some of this is useful to someone, I get a lot of info from here so wanted to give a bit back.
Cheers.
