Chesapeake Region
Autocross School Greg Hartke I apologize for not getting a column out last month. Some crises arose at the wrong time and I just didn’t have time to get the writing done, which means this column contains reports for all three of the events that have taken place since my last column. Lots to write about! The Chesapeake Introduction to Autocross is normally held in the spring as the first event of the year so that newcomers have the opportunity to come out and attend the School then have the whole season ahead of them. This year was different. AX Co-chair Brad Martinez and I decided to hold the School later in the year (September 11th) to give the pandemic a chance to calm down (which it did) enough to allow us to hold the event. As usual, I was carefully watching the weather forecast and was certainly relieved when the day turned out to be warm and dry. Phew! We would have held the event even if it were raining, of course, but dry conditions were certainly preferable. Preparations for the AX School are always interesting and this year was no different. The main challenge this year was rustling up instructors for the event. That’s always a challenge, but this year was a bit tougher. The problem was the schedule – instructors are more likely to be available in the spring than in midSeptember. Actually, I had arranged in the spring to have sufficient instructors for the September event, but plans change (quite understandably!) over such a span and some of the instructors were no longer available as September approached. With some quick last-minute work, we wound up with 14 instructors. Brad and I typically don’t do in-car instruction at the School (though we like to get in on the fun!) because we need to be available to run the event, which means there were actually only 12 instructors available to work with the students. Brad and I had decided to assign instructors differently than we had in the past with each instructor this year working the entire day with two students (instead of jumping in and out of different cars all day), one assigned to Group 1 and driving Heat 1 and a second assigned to Group 2 and driving Heat 2. (The Potomac Chapter did something similar this year and that’s where I took the inspiration for structuring our own School after working the POT School in the spring.) With only 12 instructors available (not including Brad and me, who could instruct in a pinch), we perforce had to limit the number of students to 24 instead of the planned 30. We may not have had the numbers, but we sure had the quality. This was a really great group of instructors. As it turned out, we needed 14 because two of the instructors had to stop working during the morning
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