Tuesday 11 August 2015

Drift Champion Experience Day at Silverstone

Along with a number of other gifts, my girlfriend bought me a voucher to do the Caterham Drift Champion Experience at Silverstone.

It was one of those gifts that I was ecstatic to receive, but somehow 'forgot about it' in a usual bloke type way... So a few weeks ago Charlotte was lets say 'encouraging' me to book it up, but being a bloke 'booking things up in a diary' are not that easy!  So she took it out of my control and booked it for me, told me when I was to be at Silverstone and that was that!  I'm really glad she did as I had a great day...

Arriving at Silverstone's main entrance, the Caterham van and hospitality suite was large enough to see from the road.  The day is run in one of Silverstone's main car parks, so there's plenty of space and I guess a good revenue earner for what would be a dis-used carpark for most of the year... Next up was the usual signing your life away, briefing, a little bit of tuition and then off we went to the cars...

There were two different courses in the morning, one with a small donut and large drift area, then the second which was a figure of eight.

We stopped for an hours lunch around 12:30, whilst the Caterham team replaced the cones into the afternoon's layout which was to be practised on by all with a final assessment run at the end of the day.

Below are two videos, the first being an onboard video (that you can buy on  memory stick from Caterham for £25!) of my final assessment lap...

...and the second video is also of my final assessed lap but this time from the 'pit lane'...

I was happy with my final run, and thought it was worthy of a top three finish... The scoring was based on 100 points as you started the lap with single point deductions for every small errors, ten point deductions for hitting a cone, twenty five for a spin and so on... So to get a perfect score was going to be pretty tough!

The top three finishers scored, 92, 93 and myself at 94!  Well happy to win the day, and the gift... A whole autoglym cleaning kit - for me a so called polisher?!?  Perfect! :o) Well there was also a Caterham 1st place embroidered hat, and a goodie bag too... (by the way the valet kit is already on eBay as a polisher like me already has everything in the bag anyway!)
Collecting my 1st place cap, goodie bag and autoglym valet kit
Collecting my 1st place cap, goodie bag and autoglym valet kit
And the picture below is of the top three drifters of the day...
The top three drifters of the day
The top three drifters of the day
There were a total of seventeen 'drifters' at the day of varying abilities, the overall time in the car was reasonable.  I'd say it was a very well run day, the refreshments and lunch were good, the tuition was noteworthy and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  I would recommend the day to anyone who wants to improve their drifting skills, have a day out, or generally just smoke someone elses rubber and gas!

1 comment:

  1. I bet the gearboxes were not leaking in those cars... Customers can't bring their own cars cos they are all back at Caterham getting fixed or not.

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