Turning Point….turning point.
11.15.09
Way back a while ago, I won driving lessons in Mondello Park. Obviously this was totally unexpected, and they were scheduled for 1 November, except, there was a minor glitch in that the weather did not cooperate. We rescheduled for 15 November which coincidentally, also happens to be my birthday. If you’re reading this on Facebook this probably won’t be news to you.
Anyway, this morning, dawned bright and sunny. Complete lack of rain so no phone call from Mondello to tell me it wasn’t worth my while driving down. Frankly, the sun was splitting the stones in Kildare. Coldish but not what you’d call outrageously freezing. I was happy.
Some background. I used to drive karts about 10 years ago. Nothing very serious, it was my dangerous sport of choice while I was living in Brussels. That and ice skating. Oh, and shopping in Virgin Megastore on a Saturday. Just one of those things I did to get me out of the apartment. But I haven’t done it since I left Brussels and while I’ve done loads of other dangerous type things such as whitewater rafting and other unrelated stuffy, I haven’t been in any sort of a racing mechanical implement since about 1998. Feck. It was never supposed to be that long. Theoretically I know stuff like flag signals, and racing lines and all that jazz.
I used to dream of being a rally driver too. I sort of feel that rally drivers are the rugby players of the motorsports world and that the Formula 1 drivers are the soccor players. Nothing against Formula 1 – I worshipped Mika Hakkinen. But I loved Colin McRae. This may explain the events this afternoon.
Mondello Park is great. It’s near Dublin and it’s got nice people. I’m going to get that spoke in now, because I might forget to thank Conor the instructor and Roger, the guy who took care of me, Ken the chief instructor and the girls in the office who checked my USB key was okay. These are the people who made my afternoon.
When you get down there, you sign in, you do briefing, you get kitted out and stuff. Driving suits are warm. Warm. WARM in block capital letters. This is important to know. My body wasn’t prepared for this because it’s used to being abused and dragged down onto freezing cold beaches into freezing cold water. Yesterday, for example, it was on a beach in Sligo taking photographs without the benefit of a pair of long johns. I can handle cold. The heat, that’s a different kettle of fish. Then there’s the helmet which was a hell of a lot lighter than I expected. I don’t know why I expected it to be a tonne weight. I think it’s because when I see people wearing them, they look top heavy or something.
Then you meet Conor. Conor has been a driving instructor for years. He’s been with Mondello I think ten years now and he used to race single seaters. He drives first and he drives increasingly faster around the circuit. Now normally…if my body temperature is normal, ie about 6 degrees below what it is inside this racing suit and helmet – and the briefing makes special mention of the fire extinguisher as an added bonus – this would be fine. The second thing I noticed in the instructor laps was a touch of nausea. I couldn’t be sick. I sure as hell wasn’t hungover. And I know how this works because hell…I’ve been there before on smaller little fecking things on shorter tracks with a bunch of Belgians who had aspirations of getting to Spa Francorchamps in August. They even paint the bloody racing line on the track for you. The first thing I noticed was that the racing straights were somewhat shorter than I expected but that’s only important when I’m driving myself.
Mondello Racing School has helpful signs around the place like “Brake” and “Turn In” and “Apex” and “Exit”. They are particularly important for the single seater, particularly the “Brake” one. For me, it was not quite so important, really, not at this point.
So Conor, he did a bunch of laps and I strived to remember things like where what red traffic cone was, and what gear I should be in when I got to each turn. I’ll say this. I’ve had years of doing stupid things like working out which Formula 1 driver was faster around the various tracks during qualifying and knowing the answer before idiot ITV told me simply by paying a load of attention to laps and incamera shots of laps. But it really is 100% different when you’re actually in the damn car. Even now, I can’t quite equate the circuit to the map I carefully studied in briefing. It made a hell of a lot more sense in the car than it did even in the briefing and certainly on the map. When he was done, we swapped places. And I was terrible.
Truly terrible. I wanted to be brilliant of course. I know how my mind works, it goes slowly as I get familiar with something and then whump, away like lightning. Whump didn’t happen. Whump didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons such as 1) I really wasn’t that comfortable sitting in the seat which was designed for people who don’t have hips. Not me, in other words. In fact, my entrance and exit into the roll cage were an interesting mix of total grace and total lack of grace. It’s quite some achievement to be simultaneously not graceful and graceful, I have to say. They don’t give medals for it. 2) it was a Mazda 3 and I really wasn’t all that comfortable with it “yet”. So I failed in my endeavour to be brilliant. Boohoo.
Following this, there was a consultation that went “we think you could probably do the single seater alright but I honestly don’t think you have the confidence so….maybe more laps in the saloon car.” I said yes. Definitely more laps in the saloon car, I’m right on that. I did more laps in the saloon car. They put a transponder on it so that I could pick up some lap times and walk out with proof that I’d actually done this. More proof, that is, than what the video camera was recording.
The second lot of laps in the saloon car were 5 million times better than the first lot. I don’t know why, maybe more legroom or something, me more relaxed, don’t know. I didn’t care, all I knew is that I knew the track better, felt more comfortable in the car and could identify the racing line. And, more specifically – could identify my mistakes. I sent a bunch of very consistant laptimes of around 1.24 which, compared to the laptimes that the non-wusses were setting on the single seaters – which are basically big karts (so I keep telling my head) – is kinda slow but which compared to what I did on round one, was very good. And for a saloon car…not bad. Fairly okay was a frequent comment from the instructor.
Would I do this again? Damn right and I am planning to do it again, probably early next year so that I don’t have to reclimb the learning curve, except this time I will risk getting into the single seater. Would I give it to someone else to do, yes, that too. Next boyfriend, that’s your present for Christmas, truly. Unless he wants to do icehockey or something.
The staff at Mondello are terrific. John Fair who was involved in getting me in there in the first place, Rog and Conor today. There is video but I have not worked out how to extract the bits into a file that I can throw up on Youtube – yet.
Obligatory plug: Mondello Racing School.