The new & improved SCCA HPDE

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Grand Touring Motorsports started as a social group of car enthusiasts, but we’ve expanded into all sorts of motorsports disciplines, and we want to share our stories with you. Years of racing, wrenching, and motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge and information through our podcast, Brake Fix.

What’s going on everyone, and welcome to another installment of Brake Fix. I’m your host, Brad, aka The Triple Six. With me, as always, is our co host, Eric. Tonight,

Crew Chief Eric: we have a panel of folks from the Washington DC region of the Sports Car Club of America here to educate us on their new and improved high performance driver’s education program, also known as HPDE.

With us tonight are Chief Instructor Joe Obenberger, Assistant Chief Instructor Barron Mills, and former HPDE Chairman Travis Dixon. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Thank you. Hi Eric. Hi Eric.

Crew Chief Brad: Our goal tonight is to continue the conversation we’ve been having with our listeners over several BrakeFix episodes where we introduce the idea of high [00:01:00] performance driving to folks that are new to motorsports.

Folks who are curious about what they can do with the sports car they have sitting in their garage, or maybe aren’t aware that organizations like SCCA offer a service like HPDE.

Crew Chief Eric: In our preparation for this episode, we found a little bit of history on your guys program. Originally, it was known as PDX or performance driving experience.

It is now known as the SCCA HPDE and has been around for quite some time. From what we found, it started in the 2006 to 2007 season. And we can attribute some of that to two members of GTM who were influential in getting that program off the ground. Racer, Ron Sherry and Matthew Yip. Thanks And from what we’ve gathered, the original format was influenced by their experiences.

From other organizations like BMW, Audi club, and others. It also turns out that WDCR was actually the first region in SCCA to have an HPDE program. But like every new endeavor, SCCA HPDE wasn’t without its [00:02:00] challenges, but it has become a very successful and reputable service.

Crew Chief Brad: But, but let’s fast forward.

Let’s focus on what’s new and what’s changed. How has SCCA grown the program and evolved it over the last 13 years? What’s the future of SCCA HPDE look like and why should you come out to their next event to check it out? Well, Joe, Barron, and Travis are here to answer all those questions and more.

Crew Chief Eric: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about

Travis Dixon: SCCA HPDE?

I think a little of the back story. back into that history of it is that the program was started by people from a bunch of different other programs. So even with, you know, Matt and Ron were involved, some other folks like from the autocross committee, Jim Howard, who’s no longer in the area with us, you know, those are the folks that they were on the board at the time had been part of solo committee, a bunch of different areas that said, Hey, we want to get into this, into this new area here and a new market really, you know, we saw other clubs doing it and We were always pretty shameless about trying to, you know, beg, borrow and steal the [00:03:00] best parts we could find.

And that’s why it was helpful for folks like Matthew and others to go out and, you know, run with other clubs, instructed and help put on events and such to come back and say, Hey, this is what we saw worked here. It doesn’t work. And we sort of tried to cherry pick the best elements from that and put them together.

At the same time, the collective mindset was a lot of around. Don’t make this into another SCCA program, you know, it was purposely done to not be as as serious business as uh, As some of the other competition programs were when we started we didn’t have time trials running It was just pdx, which was the worst program name ever You know, naming after an airport, never a good sign.

And even today, it’s actually, HPD really isn’t the name now. It’s actually track events is the official name, you know, SCCA still has intellectual property stuff. So they have to have some name that they can stamp a trademark on or whatever. But for our purposes, as, as a, as a regional club, we’ve called HPD because that’s what people know.

Understand and Eric, I’m sure you, you as well as anyone understand that we’re [00:04:00] not the only game in town. And you sort of got to fit in, you can differentiate, but same time, you’ve got to make it clear to people what it is you do. And if you say that, they go, Oh, okay. I know that my buddy talks about that at work.

So that’s what it is.

Baron Mills: To be clear. We should, we should have said this up front, I guess, but, uh, there’s actually two HPD programs within. W. D. C. R. S. T. C. A. Travis, correct me if I’m wrong, but until last year, our H. P. D. E. program was the only full time program independently running program. Nationwide for SCCA.

Travis Dixon: No, there were plenty of others. Uh, yeah. And even in the development of the program, St. Louis region was another one that was sort of an early, early developer of it. And we’ve actually, you know, shared rule sets and then when them and them was such, so we’re probably running the biggest standalone

Baron Mills: events or some other event or something, but

Travis Dixon: it varies.

The, the, the, the original PDX program was designed to be flexible. It was designed to have a very minimal rule set to allow the regions to [00:05:00] use it as they saw fit for that. They could, they could use it as, as a fill in for a race. We were probably one of the first clubs, regions I should say, doing standalone HBD events though in SCCA.

Most of them were using it either as just as a, as a, as a fill in, you know, in between race groups or, you know, Some of them we’re using as a worker perk. It was, it was, Hey, we’re doing a PDX and the entries are all the flaggers who are out there. We gave it to them as a freebie to say thanks kind of thing.

So again, you know, flexibility in the room that you can get away with that

Baron Mills: underneath the region, the SCCA W uh, Washington DC region. There are now two HPD programs and the other one started middle or late last year at Dominion. They have their own program chair. They have their own chief instructor.

We’re Involved with that. We’re helping them bring that up. They’ve got a good start there. I think they’re doing pretty good Let me clear that there are actually two. Uh, we’re very very closely related

Travis Dixon: Yeah, the core group of us that they put on the events at summit point. We’ve actually done I [00:06:00] think Two events at Dominion, the DC region board has been very interested from the inception of Dominion and having a presence there and trying to participate and work with them on that.

And we actually did a couple HPD, you know, events there for a lot of us that are based, you know, north of the beltway. We basically said that, look, you know, we can, we want to keep doing things well, quality over quantity. So the region actually reached out and conscripted a few folks who were interested and from down that.

Part of the world to help duplicate the program that we have at some point, and implement similar things down there, both HPD and the time trials program, actually.

Crew Chief Eric: And I know that your sister org in New Jersey is also doing events at NJMP as well. Not probably not as many as you guys, but they do a few a year now.

Travis Dixon: Um, I, I don’t know. I can’t remember which region is doing that. I know we’ve had several years ago and over the years we’ve had folks from other regions like, like Southern New Jersey come down and spend time with us and, and, and basically see how we do it. And same pattern as us, beg, borrow and steal the things you like and that work [00:07:00] and then, uh, take them home and, and put them to use in, in your, your environment.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean as much as I try to stay agnostic, but yes, you’re right There’s multiple groups out there to look into I guess which begs the question, you know What gets a new driver out of their garage to come out and burn some gas on a track with SCCA? SCCA

Joe Obernberger: is A little bit more unique with the other clubs is this whole community that we seem to have, especially in our classrooms, the novice classroom, the intermediate classroom.

There’s this sense of community that we’re bringing people together and that when they attend the classrooms, when they attend the events, they’re a part of this, this greater community. It is a volunteer organization. Everyone who attends Barron’s does this all the time. We’re all volunteers. And I think that builds a welcoming, environment for students to come to.

Baron Mills: I think kind of the generic comment on HPDE is for me, it’s an adrenaline rush, right? It’s just a lot of fun. And, and one of the neat things about it is you can, [00:08:00] once you come out and just after the first event or two, you There’s so many different areas that can interest different people. Some people love buying speed and working on their car.

