I was watching GMA on ABC this morning when they showed a story about a Safety Driving course for teens to teach them how to recover an out of control car. It is offered by the Skip Barber school. They showed them going into a sideways skid on wet pavement. Guess what all the training vehicles were. VR 09 or 10 RX8s

here is a link to the story online... I could not find the vid..

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/...ory?id=9402173

 

That is awesome, most drivers ed classes are a joke.

 

It's great to know how to control a RWD vehicle in the rain, but what about the FWD vehicles these kids will more than likely to own?

Oversteer is more nervous to control in the wet, but understeer is what causes most accidents on the road in wet conditions.

But they also need to know when to let off on the gas to correct the understeer when dealing with a FWD vehicles. Hopefully they have a Mazda 3 or 6 for those demostrations.

This Skip Barber driving course is a must for all new teenage drivers!

 

they did show a few of them in Mazda 3s

 

Cross posting this from the other thread on this topic: https://www.rx8club.com/showthread.p...46#post3363846

Yeah, nearly all entry-level Skip Barber classes are with RX-8s and MX-5s, with a few Mazda3s thrown in. They are really only gone from some of the really high level classes, which have vehicles in the low 400s+. Lexus IS-F, BMW M3, etc...


Skip Barber had a free "opening day" at Lime Rock last April, where you could spend all day just bouncing between driving RX-8s on the skip pad (with instructors riding) or driving Mazda3s on the autocross course (instructors riding), or ride hot laps around the full track in Spec Miatas or a Lotus (instructors driving, the Lotus was production, and driving at ~7/10th, the Spec Miatas were WAY funner, as their drivers were pushing at 10/10ths, often drifting the Ss, getting air off the hill on the back straight). So much fun!

All of the instructors really prefer Miatas and RX-8s to other cars when you talk to them candidly, though there is a bias towards Miatas since apparently most of them either have or do race Spec Miatas.

I am eagerly waiting to see if their free opening day will come around again for 2010