PhilFausz wrote:
As the title states, we're open to suggestions. I just can't promise we'll take them!
I've chaired a lot of novice schools over the years and you'll find that there are as many different suggestions for how to do this as there are people in the club. Nonetheless, what I personally found worked best, for both the instructors and the novice students, I will describe briefly here.
If the site permits it, I would set up three stations. Each station is a "mini course" if you want to call it that. The stations would be placed on the site such that they could be easily linked together into a full course in the afternoon, if time and circumstances permit.
The three examples that follow are basically a long U shape, which is what you have to work with on most airport sites.
Station 1) evenly spaced salom going out on the right side and head toward a single pivot cone and come back on the left side with an increasing or decreasing spaced slalom. This provides an opportunity to practice -
a) starts and hard accelerations
b) setting speed before the slalom entry
c) evenly spaced slalom
d) hard braking before a pivot and how to do a pivot cone
e) uneven slaloms
- decreasing spacing requires the student to slow the car toward the end, to learn to read the spacing of a decreasing slalom, and to pay attention to cone spacing
- increasing slaloms give you the opportunity to help the student practice applying throttle through elements that open up
Station 2
My favorite is something like this:
1) hard launch into a lane change.
2) turn around using a decreasing or increasing radius curve
3) return through a Chicago box or go back through the lane change.
You can practice an increasing radius turn for the first half of the time, then a decreasing radius turn for the last half by running this in the opposite direction.
Station 3
There are a variety of optons here.
One option is to start and go through a series of offset gates. Depending on the site, you can make these fairly far apart. I would keep the distance and the amount of offset the same for about for or five gates and then do a turn around and come back through.
This is exercise is very important as you lets you teach the importance of setting up early. You want the students to get into a rhythm, thus the reason for keeping the distance and offset amounts the same.
For one of the exercises, you should set up a practice threshold braking zone, though you will get some of this practice in braking before rounding the pivot cone. The idea here is simple. You want the students to learn how long it takes to stop the car in a straight line from a reasonable speed (say about 40 to 45 mph). You can either set a cone from them to apply the brakes, or set a gate up which you call the "stop gate". The idea of the latter is that you tell them stop with the car as close to the stop gate as possible without going through it. They choose when to apply the brakes should practice threshold braking until the car stops.
In some ways, practicing this type of braking before the pivot cone is even better because in autocrossing, you rarely come to a full stop, and getting smoothly off the brakes before a turn is as important as applying them smoothly in the beginning.
Many of the instructors in this club could write a book about how to set up a school and each would have different ideas. The above is just one way to do it. What you actually do depends on the site, how many students, etc. The above idea works well when you take about an hour at each segment before lunch, or maybe two stations before lunch and one right afterwards. Ideally, you would link the elements together during a break and let the students see the entire course. If you do this right, and an event follows the next day, you might get away with running the course the opposite direction for the event the next day and using many of the elements as placed.
The above examples provide all of the basic elements of autocrossing, including the THSCC commonly seen elements;
- slaloms (even and increasing/decreasing)
- increasing / decreasing radius turns
- offsets
- lane changes
- threshold braking practice
- pivot cones
- Chicago Box
Sites like Laurinburg actually offer opportunities to do some interesting things not available so easily at other sites, or at least done in a unique way. I haven't looked yet to see where the school is, but you can have a lot of fun with elements that are set up on the "P" and at the crossover.
This type of layout is one that allows the student to learn the basic elements of autocrossing and also begin to practice car control at the limits of adhesion. You want the students to be able to go fast enough to experience pushing and oversteering and to experience the limits of their car, but not so fast as to be really frightening. Elements that allow third gear should not be included in a novice school.
This layout also features very simple, easy to follow "mini courses". If the course is not visually clear or is too complex, the student spends too much mental energy on trying to figure out where to drive instead of HOW to drive the car.
Introducing them to a full course after seeing the basic elements is a good way to help the students quickly realize that an autocross is not a series of gates or a sea of cones, but a series of fundamental elements. None of the experienced autocrossers I know ever memorize every single gate, but tend to think of the course in elements - like "The launch, lane change, three offset gates, Chicago box, constant radius right turn, etc.
One last footnote. Providng lunch and a lunch time speaker is also a nice touch. It is fun for the students, and allows time to share things that just don't get communicated in the car. Eric Peterson was always one of my favorite lunch time speakers!
Good luck!
Miles
91 Corvette Z07
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