06/02/2009 16:03:23 Gareth Evans Whats the differance between 1 and 2 sessions? Is 2 sessions more time on track or when your on track. Sorry im sure I have read the whole description, but a conbination of it being a Friday afternoon, snow and excitement over Bedford next week stop me functioning as a normal human being. Gareth:confused: :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused:

06/02/2009 16:44:37 Dave Hi Gareth, There are two sorts of track days - sessioned and open pitlane. The Bedford day you are going to that is being organised by Lotus on Track (LoT) is an open pitlane event. The way these run is that there is a maximum number of cars involved in the day and a maximum number of cars allowed on track at once. The latter is usually around 50% of the former. Let's say hypothetically it is 60 cars total and 30 on track at once. When the track opens in the morning 30 cars are allowed out. The remainder queue in the pitlane. When a car comes off the track, the first one in the queue is allowed on. After the initial rush this usually settles quite well to a situation where there are enough people coming off all the time and enough people messing around in the paddock for there to be only a small queue. Few people will keep their cars on track for more than 15 to 20 mins - everything just gets too hot, including the driver! Concentration levels need to be high on track and 20 mins is enough for safety anyway. Some people may even only do 10 min stretches. This is why open pitlane is preferred by some - subject to queueing it is up to you when you are on or off the track. The other sort of day is more typical of MGs on Track days and that is a sessioned day. Here, if we take the same hypothetical max of 60 cars for the day we might have three sessions of 20 cars at once. The sessions are scheduled - with three sessions it is 20 mins every hour. So if we think of the sessions (groups of 20 cars) being colour coded - red, green, blue - then let's say the red session is on track from 09:00 until 09:20 and then from 10:00 until 10: 20 and so on every hour of the day (except for the lunch hour). The green session will get their 20 mins of track time from 09:20 until 10:40 and so on and the blue session from 09:40 until 10:00 and so on. Most circuits and days will run as three session days as the example above. A couple of tracks have strict noise limits that mean that only 10 to 12 cars can be on track at once. This means that we run 4 sessions of 15 mins every hour to make sure we get enough cars for the whole day to make the event viable. Sessions allow us to group the cars based on a combination of driver experience and car power. Our goal is to minimise the traffic issues caused by cars lapping at different speeds. It is safer that way. Consequently, if we have three sessions we will tend to have a slower group made up of beginners and faster group made up of the very experienced drivers and a middle group to take up the middle ground. If you see an MGoT day advertised as having two sessions of MGs it will be because we have sold one session to another club. We do this if we feel that we are unlikely to get enough MGs to fill an entire day. Similarly, if we only have one MG session it means we have sold two sessions to other clubs or we have bought a single session on another clubs day. Phew - I hope all this makes sense. If you want any clarification give me a call on 07740 582830. Regards, Dave

06/02/2009 19:04:12 Gareth Evans Hi Dave, Makes perfect sense now thanks. Since posting, have checked the calender and will be in China in April :mad: never mind at least I know for other events, later in the year. Thanks for your help.

06/02/2009 22:55:13 Dave [quote=Gareth Evans]Since posting, have checked the calender and will be in China in April :mad: [/quote]That's a shame Gareth, but as you say, there will be other opportunities I'm sure. Enjoy your trip. Regards, Dave