Yahoo Autos There's a Trackday Instructor Shortage A-Brewin'
It was a kind of irony that even Alanis Morrissette would recognize: I was at an open-lapping day recently when an older fellow pulled up next to me in a very expensive Porsche and started chewing me out. He'd read a few of my articles on the dangers and challenges of trackday instruction, and he was firmly of the opinion that my decision to discuss those dangers and challenges with the general audience here at Road & Track was doing a disservice to my fellow drivers. He's far from the first person to do that, and I gave him the same canned but very sincere response I've been giving for a few years now: If we, the HPDE community, can't put our house in order regarding instructor safety, that house will be put in order for us by the courts, the insurance companies, and the tracks themselves.
When it was apparent that my boilerplate brush-off wasn't really satisfying him, I tried to smooth over the situation by asking him about some of the tactics he uses with difficult or frustrating students. "Oh," he responded, "I'm just here to drive in the black group. I quit doing instruction about five years ago. The cars are just too fast now." And with that, he got back in his car and drove away, leaving me just standing there with my mouth hanging slightly ajar.
This would be just a funny story-if my not-quite-friend in the Porsche didn't personally represent a real trend among former instructors who have decided to turn in their credentials for reasons of personal safety. Over the past few years I've noticed that most of the major instructional organizations out there, both the car clubs and the for-profit operations, are having trouble finding enough instructors to fill all of their student seats. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data," so I've kind of kept my mouth shut on this topic even though I can plainly see instructors leaving the trackday community faster than the new ones are arriving.
Yesterday, however, I received an e-mail from a well-respected driver coach and trackday safety expert who does look at things in a scientific and data-driven light, and that e-mail absolutely confirms what I've noticed on an anecdotal level. There's a serious instructor shortage a-brewin', and the situation is only going to get worse.
Many trackday providers chose was to quick-bake some volunteer instructors.
This isn't the first time that trackday organizations have struggled to keep the right seats full. In the Nineties, when the open-lapping craze arrived in earnest, there was a flood of new students and a definite dearth of qualified people to teach them. The solution that many trackday providers chose was to quick-bake some volunteer instructors out of their existing participant roster.
As recently as five years ago, I saw one of my local groups routinely take people from first-lap rookie to "instructor" in as few as five or six weekends on-track. Needless to say, the results were rarely good-but it made a sort of rough-hewn business sense. Any instructor is better than no instructor, right? And you can't make a long-term customer out of someone who can't even register for his first event because there's nobody to sit next to him. Just get a warm body of some type in there and hope it all works out.
Over the past few years, most organizations have seen new drivers arrive faster than the old ones are quitting, so as you'd expect, in 2016 the pool of potential instructors is larger than ever. I've been given to understand that most NASA regions aren't facing any kind of instructor shortage whatsoever, since they have multiple race groups every weekend full of drivers who are eager to save some money on registration fees by also coaching.
Most trackday providers don't have that luxury. Instead of having hundred or so licensed racers on hand every weekend, they have a relatively limited number of "black group" drivers in their fastest run groups. Some of those drivers are so wealthy that the prospect of saving money on the weekend doesn't interest them-think Porsche Club and Ferrari Club-and others are too busy wrenching on their vintage or exotic cars to make two or three hours a day available for coaching.
That leaves the marque clubs and the for-profit trackday crowd with a very frustrating Venn diagram composed of three circles:
Qualified to instruct
Have enough free time to instruct
Willing to instruct
The problem is that third circle, "Willing to instruct," and that was the topic of my friend's e-mail. Instructors are quitting, and they are not coming back.
We can speculate on the reasons to our hearts' content, and I could easily come up with ten good justifications to quit coaching. (Number Ten would be, "Can't afford to eat lunch at the notoriously expensive VIR trackside cafe.") But there's really only one explanation that I ever hear from ex-instructors who have chosen to quit the right seat:
The cars are just too fast now.
If you're a BMWCCA driver coach, you're now looking at 440-horsepower M3s instead of the 240-horsepower M3 of 1996. Porsche Club? Today's Carrera has the power of 1994's Turbo. And spare a thought, dear reader, for the man (or woman) brave enough to coach new Corvette drivers. The 300-horsepower LT1 'Vette was a salt-poisoned slug compared to a new Z06.
At least new cars come with a full set of functioning electronic safety nets.
But at least the new cars come with a full set of functioning electronic safety nets. What about the 15-or-20-year-old used cars of today, the ones that the young guys are showing up in? Today's would-be instructor has an excellent chance of getting a novice with 300 horsepower, $59 Nexen tires, Pep Boys brake pads, and a decade's worth of deferred maintenance waiting to pose problems as soon as the slip angles get serious. That's just as frightening as sitting next to a novice in an SRT-8 Challenger fresh from the showroom floor. Maybe more so.
Every year, the trackday hardware at all levels becomes more deadly serious, capable of hitting the wall at higher and higher speeds. Some instructors are trying to cope by setting limits on the cars they'll sit in; I've heard "No Vettes, No Vipers, No GT-Rs" too many times to count lately. But all that does is increase the likelihood that those of us who are willing to coach those drivers will get an uninterrupted stream of very fast cars-which, in turn, reduces our willingness to coach in the future.
There's a solution to this mess, and it's one that's been discussed at every level of the trackday community over the last few years. Depending on where you go and to whom you listen, the specifics of the program change, but these are the basics:
Maximum speeds on straights for novices
Data-based remote coaching for experienced drivers instead of right-seat instruction, as pioneered by Peter Krause and others
Restrictions on modifications, R-compound tires, and the likelihood
A lot of people don't like those solutions. They're bad for business, whether you mean "business" in the literal sense or the getting-new-drivers-to-join-the-club sense. But I think those solutions are coming, and they are coming in a hurry.
Speaking personally, I'll probably be the last man in America to give up the right seat. I believe in my ability to maintain command of the car, the student, and the situation. I also believe that there are some drivers who uniquely benefit from having a coach in the car with them instead of standing in a corner station or reviewing the telemetry.
With that said, I'm also the idiot who applied for, and received, a pro BMX license with a nice deep crack in his second cervical vertebrae. Most instructors are a lot smarter than I am, and they don't like to take unnecessary risks. And those risks are out there, whether we talk about them or not. I'm going to keep talking about them, because I believe that trackday drivers have a right to all of the information out there. Like the song says-you oughta know.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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