A Fun Day At Work?

[kneedownnate]

Or; getting paid to test tires, either way.  Our company and Bridgestone got together and arranged for some of our guys to drive some new bmw 318i and test out a few different tires.  You don't get a lot of driving time cause there are 40 guys to cycle through, but you get to be in the car while instructor shows you the course (think autocross) and while the other guys in your group drive the course.

First tests were some kinda standard car tires on the wet course, new design vs old design, and you could really notice the difference between the two.  2nd and 3rd were driving on a new design run-flat tire with no valve core, then the run-flats which came stock on the bmw's and their run-flat.  Pretty basic, nothing fancy and you weren't driving super fast.

The last part was the best.  They stuck some of the new re71r tires on the car and split us up into 4 - 10 man teams to run the autocross course.  Clock starts when the first guy took off, then he jumps out and tags the next guy, etc until all the guys have driven a lap, then the instructor slides over and runs his lap.

We were 2nd group so we kinda got to watch how they did and learn from their mistakes.  One of our guys hit a cone and got a 2 second penalty, and our instructor knocked it into neutral in a corner and had to wait for the rpm to drop, so we got beat by 1.3 seconds overall.  The instructor told me to just do a nice, smooth lap, so I said "just go fast?!"  I saw almost everybody was flooring it then hitting the brakes into the first turn, so I floored it but only let off until I got into the turn, then floored it again.  He kept telling me to slow down but I didn't, and it ended up being a clean run.  Super fun, and super sticky tires!

Oh, and this was only about the 2nd time I've driven a car.  Weird getting used to a car after driving trucks for so long!  Only bad part was leaving san jose to head north at 5 pm