Some people like just improving their driving skills. Other people like the community, other people come out and drive at 60 percent all the time and never really advance and they’re happy there and we fully support that kind of driver. Once you kind of get your foot in the door and come out for an event, there’s so many different ways to enjoy the hobby.

Other than just coming out and trying to drive at the limit of the car and the limit of yourself. That’s really, really a fun part, a fun aspect of the hobby.

Crew Chief Eric: So I’d say one thing you missed on the list there is being able to come out and drive full tilt without getting a speeding ticket. I mean, that’s a beautiful thing.

There’s that. Travis brought this up

Joe Obernberger: on time trials. That’s something unique to SCCA. And I think students come out to our events and they see time trials taking place. [00:09:00] I mean, it’s right below, you know, racing. It’s right, right there. And I think they see that. And a lot of them are like, that’s what I want to do.

That’s, that’s for me. You know, as Barron was saying, you got the student that is happy driving 50%, you know, they give it to a hundred and that’s as fast as they want to go. And no more. When I first started doing this, I would see guys at VIR coming in in their Mayottas. Sleeping in their Miatas and then you got the guy coming in the giant RV, you know With like the pit crew and three Ferraris and the whole breadth folks that attend the events

Travis Dixon: As far as what gets people out word of mouth is the biggest thing We see that with other clubs and i’m not saying in any any way to detract from it at all Uh, of the different clubs have different fields for, for how it is.

And it’s groups of people, even, even within the instructors and such, you know, we, we’ve never tried to go in and tell people they shouldn’t run with somebody else. That’s not, not the way we work. We say, this is how we do it. And if you want to come play with us, cool, have fun. You know, we understand if you guys want to go hang with your [00:10:00] buddies and the other club that’s running somewhere else that weekend, that’s cool too.

You know, you’re not going to compete against having a good time with friends at all, ever, no matter what the product

Crew Chief Eric: is. And I’ve heard that before. It’s a sport of convenience. Sometimes, right? I want to go to mid Ohio. So whoever signed up the weekend I’m available at mid Ohio, that’s where I’m going to go, right?

Or that’s who I’m going to go party with. What’s your elevator pitch? To say, Hey, come out and try WDCR HPDE compared

Baron Mills: to other orgs.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

Baron Mills: I kind of in a nutshell, when people ask me that I have, I’ve got a couple examples, but one, one of them is it is an HPDE program, but yet it’s part of SCCA. So we get the leverage, a lot of that.

talent down into HPD. We have guys, drivers and instructors and classroom instructors that hold track records at SCCA that are very well spoken that share that wealth of experience to people that are there the first day.

Travis Dixon: When you’re looking at differentiators as well, you know, from an event [00:11:00] perspective, one of the things I like to point out is, is that back to the whole being a club perspective thing, is that we’re not out here.

To pay anybody’s mortgage. Nobody is looking for a paycheck from what we do.

Baron Mills: The other thing I think that we bring is a lot of the leadership team, the committee, and a lot of the instructors instruct for various organizations. So we, we get to see what others are doing right and wrong. And we bring that back and try to integrate it into the program.

So right now I think we’re kind of at this perfect balance where we have the Talent and expertise of the whole national SEC organization available to us if we need it, but over the last couple of years and probably even longer than that, we’ve been pretty flexible. We really, really, really try to listen to our customers and we make a major change once a year and we look at little minor tweaks literally after every event.

So we’re always listening to the customer.

Joe Obernberger: I will add that I think again, it’s, it’s this community that I [00:12:00] think we have that. That a lot of the people that come to an SCCA event. Come to the following SCCA events to have that same sense of community. I mean, back when I first started doing this, I didn’t care who was coming to the events.

I was going by myself and I would hang out by myself and drive and have a blast. But once you build up your, your kind of core set of people, you know, especially if you find someone that you’re close to, you know, a speed wise and you can follow them around the course and you, you kind of start building this, You know, your own little group that you play with all the time.

And now, for me, I mean, to go to an event where I don’t know anyone is kind of a foreign concept. But, as far as our instructors go, I mean, I’ll even say during the instructor meeting, you know, if your student asks about events, tell them about track days. Tell them about NASA events, hooked on driving, chin events, and what you think of those events.

How much track time the students get per dollar. That was what was important to me back in the day is, you know, I’m [00:13:00] forking out, you know, 350 bucks. How much time do I get on track? That was a big, you know, deciding factor for me.

Crew Chief Eric: So how much time on average does a student get at an SCCA event for their dollar?

Joe Obernberger: So it’s different per run group. So our novice students get four 25 minute sessions. Intermediate gets some additional time. I think they get 120 minutes total per day and advanced gets like 130 minutes per day. So it’s a significant amount of track time and I think that was one of the changes that as Barron pointed out that we made early on, you know, we A lot of the instructors instructed with all these other organizations, and we looked at how much track dime per dollar do they get with each of these clubs.

Crew Chief Eric: You made a very good point, and a lot of people see racing at the track as equivalent to, let’s say, golfing or skeet shooting or flying planes or boats. And in reality, it’s not that expensive, and since you were talking about numbers, and It’s 6 per [00:14:00] minute based on the numbers you gave me for, for a novice student and versus an Ottercross.

And I know it’s huge in SCCA, but it comes out to 17 a minute at an Ottercross. So value for money, track is worth it.

Travis Dixon: And I always like to point out when people compare the two that if you come out to a track event, we have toilets of flush.

Crew Chief Eric: We’ve got that going for us. And you’re not obligated to work either.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Once in a while you

Baron Mills: get the drag racer that shows up and he gets three laps in and it’s more track time than he’s got in the last three. Three race events. And he’s, you know, very, very happy about it. Oh, absolutely.

Travis Dixon: That was a challenge when we started time trials actually was we sort of tried to cross market and involve the hill climb community, you know, some of those folks like, like, I think Blue Ridge region runs on Jefferson a lot.

Do they have a lot like, like a more moral day or labor day event every year? I think I can’t remember which of what it is or whatever, but there’s a lot of cars out there. They’re [00:15:00] really neat race cars. You know, they’re, these are open wheel cars and some really neat stuff, but they’re designed to run.

Like an autocross car that they’ll go out and do three laps and that’s it. They have to come in at that point in time. They’re not designed to do that, which led to some interesting evolution and changes over time with our time trials. Bram, we started out doing that, doing like three lap time trials with, you know, one car at a time kind of thing before evolving to the current format.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. I mean, and not to diverge too far off, cause I am a trialer. I’ve trialed with you guys and Emrah and some other groups and I’m a nine, nine lap maximum. Three warm, three hot, three cold. That’s it. And I come in, whether, I don’t use the whole session because I figure if I can’t do it in nine laps, I shouldn’t be out there.

But, uh, that’s, that’s aside the point. A lot of buzz in the last couple of years around an SCCA construct known as Track Night in America. And what I’m wondering is, is this a gateway? So I’ve never been to

Baron Mills: one, but we have had several students that have come from Track [00:16:00] Night in America that enjoyed, right?

That, that loved to be able to get to a track, you know, spend a couple hours there. It’s, it’s inexpensive way to get onto a track. They enjoyed it. And when they came to an HPDE, they understood, they very clearly understood the difference, you know, capital E for us, right? The education part, very much more interested in being very clear in the education part.

For the HPD portion

Travis Dixon: track night. America actually started as a push forward from the autocross side into other faster things on track and such. So it was a little different mentality. The track night part came from from their their concept of coming in and doing track events middle of the week in the afternoon.

