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Located at Norwell, midway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, the Holden Performance Driving Centre is an $8 million (NZ$8.9 million) facility is purpose built to provide an ideal and safe environment to asses and improve driving ability.
The facility includes a two-kilometre training circuit, skid pan,
full fleet of training vehicles an off-road four-wheel-drive training course, conference room and onsite catering.
In addition, the centre features one of the few mechanical turntables used to simulate oversteer in the Southern Hemisphere. Part of the centre's appeal is that it offers hot laps in a V8 SS Commodore and with the new V8 Super School, participants can now get behind the wheel themselves.
As well as driving, guests can also get a behind-the-scenes look at the Holden V8 Race Team and the world of V8 Supercars, with packages including a visit to the Motorsport Gallery and the Paul Morris Motorsports Sirromet Wines V8 Supercar Team.
The HPDC is committed to improving the safety of everyone on the road. Corporations and the general public are becoming more and more aware of the need to have good driving skills.
Driving a modern-day car occurs in an volatile environment and accidents can happen quickly if a driver lacks experience and good driving techniques.
Generally, once a person gets their drivers licence, all they know are the rules of the road and the basics of getting from A to B. But this is just the bare minimum required for safe driving.
A majority of drivers have little knowledge of the dynamic forces that act on a car in normal circumstances and adverse conditions.
The HPDC will help drivers develop better driving skills, lay the foundation of driver-awareness and provide the skills to enable drivers to handle situations that arise that are outside the comfort zone.
Many accidents could be avoided if drivers are trained to understand a vehicle's dynamics and better prepared to handle unexpected situations.
As well as improving driver skills, the centre has a fleet of V8 Commodores built for the V8 Super School. The vehicles are liveried in a selection of V8 Supercar team designs.
There are two levels in the super school programme. In both levels, the cars are equipped with roll cage, race seats and harness, full race aero kits, quick-shift gearboxes, race suspension and slick racing tyres.
If drivers graduate at level one, they are eligible to drive a level two V8. These cars feature 450-horsepower engines, an increase of 100-horsepower over level one cars and have V8 Supercar brakes, coil-over adjustable shock-absorbers and springs, wider 10-inch rear slick tyres (8-inch on level one cars), racing spool locked differential, and a Motec dash with print out.
And for the ultimate ride, there's option for a few laps in Paul Morris's actual V8 Supercar race car.
It's not all fast cars at the HPDC, for over the last 14 years they have been seen as a university of driving. In conjunction with Griffith University's Gold Coast Campus, the HPDC has undertaken its own research to investigate the links between good driving technique and overall car stability.
Some of the research indicated that the greater use of bracing by instructors to resist g-forces represents a strategy of active stabilisation and may enhance both postural stability and overall stability and consistency of driving performance.
Also, instructors employed a different emergency braking strategy, and were able to perform a high-speed swerve and recovery task more effectively than even experienced drivers.
Because the instructors at the centre focus on the fundamental technique of increasing dynamic stability as a means of increasing perceptual awareness during driving, driver-training programmes available at HPDC have the potential to dramatically improve road safety in general.
For more informantion go to www.performancedriving.com.au. Eric Thompson was able to attend the Holden Performance Driving Centre courtesy of Gold Coast Tourism, www.verygc.com and Lemark Indy 300, www.indy.com.au.