I’m not sure if you know an Autodrome in Most. I suppose you don’t know it and you haven’t been to this circuit until today. 🙂 It’s located outside Most near Hnevin castle. My brother told me he would attend an „Open door day“ there last weekend. So I joined him without hesitation. And the organizer of „the day“ offered two interesting doing.
First, an attendant could take a ride over whole racing circle with his/her own car for 40 crowns and second, we could attend a Lateral breakaway school for free. I told my brother I wanted to try both offers. But he surprised me. He said he was afraid of a test slide-way. And I answered him that he had to train and I mentioned that real icy roads were more dangerous than the test slide-way. Despite of this fact he didn’t change his decision.

Racing course
A length of this circle is more than four kilometers and the faster driver ran though the course in a minute and fifteen seconds. I think that an average speed of the faster driver is aroud two hundred kilometers per hour. It’s a good time. We had paid 80 crowns for two cars (my car and my brother’s car) and we got ready to start. The organizer had said that we had gone at our’s own risk before we started. It made us really „happy“. I imagined how I crash into another car or another car crashed into my car. In a few minutes we started one by one, there were just about 20 carson the way. I was afraid a little bit in a first curve. There were a lot of cars together. By the way, I’ve forgotten to say that there was my 12 years old nephew in my car too. So, we carried on going and when all cars overtook me I was finally calm. I could look over the whole circuit. My nephew told me I should go faster. I felt like professional competitor. Finally, we finished the „race“. It was great but a better action was ahead of me.

Lateral breakaway school
It was for free, so I told myself I would be stupid if I didn’t try it. A group of 8 people attended a theory training in autodrome’s room for an hour. Lector told us how we could skid and still get our cars under control. It was interesting. He mentioned a few types of skids. He explained us that being calm is the most important thing when a car is not under control. I think it is easy to say, but hard to do. I told him it’s hard to manage the car going down the hill on an icy road. He agreed with me. His advice was to brake hardly and pray.
So, finally he told us we would go to a wet test slide-way and try to manage our cars sliding. The test way length was about fifty meters and width was circa five meters. The slide-way surface was white and it was still watered.
We tried to brake on the slippery surface many times. After each attempt the lector told us what we did wrong or well and he explained how we could get better. We tried to drive around a transport obstacle such as sudennly appeared walker in front of the car. In our case it was a plastic cone of course. I found out that it hadn’t been possible to brake and turn round at one time. So, I have to remember that I can brake at first and afterthat turn round without braking.
I had thought that it would be more complicated but controlling a car is easy when I know what to do and when I have a lot of time for making decision. A theory is a beautiful thing but experience is most important. I told my brother he would have to attend this kind of school before this winter. It was certainly useful…:-)