Learn to Gymkhana!
What a hoot. We hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as we did, watching drivers progress throughout the day is one of the best things about these events, and wow was there some progression!
We had 15 drivers take part yesterday, 13 of which were completely new to the sport. As before, we ran a full morning of practice with tuition from our lovely Pro Class drivers, and after lunch allowed a few passenger rides with both Street and Pro drivers to help the food settle! After a little more practice, but without passengers, we had a Fastest Time of the Day competition, based on a Championship qualifying session, only with reaction times included! It was a super tight competition, just how we like it, with just 0.6s separating the top three!
Our fastest novices were:
Nick Chiswell (Turbo NB MX5) - 29.158s
Richard Cash (ND MX5 RF) - 29.282s
Ilya Krylov (ZZW30 MR2 Roadster) - 29.784s
Incredible driving from all involved, we greatly appreciate all the novices for giving it a go and being such great sports! Thanks also to our Pro drivers for giving up their time to coach their future competition; thanks to the FG drivers for giving our guests a taste of what they're up against with some passenger rides; thanks to our amazing media team David Gardener, Saadat Jesper-Mir, and Seb Allan for taking pics and videos all day; and finally the hugest thanks to our amazing team of marshals for making the event possible (even when the timing system didn't want to play along!).
We’ll be sharing some of our favourite pics and videos on Instagram and Facebook over the next couple of weeks, as well as some thoughts from our novices on here, so stay tuned!
Oh, and here are some stats, naturally
Average number of runs per driver: 25
Total seat time: 2h 46m (excluding DNFs and skills arena seat time)
Fastest lane: Right (33.136s vs 33.765s)
Most runs: Joshua O'Sullivan (40)
Fastest Reaction Time (all day): Pete Holder (0.092s - that is QUICK)
Lowest average R/T (all day): Ilya Krylov (0.433s)
Lowest average R/T (FTD Comp): Martynas Lavinskis (0.300s; worth also noting that everyone's average was under 1s - top work!)
FTD (including practice runs): Nick Chiswell (28.499s excluding R/T)
Most improved times: Alana Sims (63.129s at the beginning of the day down to 32.601s in the FTD comp!!!)
Most consistent times: Eden Young
Most average driver (average driver E/T compared to overall average E/T - 33.472s): Eden Young (33.902s
Most biased driver: Emiley Brown - 78.6% of runs on the righthand lane!
Most penalties: Pete Holder (3)
Most DNFs: Heather McFarlane (11)
We hope to see lots of you at the Test Day on 24 March at Santa Pod - you can sign up here!
Nick Chiswell tackled the course in the fastest time at Learn to Gymkhana! in his beautifully presented turbo MX5