Bug out of work at lunchtime, head to the track, and spend the afternoon. And they actually had a, you know, more autocross type setup. I don’t know if they still do or not, but where you, you could work and run within the same day, flag a, flag a session, run a session kind of thing. By [00:17:00] doing midweek, they were able to keep track.

Cost pretty low. They got some really great deals with tracks and it was a good taste for people that didn’t want to commit three, four, 500 bucks to a weekend at the racetrack to do it. They wanted more of that taste of, of, of go out and spend, you know, a hundred or 200 bucks program differences is that they have almost, uh, I don’t think they’ve ever done in car instruction.

Their model has always been to do track side instruction. They have driver coaches, which are looking and observing. That behavior and making adjustments in between sessions more than anything. And whereas we were taking it more to it, to a direct feedback model with having people in the right seat and offering that, that direct feedback and, and, and coaching that goes beyond what you can see from, from standing on a corner, watching a cargo.

Yeah. We call that the

Crew Chief Eric: send it system.

Travis Dixon: Nothing wrong with it. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s different ways to get the job done and, and, and everybody’s going to find a, find an event that works for them, you know, between what they can, what they [00:18:00] want to spend, what kind of feedback they want and what they’re willing to tolerate from, from an event organizer, you know, as far as structure and, and time on track and, and everything else.

Joe Obernberger: I’ll echo Baron a little bit. I’ve never been to a track night in America and here I’ve been saying all along. We, we go to all these different events and we take the best of all of them, and, and none of us here have been to a, to a Trackman America event. I think that’s primarily because of the, the lack of instruction.

For me, looking back, you know, my first track day, the things that you learn, you know, keeping your eyes up, taking in the whole scene, being smooth on the controls. is very hard to teach without someone in the right seat. A concern of mine, I guess, is that you get folks that are going through track nine America, they’re just dropping the seat, going on track and driving.

They might be developing habits that that are hard to unlearn when you really want to start going fast, learning the right line. Learning the techniques, I think, would be an issue, but again, never [00:19:00] been.

Baron Mills: It’s a cheap way to get a couple hours on track, right? PDE is more of a money and time commitment.

There’s no doubt about that. I think it’s more than pays for itself in the type and quality of instruction that you get at an HPD.

Crew Chief Eric: But let’s set expectations here, right? Because I’m still playing the part of our listener who’s sitting on the couch kind of going, Eh, well, okay. It seems cheap compared to autocross compared to drag racing.

If I look at it at, at dollars per minute, right. Or dollars per lap, but there’s still a fear factor here, right. And there’s still maybe, do I have the right car question? So let’s try to answer some of those. Let’s, let’s talk about safety a little bit, but let’s also, let’s set expectations and say, what is it you really need to come out to have a good time at a DE the simplest approach, right.

Baron Mills: Is, you know, we have, we have people showing up. And literally in station wagons right in modern like a BMW station wagon that is fully stock been looked over real [00:20:00] well mechanically and that’s it look the first time you’re on track you’re not pushing the car you’re pushing yourself. And that’s, that’s really, really key.

The thing that you really have to worry about at the track is the person driving the car, not the car, especially the first three or four events. So you can go off from there, right? You can get it all kinds of detail of what you really need to do to the car. We have a tech sheet that, that you check off.

It gives you a list of things to review. They’ll look at the car.

Travis Dixon: The lowest barrier to entry. Where we would draw the line was you need to at least bring your own helmet. You know, we, we, we sort of tried to try to put something in of, you know, at least get them committed at that level. And, you know, honestly, we, we’ve always had it in there that, you know, you can go to OG racing and rent a helmet.

If that’s where it’s at, that’s where you want to be. We actually have a set of loaner helmets we use for giving rides and such in non COVID 19, uh, seasons. Love to take somebody who hasn’t been on a track before and put them in a car with an instructor and let them go and see what the track is like. So I have some really good videos somewhere.

We stuck a brand new [00:21:00] person in the right seat of a factory five Cobra and I stuck a GoPro in front of him looking back at him. And you know, you can just see the Fun and terror in their eyes all at the same time. It’s glorious

Baron Mills: That’s a really good point, right? I mean if somebody has a question about whether or not they should come out and pay the money Come out and visit us right just come out and hang out for a half a day or drop by The people there are very very friendly.

You can walk up to Anybody and ask a question and you’ll get help. And we’re very, very inclusive relative to visitors and new people. So it’s a really, it’s really good environment for that

Joe Obernberger: as far as the cars themselves go. I mean, I would say pre 1990 ish. Yeah. If your car is pre 1990, you know, there, there’s going to be some things that you’ll want to do.

But Modern cars today are, are so rock solid. You know, we’ve taken a rental Ford Fiesta, put five guys in it and just beat the hell out of it on the track. And [00:22:00] It’s fine. You know, yeah, the brakes are a little bit hot, but it, you know, they, they don’t break. They don’t overheat. They, you know, modern cars are really, really good.

I mean, and Barron mentioned, you know, the track day prep tech sheet, check your pads, check your brake fluid, you know, tires, coolant, oil, transmission, differential fluid, lug nuts, you know, wheel studs, uh, you know, wheel bearings, that sort of thing, you know, check those things over. But we also have a tech crew on site, you know, to help out with those sorts of things.

Travis Dixon: We’ve tried to make sure that the rules are written in a way that that’s inclusive, wherever, wherever reasonable. For, for obvious reasons, you know, we can’t put your average, you know, wallowing SUV out there. It just doesn’t make sense. But we took pains in creating the, the rule set to allow for those, the, the sport truck and sport SUV kind of thing.

You know, we’ve had Ford Lightnings out there on You know, a 30 series tire looks like the whole thing is lowered and it goes out there and starts passing Porsches and such. It’s, it’s, [00:23:00] it’s hilarious. You know, I, we, we literally just had a conversation with a guy came out at our previous event, flagged for us, had a blast, wants to come out and run again.

He’s building an S10 extreme, you know, with a cage and everything lowered. And I’ve seen those autocross before. And I know that they’re actually reasonable. You know, that’s a little crazy, even the grand scheme of things. But from, from that, yeah, that’s. As long as he builds it, builds it safe and the thing can, can stop and, and, and not, uh, be a danger to itself and others from that standpoint.

Yeah. Let’s let, let’s see it out there.

Crew Chief Eric: I, I like the fact that you say that it didn’t need to turn, it just needs to be able to stop . Well turn eventually, but , so. Okay. I mean, that kind of leads into a question that’s probably on everybody’s mind and I think the answer probably goes without saying, but we’re gonna say it anyway.

Is it safe?

Joe Obernberger: Here’s the thing, you’ll hear folks at HPD events say driving on track is safer than driving on the street. I don’t believe that’s true, just me personally. However, [00:24:00] I mean, the speeds are higher, but you do have, you have an instructor with you in the car. You are driving the car. Things happen, of course.

As far as in SCCA goes, I mean, we have pretty good track record as far as Any, anything happening during our events and pretty rare. We have any sort of actual metal bending at an event, extremely, extremely rare that we have any metal bending events in our novice run group where we have instructors in the car.

Usually that’s. Ends up being some mechanical issue that has happened where a car goes off track and usually it goes off track and that’s it. Nothing gets bent.

Travis Dixon: Compare doing 140, 150 multiple times in a 20 minute session on the beltway. It, yeah, it’s safer to do it on the track. I guarantee that. No doubt about it.

