Street Survival from One Lap
What do you do to occupy your time in the painfully slow months following One Lap of America? Teach teens how to drive of course. This past weekend Sean and Stephen decided to offer some instruction seat time with the Street Survival program, put on through the Genesee Valley BMW Club. We did have a Street Survival sticker on the One Lap cars this year, as it is a Tire Rack supported event, carried out nationwide.
If you are not familiar with this program, here is the premise. You take teenage drivers, who are just getting, or about to get their license and teach them how to deal with emergency situations on the road. While some of them have only just started driving, there is a high rate of accidents among teenage drivers, which this program focuses on reducing. You do this by setting up a series of simulations using cones in a large parking lot, so the teens can learn how the car will react when they need it to. By learning proper braking techniques and learning how to react when the car looses traction, they gain a huge advantage on the road, where you can’t really practice for such events.
Homework
The day before class, I took at look at the student instructor pairings and found out my student was driving a 2001 Subaru Forester. It happens to be the same car that my neighbor has, so I asked to take it for a test drive to make sure I knew how the car would handle. Besides determining that my neighbor needs new brakes on every corner of the car, it helped me to know what sort of expectations to see out of the car itself. After stepping out of a 400+ horsepower One Lap car, it was pretty easy to handle because everything was in slow motion. It also pivots real easy if you want it to, so I knew focusing on braking and turning at the same time would be a big advantage in this car.
Instructing
Volunteering for this event was an easy one, because it has to be the most fun and rewarding driving schools on the planet for an instructor. I was leery on what to expect in regards to results the first time out, but now I know why this program is such a success. It grabs the drivers before they have been corrupted with years of bad habits, and they listen without the burden of all of those expectations. Sean was already a veteran of instructing the program and still had a yellow shirt to prove it. I can say with confidence that I will use my yellow shirt again with pride.
Media Coverage
Despite an overcast and foggy day, there were a few news crews that came out to document the class. You can catch up on the articles and video clips through their websites.
http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext/?nxd_id=184805
Instructing the instructors was none other than Stu Sacks, a veteran One Lapper who gave us our advice the first year we entered the event.
the driving schools in our area are quite good in giving basic driving lessons:-’