Photo by Shawn Pan

Written by Gerry Papenhausen

27 Teens Learn Street Safety Skills

This July, NER Solo came together with all of the other autocross clubs that call Devens Airfield home to put on a full weekend of Tire Rack Street Survival Schools. All together, we successfully gave 27 new teenager drivers the opportunity to experience safety training and practical emergency maneuvers in a safe environment that has the potential to one day save their lives or even those of the people around them.

“The Tire Rack Street Survival school is a safe teen driving program, designed to go beyond today’s required driver education and give teens across the U.S. the driving tools and hands-on experience they need to become safer, smarter drivers. The school provides trained and qualified in-car driving instructors as well as valuable classroom experience for each student.”

This community outreach program is just one way NER and the autocross community is working together to provide a valuable service and resource to the New England area. By taking our love for motorsports, we can use our performance driving skills to help develop young drivers and create safer roadways for everyone.

While NER hosted the Saturday school and Boston BMW CCA hosted on Sunday, the in-car instructors, course workers, and set-up/clean-up crews that participated came from all eight Devens autocross clubs to volunteer their time and significant expertise to the effort of teaching teenagers safe-driving habits. The individual school days were split between classroom instruction focusing on those habits and on-course practical seat time with a qualified instructor sitting right-seat at all times to guide each student through the exercises safely. The closed-course nature of the practical driving exercises gave the students the opportunity to safely experience the full range of both what the car and they, themselves are capable of doing to avoid collisions and to properly handle emergency situations behind the steering wheel of a car. Though we were not teaching performance driving skills specifically, the deep experience and expertise held by the various members of the autocross clubs that compete at Devens every weekend of the summer was more than equal to the task of training the students in skills that vastly improve their avoidance and safety abilities.

Key Leaders

The event would not have been possible without NER Autocross (co-)chair, Melanie Kwong, who led the team for NER. BBMW Justin Chen led the team for BBMW. Jerry Papenhausen assisted both of them with logistical duties, and assisted Wiley Cox with teaching the classroom sessions.  (Wiley led 2 hour-long classroom sessions, plus 2 half hour run group sessions, for a total of basically 6 straight hours of instruction!) Brandon Dryer ran our airbag demos and Emmanuel Cecchet donated all of the airbags. Barb Seeger handled registration duties and kept us on track with all of our waiver requirements.