You know, risk increases with speed. You know, it’s just. Uh, part of the game, you know, and I wouldn’t tell anybody to put their car out there that they can’t risk, you know, if that’s [00:25:00] your daily driver, I don’t want to see it, not be able to get to work on Monday morning, you know, I would feel bad about that.

I’m not going to try and short code and tell anybody that nothing can happen because things can happen through yourself and others actions or inactions, things go pear shape. It’s, it’s a fact of life. What we try and provide is a safe way to explore the limits that you can’t do on public roads.

Baron Mills: I’m going to say, you know, look, it’s a high speed sport, right?

And it’s a, it’s, it’s got some adrenaline associated with it. It’s as dangerous as the driver wants to make it right. Limited in novice, at least limited by the instructor. So you can drive at a, at a very moderate, you know, high speed with a lot of margin and have a lot of fun out there, but it is a high speed sport, nothing like racing.

It’s not demolition Derby. Like Joe said, we have a, we have a really good safety record. And by safety, meaning. any sort of not not talking about harm to a human. We’re talking about simple things like bending metal. That’s actually very rare. It’s rare. It’s rare

Joe Obernberger: again with S. C. C. A. [00:26:00] There’s this, you know, when we have the novice classroom, all the students are there together.

We’re all talking. We all get to know each other a little bit so we can say, Oh, that’s barren in the gray BMW. That’s, you know, bill in the And you have this spectrum of cars, right? Everything from, you know, uh, VW Golfs to Miatas to Corvettes to McLarens, right? So you have this whole spread, but we’re in an environment that all those cars can play well together.

They all know, you know, we all know each other. And. You build up that sense of community so that when you’re on track together, you can trust each other. That guy in front of you in the McLaren with, you know, so and so as an instructor isn’t just going to bury the brakes on the straightaway for no reason when you’re flat on the floor behind him trying to catch him.

So I think that that community builds. Uh, a way to help mitigate some of the safety

Crew Chief Eric: to borrow a phrase from Ross Bentley, right? The E and HPDE stands for [00:27:00] education and we’re going to talk about that a little bit more as we progress here in the conversation But I just wanted to bring it up because it is a question that we’re asked more often than not as coaches How dangerous is it?

How safe is it? Is it this is it that as we said everything comes motorsport, but In the HPDE world, the risk is mitigated by the fact you have a coach in the right seat. A lot of other things are taken care of, speeds are lower, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s good. But the next question that usually crops up, you know, we’ve got our, our gal or guy going, Oh man, this is really exciting.

I’ve mitigated the risk or I’ve accepted the risk. I still want to do this. I want to take my, you know, BMW 330 to the track and I want to go have fun. What happens if, you know, something were to go pear shaped, as Travis said, will my insurance company cover me? And if they don’t, where do we go from there?

Travis Dixon: Our answer to mitigating things going bad sometimes involves being perfectly willing to cut loose a risk. If somebody is not able to bring a car that’s properly [00:28:00] prepared, a driver that’s properly prepared, a mental attitude that is in line The goals of the program and the rest of the people on the track.

We’ve always been more than happy to say, look, here’s your money back. I’m sorry. You didn’t have a good time. Want to find out how you can change things to fix it? Let us know. But as an organizer, I’ve always wanted to put the safety of, of my, my instructors first and foremost, my staff, and also the other participants up there, the 300 bucks from some guy who who’s out there and thinks he knows more than everybody else is not worth it.

You know, we can refund his money. And.

Crew Chief Eric: So

Travis Dixon: I’m

Crew Chief Eric: going to ask it this way, SCCA, the parent organization can’t recommend that a driver use track insurance. We talked about track insurance on a previous episode. So our listeners are probably familiar with that. And if you’re not, please go back and check out the things I wish I knew as a new episode where we dive into that a little bit deeper.

So I’m going to ask you guys, what’s your opinion on track insurance? Should students, especially folks that have never been to the track, look into it or purchase it in your personal [00:29:00] opinion?

Joe Obernberger: So I had a buddy, he had a GT3. 60, 000 car and he would always get track day insurance. I don’t, I don’t know how much it costs per again, but so he got the insurance and he had on Shenandoah, one of the suspension arms broke and car went into the wall.

He’s fine. Car was not very rare, by the way. Very rare. That’s true. That is very rare. Track insurance covered it completely. And so it works. It’s not a scam. Anyone’s worried about that.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s in lieu of your standard insurance, which basically stops once you cross the threshold of the, of the campus itself, right?

Most people aren’t really aware of that. Although we did cover that in the previous episode. I just want to kind of point it out, reiterate that fact.

Travis Dixon: Yeah. And we’ve had, we’ve had, uh, fortunately a very, very small number, but, but a nonzero number of people that have had to exercise the, uh, the track insurance option.

And, and one of the things that, that we’re very careful of is that again, back to the whole, you know, yeah, it’s bureaucracy, but you know, we have a well defined incident [00:30:00] reporting procedure, again, tied to our event insurance, where if something more than a. bump into the tires happens. We’re going to take some notes and write up something and, and more importantly, be available to somebody if they have an oops, if they have an issue, we’ll spend time to talk with their carrier and explain to them what the event was and what it happens.

And by the way, we can provide a pretty significant amount of documentation to show that, that this was in fact a instructed educational event that they were participating in. As for, as for opinion, you know, as an organizer, even not for a couple of things there, I can’t afford to ball my car up and walk away.

I buy the event insurance.

Baron Mills: Travis said it well in an email exchange we had, and it’s, you know, whatever you bring to the track, you know, if something bad happens, that shouldn’t put you in any sort of severe financial bind. If the way you want to do that is to bring a 3, 000 Miata, That you can walk away from.

That’s great. If you’re bringing an expensive car and you’re extremely wealthy, that’s fine too, but another way to buy that ability [00:31:00] to just to walk away is to buy track and shirt.

Crew Chief Eric: The other thing, the reason we’re kind of harping on this issue here is there’s often a misconception that D E. Is racing and racing is D.

E. And I just wanted to make sure that we clarified that it’s not. And that’s why again, we’ll deep dive a little deeper into Barron’s domain. We’re talking about what is the expectation of what’s going to be learned in the classroom and things like that. But before we get into that, let’s let’s kind of dive in just a little bit into, uh, How someone goes about getting into an event, kind of crossing that gate saying, yeah, I’m going to do this.

So I know there’s some peculiarities with respect to how SCCA does their registration, things that people should be aware of, things that you guys can elaborate on.

Baron Mills: Just send me cash, cash is fine. Bitcoin, you know,

Travis Dixon: we’ve actually, uh, I think normalized things over the years. Um, like many clubs out there, we’re now using motorsport reg.

We have been for several years. And part of what we rely on there is, is that for those that aren’t aware, is that motorsport reg has [00:32:00] a back end that lets organizers share some information. So we look at, What other events somebody has done, notes that may have been left, some breadcrumbs from other clubs and organizations.

And we, and we use that to help, help guide somebody towards whether they’re in the right event to begin with, what run group they should be in, etc. There, there’s a lot of work that goes, that goes on behind the scenes between Joe. And Kim, our registrar, who, uh, Joe’s laughing at this because I think it’s understated things dimensely, but there’s an immense amount of back and forth to make sure that people get into the right run group and that they’re not stepping up unprepared, you know, we, we try and do whatever we can to help them succeed at and have a good time at

Crew Chief Eric: the event.

So one thing I will say, having used Motorsport Reg forever, and there’s very few organizations that really don’t unless they have a proprietary system. So it’s pretty common in our world to use that. The nice thing was that SCCA used the PDX moniker, so it made it very easy to just suss out the events because you’re just punching PDX and they’re the only ones that would [00:33:00] come up.

