Jeff Cashmore wrote:
> As an instructor, I find myself repeating the same things to students
> over and over. Below are the lines I use most often.
Here's mine. I'll allow some overlap with Jeff and Rocky, since the
novices on the list will benefit from the repetition.
(1) "Look ahead." I believe that almost everything else is
secondary, including lines. If a driver has a good academic/
intellectual understanding of lines, and looks ahead, the lines will
come naturally.
(1a) "Don't stop turning your head when you get to the A-pillars. It's
okay to look out the side windows." It's interesting to ride with
novices and see them do this. Happens all the time.
(2) "Go slower in the slow parts, and faster in the fast parts."
It's almost universally true that novices go too fast in the slow
parts and too slow in the fast parts. Of course, a key component of
this is developing the skill to recognize the slow parts and the fast
parts.
(3) "Spend as little time in the corner as possible." Mostly applies
to hairpins and other long, slow corners. People think about
maximizing speed, rather than minimizing time.
(4) "Try driving at 9/10ths. That's more like everyone else's
10/10ths." I say this to people who chronically overdrive, and I've
had pretty good results. (John Thomas actually said this to me at the
McKamey Phase II school.)
(5) "If you can't tell where to make up time, the answer is usually
'a little bit everywhere' or 'a tenth in each maneuver.'" Pick up a
tenth in each of 20 manuevers, and suddenly you've picked up two
seconds!
(6) "What are you going to do differently on the next run?" Far too
many novices don't put enough of their attention span into paying
attention to what happened. Without doing that, there's no way they
can make adjustments for the next run.
(7) "If you have a choice between slowing down here and slowing
down in the next manuever, slow down here." It's almost always
better to give up earlier rather than later.
There's more, I'm sure, but this is what pops into my brain at the
moment. Perhaps someone ought to assemble the responses to this into
a web page or something.
Mark
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