[Norm Peterson]

I kind of hope he did get it, or at least still has it as an option. Either way, I hope that distilling my experience down to a couple of paragraphs can help him, his wife, and anybody else.

For riding - even driving - at up to at least moderately enthusiastic driving, the key is to simply relax in the seat. Don't tense up, or push on the floor - those actions tend to unweight you in the seat (you don't want to be doing that). As would pulling on an overhead strap, with the lifting up being somewhat counterproductive to whatever value it has in holding your upper body in place laterally. Grabbing low, say, under the seat cushion with both hands, might make more sense and for sure be better than reaching outside the window for the edge of the roof. Hands outside the vehicle is frowned upon even at autocross.

I don't think it's the g's per se that's the problem as much as it's the rate at which they are developed. And that's entirely a driver issue, save for any emergency-mode accident-avoidance maneuvers. While I can (almost) fully understand OP's situation out on the track as an instructor for people with driving skill levels that are unknown/uncertain/maybe almost absent, that shouldn't be the case for others when he's in the driver seat.

I'm not an instructor (experienced intermediate, maybe), but I do try to notice what's going on around me. One of the things I've found out over the past 45+ years is that the smoother your driving is, the harder you can drive before it upsets your passengers. But you have to drive smoothly all the time, and probably a little bit harder than average traffic for much of that so that whatever higher intensity you're about to put into your driving won't come as a big surprise. There will still be limits to what you can "get away with", and needlessly tossing people around faster than they can adjust to or dialing it all the way up to track pace are a couple of things to avoid doing.


Topaz - the average driver rarely pushes past 0.3g laterally at any speed much past what you take neighborhood intersections at, 0.2 being more common at least in measured observations I made some years ago. 0.5 runs away from most everybody, so it doesn't surprise me that 0.4 is outside your wife's comfort zone. Whether it's too late for her to ever get comfortable at 0.6 or a bit higher, only you'll ever know. But from where I sit, married to the same girl since 1970, it's at least possible.


Norm