FEATURE
FAST & CURIOUS! Ted Welford spends a day with motor racing coach Mark Hales to learn the skills needed for safer track driving. Even away from the car, Mark can teach how to gain speed
40 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
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f you’ve spent any amount of time on the UK’s roads recently, you’ll probably also be thinking about how many different standards of driving you’ll see. From those oblivious to what lane they’re in on the motorway to others glued to their phones as if there’s a magnetic field, there are plenty of areas for improvement. This change in standard of driving is perhaps to be expected, though. As a result of lockdowns, many went from driving their car on a daily basis to only using it a handful of times in a month while also remaining local, and it’s only natural for a skill to get worse if not practised regularly. Mark Hales is a racing driver-turned-journalist who now spends most of his days teaching people how to drive. But we’re not talking about those sticking L-plates on their car for the first time, rather how to drive quickly and safely. We’re on the test track today, but there is quite a lot of overlap between this and road driving, with a surprising amount of rules that should be applied to every journey. Blyton Park is a lesser-known racetrack near Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. It’s a relatively new circuit too, being repurposed from its original use as an airfield just a decade ago. That said, it’s played an important role in the development of some well-known racing drivers, not least current F1 driver Lando Norris. Our wheels for the day are pretty good, too: Hales’s Mazda MX-5 that he uses as his everyday transport. With its combination of lightness, rear-wheel drive and manual gearbox, it’s the ideal choice to get to grips with track driving. We actually start the day nowhere near the driving seat of the MX-5 but in a portable building at the back of the track. Think detention in secondary school and you’d get the picture. But it’s this ‘grounding’ that is key to learning the basics – I should point out that this is my first experience of driving on a track, so we’re very much at a novice level. Hales kicks off the day with some stark advice: ‘You can’t know how to do this. Having a licence shows you how to operate a car and control it safely on roads, but you have to override your natural instinct as a matter of safety if you want to drive quickly.’ No pressure then. As someone who’s driven everything from historic racers to modern hypercars on track – as well as almost priceless Ferrari 250 GTOs – Hales knows more than most, and he’s clear that we have to understand the science behind driving quickly. It’s why we spend part of the day learning about grip levels and understanding weight transfer by looking at Venn diagrams. But the first bit of advice we learn is what needs to be applied to all driving, and it’s