But now that you guys are using the HPD acronym, what’s the quickest way for somebody to find a WDCR event in Motorsport Reg? Go to our website and go from there, I would say. That’s fair. It’s

Travis Dixon: good to count calendars up there. The events are linked.

Baron Mills: And if you make it that far, if you go to Motorsports Reg, if you have any questions about any of this, there are emails on there.

Lynn Tolan, the program chair, and Joe’s name email is on there. And probably most importantly, Kim’s name is on there as a registrar. If anybody gets stuck in all this, just send an email and ask. Right. And we’ll answer that.

Travis Dixon: One of the things we see that’s worthwhile to mention is when people register is not being honest with themselves and others over what run group they should be in.

The common thing we’ll see is, Oh, now this is full, so I’m going to bump myself up. And we would start looking at their history and their, their driving resume, as we like to call it. We can go, Oh, you’ve done two autocrosses and some go karts. Maybe you shouldn’t be in [00:34:00] advance for this one, you know? So, but with that, that’s comes down to what, what was said earlier of.

Email us. Let us know. Say, hey, I wanted to get in, you know, I was out of town. You may not be able to talk your way into it, but we can at least do the, okay, we’re going to keep notes. If we find a spot, we’ll work on it. But we ask for driving resumes because some cases it’s, yeah, I’ve been driving forever, but not entering events like this.

It doesn’t show up in MSR, but here’s my, this, here’s my racing license. Here’s, here’s other stuff, you know, use your words, talk to us and tell us what it is. But being honest and being truthful and reasonable with what it is you’re, you’re trying to do is, is important. It’s no fun to show up and end up in, in a, in a run group that is frankly too fast for you to be in.

And you spend the day getting bumped down and having uncomfortable conversations with stewards and instructors and everybody else about maybe you should rethink your choice of hot.

Crew Chief Eric: Other sports backing, but there is the rare occurrence and all of us being coaches here, you know that you do get the one guy who his [00:35:00] whole resume is he played Gran Turismo and he’s actually quite good on track and you don’t know how that works.

So there is some natural talent out there, but we are not all Schumacher. We are not. Sorry, so we all got to start somewhere. We have all humble beginnings and it involves a coach in the right seat.

Joe Obernberger: And I will say, um, for those listening, if you’re thinking of signing up for anything, do both days. Don’t I, we do, you can sign up for just Saturday.

You can sign up for just Sunday. But you will get so much more out of it, out of your first track event if you do both a Saturday and Sunday. Um, you’ll have that Saturday night, I swear you’ll sleep amazingly well. And you’ll wake up, you’ll be back at the track ready to execute what you learned the prior day.

And, and the, the driver that you were Friday night compared to Sunday night. Will be so drastically different. You’ll be hooked. I mean, you’ll, you will be hooked, but

Travis Dixon: there’s a reason why our second day is not that much more than one day. [00:36:00] You know, it’s usually what about 100 bucks more to do to do two days in one.

And I think we put that in place because we saw the value in continuing over two days versus encouraging people to do one day or the other from a being able to bring them up to a much higher level than one day at a time. Would don’t wait. You know, we deal with a lot of people who do the Oh, I forgot to register or whatever.

We’re really permissive about dropping out. And we understand stuff happens. It helps us as organizers to know early who’s attending. We can sort out any issues we could ask you questions about. Do you really think you should be in time trials, even though you’ve only done one autocross or not, you know, if you register.

Three weeks in advance. We’ve been pushing it. I think this is one of the first we’ve done it of having basically all of our events open at once, which our registrar hates. It helped get it out of there and people can figure out their HPDE calendar early for that and know where they’re going to be and lock that in.

And again, especially with novice groups, I think all organizations have this of that’s the group that fills up first. So if you want a spot in there and to [00:37:00] get your feet wet in order to be able to move up to a group that doesn’t fill up in three days, register early. If something changes, we understand.

We’ll, we’ll deal with it.

Crew Chief Eric: See, it’s, it’s just like voting register early, register often.

Joe Obernberger: SCCA is pretty lax with giving refunds. So something happens with the car or you get sick the night before and you can’t make it. Will you just give me your money back? To Travis’s point, sign up early and, um, you know, uh, please, uh, plan on coming, uh, of course.

Um, but, you know, there’s, there’s always the option of going back if something comes up with the car or, you know, who knows what life throws at you. Um, especially now with, with COVID, you know, if you get a fever or something, please don’t come.

Crew Chief Eric: So we found our event, right. We found a DC event. We’re going through the SCCA website.

Takes us to Motorsport Reg, sign up and go. And at the bottom it says, you know, do you acknowledge download these, Subs. What’s that all about?

Baron Mills: To me, the subs [00:38:00] are simply, are very simple, right? They’re a document that has some unique characteristics or some details that aren’t easy to, to keep up, to date on the webpage or in Ms RMSR.

So they’re, they’re just another format for us to give all the detail that. The customer needs. There’s a SCCA history behind all that, and Travis probably knows all that, but that’s, that’s the big picture for the customer.

Travis Dixon: The HPD rulebook is pretty small and generic. Event supplementals have always been used to fill in the blanks that are for things that might be site specific.

I mean, you know, it includes everything from detailing into car eligibility, which, as you’re probably aware, can vary depending upon facility. If you go to other, other racetracks in other states, you may find peculiarities over, over, you know, Seatbelts or convertibles, all kinds of things like that, which sometimes are state mandated, racetrack mandated, you know, whatever.

So we detail that in there down to where can you find info on where to stay at a hotel [00:39:00] in the, if you’re coming from out of town. I mean, we try and try and use that as concise as possible. One stop shopping for how to get to the event and how to be successful at it. It’s a lot of information in one place, but it’s been whittled down over the years to hopefully just the stuff that is really going to be useful.

It’s, it’s, it’s It’s a lot of how to do

Crew Chief Eric: stuff, not don’t do this. Hope. And a shameless plug for the GTM website, it’s actually where we got our inspiration originally for our track travel guide. Having been in SCCA a long time and knowing the SUPs and what’s in there, we were like, you know, maybe we could soften this a little bit because they do read like a rule set and that’s what they’re designed to do.

To be modeled after, but it is valuable information. So I recommend if you are going to an SCC event, don’t just click next, next, next, and ignore them, read them because it is specific track information. They’re updated by the event. So if there’s, let’s say additional COVID information or participant information about wearing face coverings and how you’re going to handle class, all that stuff is going to be found in the subs.

And I tip my hat to the folks that write those for [00:40:00] every event, tailoring them to every event. every year.

Travis Dixon: And it seems like a lot of bureaucracy, but the fact that we have those subs and those subs get approved by a national organization who is the one issuing our event insurance helps lead to having events which are insurable by track time.

day insurance as well as we’ve never had a problem with anybody looking at our events. You know, the locked ins or Haggerty’s who offer track day insurance and they go, okay, that’s, that’s definitely an event that we can offer insurance on. It’s never, never been questioned for that. And part of that I think is because of having, you know, a strong basis in, in a well documented event structure includes that.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. So we’ve registered, we’ve done all these things, we’ve read the subs, we’re checking the list. There’s one last thing to do before we get to the event. Let’s talk about tech a little bit. So SCCA does tech a little differently than other organizations do. There are few out there that require you to go to legitimate or mark specific shops and get your car looked at by a specialist and things like that.

