Both low-speed and high-speed driving are required in training

Thank you for letting me take a week off to attend two driving courses in Nurburgring, Germany. I have attended four driving training courses operated by BMW, two in June and two in the last week.

Nurburgring, or Green Hell, is a circuit known as the toughest circuit on the globe. Most car manufactures no longer compete at Le Mans 24 hours endurance race, but now at Nurburgring 24 hours endurance. Its length is over 20 kms consisting of 73 corners and its altitude difference within the course exceeds 300 meters. For instance, Fuji Speedway, the largest circuit in Japan, is 4.5kms, 16 corners, and 40 meters between the highest altitude and the lowest.

I attended the training courses as frequently as possible in a short period of time, hoping that it would let me get used to Nuburgring and remember the corners there. Roads are not wide, and escape-zones are not forgiving, so driving safely there is a major challenge. I knew my way of driving was somewhat rough and brave, and I needed to improve my driving preciseness and control.

In between June and the last week in Nurburgring trainings, I managed to have one driving lesson in a small rural circuit in Japan with a professional driver. Even in a small and low speed circuit, I found myself still lacking preciseness and control, so the lesson was educational. When it came to Nurburgring, a high speed and a large circuit, I learned that the speed we were making, sometimes over 200 kph, was quite educational too.

The low-speed driving lesson was like a word by word, or dictation lesson of a foreign language. Whereas, the high-speed lesson being like an intense conversation of that. Word by word is important, but you'd need to get into a certain speed if you wanted to be fluent. So, high-speed lessons have their importance too. We, Japanese drivers, tend to put too much emphasis onto low-speed lessons, but German drivers are trained in high-speed areas too.

This experience made me realize the value of low-speed and high-speed driving lessons. Low and high applies not only in driving, but also in many other areas such as language lessons.