Your "Professional" Mercedes driving instructor...

[nealtovsen at yahoo.com (Neal Tovsen)]

A couple weeks ago, my autocross region was asked if
any of us would like to be driving instrctors for an
event put on by the AMG performance car division of
Mercedes. They even offered to give us a hotel room
and pay us! I got to drive all the different AMG
Mercedes, but I spent most of my time running around
the Daytona speedway in one of these:

http://www.caranddriver.com/article.asp?section_id=19&article_id=1844

(BTW, according to the information I was given, the
car has about 30 more horsepower for 2004)

All I can say is, "Will anyone borrow me $114,000?"

I let about 75 millionaires take me around the
autocross course and tried to teach them how to drive
fast. I got a lucky assignment, as only about three of
us instructors were given the opportunity to beat the
heck out of the SL ourselves and take the customers
for a good ride. 500hp is a lot of fun on a tight
autocross course, and the cars handle amazingly well,
despite weighing over 4000 lbs!

Though some of my friends did, I never got to go up
onto the big NASCAR oval track. We also got to meet
"real" pro drivers from various race series. Seeing
the huge, full-size S55 AMG sedan rocket around the
track at 160mph was amazing. It looked very
comfortable at that speed.

Neal

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com