There’s other [00:41:00] organizations that don’t even bother. So what does SCCA do about tech and can you explain your tech process?

Baron Mills: Real simple, right? Don’t let it scare you. I remember the first couple of times I was scared to death of tech, right? And our, and our guys look at the checklist. Make sure your car is safe.

You know, it almost always comes down. If you’ve made a modification, that’s where things go wrong and brakes and tire, right? That’s the biggies. The good news is our tech guys always try to help you get through. They’re not there to fail you. They’re there to make you have a fun day. They’re very, very helpful.

I’ve seen those guys actually, sometimes when they have time, you know, helping people fix their car or getting an instructor to help them fix their car. That that’s the kind of things, that’s the kind of environment that, that these first timers are stepping into.

Joe Obernberger: I’ll add that as Travis mentioned, I think SCCA may be the only organization [00:42:00] that if you fail tech, We’ll give you your money back and send you on your way.

Almost every other group will happily take your money and say, sorry, you didn’t take your car and you can’t drive, but thanks for your 400 bucks.

Crew Chief Eric: If your wheel falls off after you pass tech. I mean, that’s a whole nother

Joe Obernberger: turn

Crew Chief Eric: away. If you’ve turned, turned a wheel. Yeah. You’re on your own at that point in time.

So,

Joe Obernberger: but yeah, I mean, as I mentioned it, you know, brakes and tires again, as you mentioned, also the modifications. If you’ve got a race seat and six point in driver’s seat and some like 20 year old passenger seat, the restraints have to be the same on both sides. So I think if you, if you’re really going to get serious about HPD events, you’re going to have to know some stuff.

You know, how do you, how do you check your pads? How do you check tire pressure? How do you check oil coolant? Differential fluid, trans fluid, all that stuff, you know, wheel torque and so forth.

Travis Dixon: Understanding that brake fluid is a wear item is a [00:43:00] big thing, you know, a big way to pass tech is to be able to go, is to be able to know when was the last time your brake fluid was changed, you know, was it recently, was it this year?

That’s one of the, one of the main things is, is, is fresh fluid will, will go a long way to helping have a, have a successful weekend.

Joe Obernberger: Yeah, quick story. Uh, so I had a student with a Lexus LFA, a V10, 9, 000 RPM, awesome car, 5, 000 miles. But it was a 2004, never had the brake fluid changed, but Hey, it’s only 5, 000 miles.

Why would you change the brake? So it’s nice to say the brakes traded car’s fine. Everyone’s fine. Nothing happened. We didn’t go off track even, but you know, push the pedal and it’s getting a little bit soft. Travis said it’s a wear item.

Crew Chief Eric: The marketing pamphlets these days say lifetime fluids, right?

Travis Dixon: Yeah, right.

That’s true. Whose, whose lifetime?

Crew Chief Eric: At the track, it’s in dog years, unfortunately. That being said, so we’ve gone through tech, we’ve done all these things. We’re there now at the track. So let’s focus on [00:44:00] the education part. Let’s really level set. And I know this is Baron’s sweet spot. Let’s talk about the classroom.

What? Are new drivers going to learn during their first track day or their first track weekend?

Baron Mills: It’s really pretty simple, right? So the track is a new environment, and you put anybody into a new environment and add speed. And it causes stress. The novice classrooms are all about managing that and instructing as much as possible the students so they can become more familiar and comfortable with the environment and manage that stress.

You know, the other half of that story is communications with the instructor, what it’s going to be like on track and how to manage that relationship with the but it really is all of the safety guidance of Communication how the track communicates with the driver and how other drivers communicate with you and passing [00:45:00] rules.

It’s just critical stuff is is one or two pages of things that if you get right, you’ll be absolutely fine.

Crew Chief Eric: So Baron, you said that the The track talks to you. Do you hear voices that the rest of us don’t?

Baron Mills: Yes, I do. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, one of the phrases we say, and we have communications from car to car, we have communications from, from driver to instructor, and we have communications from the track to the car.

And the way that happens on track is through flags. through visual communication from people that are stationary around the track, giving the drivers information and direction on what to do on the track. The classic was the checkered flag, white flag, the red flag, et cetera, that you see on TV.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s only one flag I remember.

It’s the blue flag. And if I remember correctly, Baron, it means there’s a race going on and you’re not in it.

Joe Obernberger: Exactly. For the novice classroom, I think the key things to take away that we [00:46:00] Try to drill into the novice students is, one, listen to your instructor. That’s probably the biggest takeaway from the novice classroom.

And that you, as the novice student, are responsible for driving the vehicle. That is your main goal during the day, is driving the vehicle. The instructor is responsible for what happens outside the vehicle. The cars around it, the flags, what corner’s coming up. But they can’t control the vehicle. That, that is the student’s job.

And then as Bear mentioned, the flags, what the flags mean. But even that, I mean, I, honestly, I don’t know how many novice classrooms I went through before I even knew what all the flags were. So, your instructor is going to help you with the flags. So, in the novice class, we’re going to tell you what the flags are.

Those are what a yellow flag is. But then, when you’re out on track, And you see a yellow flag, I guarantee your instructor is going to tell you what that yellow flag means. Um, and then of course the passing rules.

Travis Dixon: The instruction actually starts at the, at the all hands meeting first thing in the morning.

Of reminding people, we’re not getting the details of, of how [00:47:00] to go out and drive. But, you know, the little things that they may, people may not have internalized yet, or maybe site specific or whatever. Like if something happens, stay in the car with the belts on, you know, don’t get out and go out and try and fix it.

You know, we have emergency staff there who are well trained professionals. If your buddy’s car, you know, goes off and hits the wall, you’re not going to make it any better by stopping and trying to help. You know, we can get it, get an ambulance and a fire truck on any point that any of those tracks within about 90 seconds.

Um, not that

Joe Obernberger: that happens a lot,

Travis Dixon: not

Joe Obernberger: that

Travis Dixon: that happens a lot. So please do that. You know, if your car stops, you pull off, stay belted in. It’s the safest point for that. And that’s something that anybody, no matter how many track days they’ve done, doesn’t hurt to remind them of that in the morning, that that’s what they should do.

Baron Mills: We’re very much about, you know, A lot of, some people call it continuing education. We have three run groups, novice, intermediate and advanced, and we have instruction available for all of those. We, a lot of organizations [00:48:00] do not do classroom instruction for advanced, for example, and we do, it’s optional for advanced, our intermediate, uh, has instruction classroom instruction.

Also, we have the novice, you know, the instruction there happens in class and in the car with the instructor. And as you move up, you make more assumptions about what That customer can do. You assume that they know all the flags and all the basic safety operations in the intermediate run group, but you very quickly start teaching car control, car dynamics, how to improve drills.

And as you get to an advanced group, those discussions become even more advanced. I think sec is really, really good at that. And, and part of that is enabled by, you know, our, our, uh, our advanced room instructor is a current race car driver. I teach intermediate right now, but the person that helps me is a race car driver.

Active race car driver holds one of the lap records. So I think, I think we do a really, really good job there. That’s, that’s what we hear back from the, from the [00:49:00] customers anyway.

Joe Obernberger: So we, uh, We have three classroom instructors that all have, as Barron mentioned, that bring unique things to the table. So we have David Miller, our novice classroom baron, and Bill Smith is our advanced classroom instructor.

