2026 Autocross School Recap
NER held its Autocross School early this year – on April 11th. The event was sponsored once again by Conway Autoworks in Hanover, MA. (Thank you, Kenny!) At this year’s event, we mixed things up a bit by inviting a group of drivers and instructors from NER’s HPDE Team led by Tim Canfield to host a car clinic in conjunction with our event. The two groups ran their respective exercises separately during the morning sessions followed by a Pizza lunch provided by the Club. In the afternoon, both groups combined to run a full Autocross Course – putting into practice some of what they had seen during their morning exercises.
This year’s event attracted 32 students at the Autocross School and 16 drivers for the HPDE car control clinic. Both groups had a number of their own experienced drivers on hand to instruct the students.
The Autocross Students had been advised (prior to the event) to watch the 3-part NER Autocross Video produced by Richard Viard (who was one of the instructors attending) to get acquainted with what to expect at an invent and pick up a few tips on driving technique, safety issues, and more. After a brief morning driver’s meeting to cover a few basics on Autocross and Safety, instructors and their students were turned loose to drive the morning exercises.
This year, we set up two comprehensive exercises – a “Figure 8” exercise to help with turning and following a course, a “Clamshell” exercise to practice more braking with turning. A “Slalom” element introducing students to a frequently used autocross element was also integrated into the Figure 8. Students were broken into groups of drivers and course workers and had 45 minutes of driving each exercise allowing plenty of repetitions for each student.
Following a Pizza lunch provided by the Club, we held a brief driver’s meeting before running an actual autocross event for the afternoon.
Students were driven around the course in their own cars by their instructor at a moderate pace to get familiarized with the course and a driving approach. Then, each student was given a chance to do 4 timed runs with their instructor riding along. By the end of the day, there were a lot of smiling faces and a number of students saying they were looking forward to signing up for our first regular event for the season on May 17th.
A look at the posted times for the day shows most of the students managing to improve their times considerably over the course of their four runs showing that they learned something during the day’s activities. Once posted, full results can be seen by going to NER’s Live Timing site at https://porschenet.com/ax, scrolling down to the date of the Autocross School (April 11, 2026), then selecting “Results”.
Thanks again to Kenny Conway at Conway Autoworks for sponsoring the event and hopefully helping to generate some new autocross regulars …
