Today was Jen's first lesson in driving a manual transmission. At least with me as her teacher.
This is the early preparation for the September 10th Powder Puff race. The powder puff event takes the wives/girlfriends/[insert female here] and lets them loose against the other women for 10 laps of racing action in the race cars.
Jen is planning on driving the Acura in the bandit powder puff race. The Acura is a manual transmission, hence our lessons today.
We started at the MATC Truax Campus in the rear parking lot. Jen wasn't the only one learning driving skills in that lot either. There was a 15-16 yr old girl learning how to drive a Ford Ranger. Started out with first gear which began more like a rodeo. That poor little Mitsubishi hasn't been abused like that since ... well probably since we took it to lunch last.
She graduated to second gear and then third. She was still shaky on her starts.
She got "bored" with 1st-3rd so we went home did some chores. Later we went out and did some country road driving. She made it into 5th gear out there a couple times. One time she even meant to ;)...
A few more practice sessions and we'll be ready to teach her how to race.
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2 comments:
Your comment on abuse of the Mitsubishi reminds me of lunch hour in high school when my friend Bob would wring every single horse and then some out of his parent's Ford Pinto. It had a manual transmission and a four cylinder engine that receive my personal award for the most abused drive train of the '70s, and that includes two great cars that I knew of that were in the hands of the third of three brothers. Bob is now an engineer at Boeing. Don't be afraid for a moment. When Bob designs something, he expects it to hold together in the event that he gets to drive/fly it. That should make it extremely safe and reliable for normal use.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. It may be a fluke that we lived through those years, and I'd avoid any of those yellow-orange Pintos you might find in the junkyard in these parts.
John A
Ha!
My Dad used to race pintos with the color of choice being Orange. Small world.
The most memorable moment was when he won his feature race on his birthday. They hurried all of us kids down to the car for a victory lap. By the time they got the seven of us in the car, it wouldn't move. The driveshaft was bound up on the floor board. Talk about an abused drivetrain :)
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