And one thing that we’ve been doing recently because of COVID is having some online classrooms. And that might be something that we keep. What has come out of that is that students can pay a little more attention at an online classroom, um, When there’s not the, the, you know, cars going by outside, you know, they’re like excited, like, all right, I’m going to go wide open throttle, third gear, 5, 000 RPM, that’s my goal.

Um, so with, without that involved, I think there’s, you know, learning the flags and things like that. May come a little bit easier, but you know, we’re all still playing the code game still to figure out what’s going on there.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, and I think we’re always fighting in my best Ricky Bobby impersonation. The I want to go fast mentality that people come to the track and immediately expect that [00:50:00] speed is the First thing that we talk about.

And so I think what you guys have hit on is good is that safety always comes first, safety is paramount and the speed comes later. That’s even as coaches were always instructed, you know, the, the flow of teaching is speed is always last. You always add it as the last thing in the cycle.

Joe Obernberger: Well, so I, when I, when I was a student, uh, my first track day, what I wanted to see is how fast can I go on straightaway?

That was my goal is and I better believe I was staring at that speedometer going on the straightaway not worried about anything else is going on just just like what is that needle going to read before my instructor tells me to break

Crew Chief Eric: that actually changed Joe.

Joe Obernberger: Fair enough. So

Crew Chief Eric: I think you guys have set a really good expectation for the students. It’s an environment to foster learning, right? And it’s a progression. You’re not going to learn everything in one day. It’s going to be multiple over multiple [00:51:00] sessions. You guys average probably one to one on, or maybe it’s N minus one number of sessions in classroom as you are on track every day.

So it’s, it’s repetitive, but that repetition is what cements it in there. And then the coach augments. What is being learned in the classroom

Baron Mills: to kind of back up and just summarize real quick, right? You come in as novice you have an instructor in the car. We give check rides to move to intermediate An instructor will give that checkride and move that person to intermediate, and then they are soloed in SCCA.

They still have the ability to, they still have a classroom, and they still have the ability to ask for an instructor. I still learn things when Joe gets in the car with me, how not to drive, you know, things like that. And then the next progression is, of course, advanced. We do the same thing. We do a checkride to go up to advanced.

Crew Chief Eric: Really, the next segment that we wanted to talk about, which is what are other things that SCCA HPDE offers and one of those being coaching. [00:52:00] So what are some next steps post I’ve done my track days, I’ve moved up through the system. Where should I go from here? Do I just go to another group or do I find another discipline?

Joe Obernberger: Well, I think one is the Instructor Clinic. Uh, haha. Bear and I actually have been working quite a bit on how we should run the Instructor Clinic changes that we can make to it. We’ve gone through Friday at the Track has a way of bringing their instructors on and we’re taking ideas from them, as Travis mentioned.

You know, we all go with lots of other clubs, see what their clinics look like, and try to bring the best of all worlds into what we do. It’s a volunteer organization, and we send slide decks around constantly to each other, and criticize each other, and try to make these programs better. That not only goes for the instructor clinic, but also novice, intermediate, and advanced classrooms.

The cool thing about the instructor clinic, we put the candidate in the right seat. So they are expected to instruct for at least, I think we do four sessions, and then we do classrooms between them, and we have a pretty [00:53:00] detailed document that Baron primarily put together. That we send out every event to all the instructors, what we expect, all the things that we do with driving evals after events where students evaluate their instructors.

And of course, instructors evaluate their students. That really has, I think, been extremely beneficial to the program in helping all the instructors become much better at listening, at setting goals, helping their students. Be faster. So that’s 11 area. And

Travis Dixon: so it might be. It might be a good, good, good thing to point out that one of the things that we’ve done for for a number of years now is an instructor clinic, and that’s where we’ve been able to more tightly integrate what happens in the right seat on track with what happens in the hard plastic seat in the classroom.

Overtaking and trying to make, make a unified program. Not just saying, Hey, you instruct, come on out and play with us. Go out and do whatever it is you do because you’re fast and that’s okay. We try and do train to trainer stuff and have done those typically on a free to the [00:54:00] instructor basis for a while as a, an expense to us, but worth it to build the program.

over being able to bring in, get people up, and teach in a way that is compatible and the way that we think should be done. It goes both ways for us, I think, is, is that those instructor clinics tend to be where we also get feedback from other, from instructors and do the, Hey, we do this this way here.

Maybe we should try this and we’ll go, Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s, let’s give it a shot.

Crew Chief Eric: And it’s also a recognized Program. It’s a recognized certificate. Let’s call it that where there’s reciprocity with other groups to say you’ve been through SCCA’s bootcamp. We’ll recognize you as an instructor.

It’s not always a rubber stamp. Sometimes it does take, you know, uh, Hey, call Joe and he’ll sign you off. And I know we’re talking a little bit more on the coaching side, but I’ve had the, the distinct privilege of being to the school many, many times. I come back now as a veteran instructor, but I came up through that system.

I got certified through SCCA and, and the, Teaching that I got through there is, in my opinion, second to none. So I know we’re kind of branching away from the student [00:55:00] here a little bit.

Baron Mills: Let me add one thing to that, that last discussion, you know, started talking about the instructor aspect of that. And Joe really championed a couple of years ago, uh, giving our, each of our instructors only one student.

That shows on the student side too. I have instructed for organizations where I’ve had three students, All in the same day, and you know, you make it work, but the student doesn’t get as much quality time as with, you know, the other extreme where that student has one instructor and that instructor’s job is to make that student happy for the whole weekend.

So it works both ways. The instructors are happy having one student and the students are happy having one, you know, knowing that their instructor is fully committed to them.

Crew Chief Eric: So a couple other things I have on my list as extracurricular activities could include flagging.

Travis Dixon: We’ve always done a work, something, get something arrangement.

We do try and use volunteer flaggers wherever possible. SCCA has always tried to avoid paying flaggers because you sort of get what you pay for [00:56:00] inversely a lot of times. Um, yeah. So the people out there volunteering to stand, take it very seriously and do it very well. Almost to the point of amusement at times, but the outcome is that we get people that are very attentive and very interested in that.

Trying to reduce the friction to attend our events though, we’ve opened up opportunities to say, Hey, come out and flag a day or two with us and you’ve earned yourself a free track day. You can’t really beat that. I mean, You know, a little sweat equity and, and get, get to see the track. Uh, and by the way, we feed, feed, feed you lunch and dinner usually, uh, in normal, in normal years, at least.

You get to wear that really, really stylish white. The, uh, yeah, exactly. So the, uh, the, the, the shirts came about as advertising, you know, we, we started out because the rule said you had to have long sleeve. Cotton t shirts or whatever you couldn’t wear nylon or short sleeves and such. And, and so we said, well, let’s print up some long sleeve cotton t shirts and hand them out and they turned into advertising, uh, there’s [00:57:00] something cool about walking around the grid at the Daytona, you know, Rolex 24 and seeing some random person with a PDX shirt on,

Crew Chief Eric: is there anything else you guys want to add to that as to things you can do after,

Joe Obernberger: of course, SCCA is a race organization, so there’s time trials to move toward and also competition.

Baron Mills: In our organization, once you’re signed off for advanced, you can run in TT. We do not, we, WDCR does not have a separate TT license. It’s, it’s, once you’re signed off for advanced, you’re in TT. Yeah, and then TT is, it’s the competitive part of this, right? The HPDE, you’ve moved past HPDE and moved into a competitive part of the SCCA ecosystem, so to speak.

And then

Travis Dixon: there’s, there’s actually a national component to that now, uh, there’s a team time trials nationals group that, that has started coming up with some consistent rule sets and running sort of a national series of events. And as that has come and matured, we’ve actually been adopting rule sets from them.

So there’s consistency and, and trying to [00:58:00] integrate, integrate with what they’re doing. And some of that’s partnership with, with things like grid life as well of, of national has done that. And, and we’re, we’re, we’re trying to. Trying to come up with a program and have a program that is unique, but not so unique that, that, that nobody wants to come and run it because it’s car prep or whatever is different again, back to the top of the order of people book events because of what fits their calendar.

A lot of times, you know, let’s, let’s do a good event that they can go. Yep. My car fits that let’s come and come, come and have fun with these guys because I have off that weekend.

Baron Mills: I just add again, it’s, it’s a completely volunteer organization. And as you move up and as you become more experienced or more familiar with it, basically.

Anything is available. If, you know, if you’re interested in doing tech, we’ll get, we’ll figure out a way to have you help the tech guys. If you’re interested in flagging, if you’re interested in registration, any of those areas, we’re, you know, we’re, we’re open for that discussion.

Travis Dixon: It’s taken a few years to get there, but the SCCA race programs are now starting to look at HPDE experience [00:59:00] as a precursor to going racing.

It’s been sort of a weird thing that for the longest time, SCCA didn’t have a progression from non competition to competition, you know, wheel to wheel competition. And that’s actually changing. And we do a lot of close work with our, with our region race school for things for a long time. And we probably still do once this world returns to normal of we try and schedule and usually offer a discount of if you do the, the early, HPD event before going to race school, you start to take a lot of money off the end of your bill.

And it’s, it’s really designed to get people on the track. Prior to that, there were people showing up for race school that had never been on a racetrack before. And we saw that as a, Hey, we can help fix this guy’s talk to us and we’ll work together and make it more fun for everybody.

Joe Obernberger: And the people are there.

So when you go to an HPD event and you want to do racing. Or do time trials, they’re all there to answer your questions that the people that do it. And I think Travis hit on a really good point. The volunteer part of the organization, [01:00:00] there is motivation. I mean, the people that are volunteering are doing it because they really are passionate about making a good program.

And the amount of time that Barron, David Miller, And crew put into the classroom content is huge, you know, if we had to pay them It’d be awful But so there’s really a big effort that the volunteer people have put into this program and I think it really shows

Crew Chief Eric: All right anything else guys before we wrap it up?

Joe Obernberger: Just say a little something about high performance driving events in general. I like driving I like to drive fast and I like cars. I like the people the technology You Pretty much everything involved with HPDE. So burning fuel, running through tires, burning through brakes. I like the physics involved with it.

One thing that I’ve noticed is we seem to get a lot of engineering minds at HPD events, and I think one of the reasons for that is because it is kind [01:01:00] of Science personified in some ways. I say this to Baron all the time. One half mv squared, you know, we’re calling us down the straightaway going 120. We got to convert all that energy, all that kinetic energy back into heat.

And I think that mindset really plays into who attends the events and it. The other thing I like about it is the whole engineering tradeoffs. You know, everything’s a tradeoff with, with this, you know, and not only with just with the cars in general, but in driving, driving the course, you know, you can take the shortest path through and go slow, but drive a shorter distance or, you know, drive longer path, but your speed is higher and you need to find that correct balance for every corner and every car.

I think one of the great things about SCCA is the paths they provide for moving forward. Now, obviously there’s a path to moving towards racing. For me personally, that’s not something I was really interested in. I was all about instruction. I wanted, you know, I got in the car with some guy, some poor fellow in the right seat.

And I was like, wow, [01:02:00] this guy’s job is the best. I want to do what he does. And SCCA provides a nice path forward.

Baron Mills: I just want to, I want to quickly bullet list or really just run through, you know, at speed, the things I believe that SCCA What differentiates SCCA from the other HPD programs? One on one instruction, right?

One instructor per student. It’s a volunteer organization. We believe that allows us to create very competitive pricing and time, amount of time per dollar. Some of the best classrooms that are available, and I’m not speaking even for myself, you know, the novice classroom and the advanced classroom. The fact that we’re part of a race organization, that knowledge of all those things, like.

Car dynamics and safety and driving the car and mindset. All those things we leverage heavily in, in the HPD program ability to cancel registration late. Some organizations you commit one week out and you may, you might get a 50 [01:03:00] percent refund. We’re at, uh, we’re most of our track days are at, uh, summit point.

They have three tracks. All three tracks are just fantastic. Right. Maine is just a really, really great track. But the other two tracks are fun too. We have track days at those two

Travis Dixon: again, on, on on the club perspective o of we we’re, we’re in an organization run that, that runs events by its members. So when somebody says, Hey, I, I think I can do a better job at something here, let, let me help.

We go, okay, come on in and help. We don’t get hurt. Don’t get feelings hurt by somebody, uh, who has a better idea. You know? So we, we. We take feedback, we truly listen to it and try and incorporate that. And, and that’s been the evolution of the program since day one of, of, of listen to it, to our customers, listen to our instructors, listen to people that have been there beforehand and know better and have seen things and, and are willing to

Crew Chief Eric: share.

And on that note, gentlemen, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show tonight. It’s been super informative and I’m sure our listeners now have a better perception of what SCCA is all about and why they should come out and [01:04:00] try an event. There’s a lot of really good information on WDCR’s website.

I think you guys probably have the most thorough documentation when it comes to being prepared and how the driver should be prepared and the car should be prepared. There’s a lot of information there and check it out because they’ve done a really good job of being very thorough with the information.

Now for the listeners out there, you can find more details on everything we’ve talked about either GTM website and looking at the followup article that goes with this episode or by visiting www dot. Wdcr do org slash hpde or following Wdcr on Instagram at wdcr cca or looking up w dcr SCCA on Facebook.

I think that’s everything. More than enough . Very good. Again, I cannot thank you guys enough for coming on the show, and I appreciate, uh, everything, all the knowledge you passed on, and hopefully we’ll have you back again soon. Thanks, Eric.

Baron Mills: Thanks, Eric. Thanks, Eric.[01:05:00]

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, listeners, Crew Chief Eric here. Do you like what you’ve seen, heard, and read from GTM? Great. So do we, and we have a lot of fun doing it, but please remember, we’re fueled by volunteers and remain a no annual fee organization, but we still need help to keep the momentum going so that we can continue to record and Write, edit, and broadcast all of your favorite content.

So be sure to visit www. patreon. com forward slash gtmotorsports or visit our website and click in the top right corner on the support and donate to learn how you can [01:06:00] help.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Gran Touring Motorsports
• 00:22 Meet the Hosts and Guests
• 01:12 History of SCCA HPDE Program
• 02:07 Evolution and Current State of HPDE
• 03:56 Unique Aspects of SCCA HPDE
• 15:42 Track Night in America and HPDE Differences
• 23:49 Safety and Insurance Considerations
• 31:22 How to Get Started with SCCA HPDE
• 33:36 Honesty in Run Group Selection
• 35:16 Importance of Two-Day Events
• 36:17 Early Registration Benefits
• 37:58 Understanding Event Supplementals
• 40:45 SCCA Tech Inspection Process
• 43:59 Novice Classroom Insights
• 47:47 Progression Through Run Groups
• 52:11 Instructor Clinics and Coaching
• 55:43 Extracurricular Activities and Volunteering
• 56:53 Pathways Beyond HPDE
• 01:00:29 Final Thoughts and Wrap-Up