Blog

Our first HPDE for 2025 was a resounding success. We opened registration early and offered an early bird discount. We had a tremendous response and sold out 2 weeks in advance of the event date. 

We were fortunate that that the weather cooperated all weekend with temps in the high 60’s to low 70’s. Nothing better to get out and exercise your car and test your driving skills.

Due to the large turnout, we had the front entry gates opened @ 6AM so we could get participants registered early and allow them to get their cars through tech before the drivers meeting.

This and all of our prior events could not happen without the efforts of our volunteers led by Lisa Disabatino managing all aspects of registration to Ryan Raser and Andy Stahl @ tech ensured a smooth flow from driver registration to completing tech in record time. 

Brian Schmidt, our Chief Driving instructor, managed the skid pad with our volunteers, on Saturday morning along with several classrooms for the yellow group throughout the weekend. He also assigns and coordinates with the PCA group of certified instructors to assign them to the yellow group and well as those in the white group and any other participant that request to have an instructor ride in their car. 

Instructors were available throughout the weekend

Barbara Baron managed the rest or our volunteers ensuring we had coverage @ registration, black flag and the safety check station. 

We ran 4 run groups from Red- highly experienced, to Green- experienced, to White-Novice, to yellow -new drivers participating in an DE or to the track with instructors.

We also provide an option for anyone that has an interest to learn about what we do at these events called “Taste of the Track” where you ride in an instructors car for several laps to understand the dynamics of safe, high speed driving. 

With the large amount or participants, there are bound to be challenges which we experienced throughout the weekend. Most were minor with the usual learning curves of drivers and their machines. Mostly everyone behaved and we had no major incidents.

For those members who are not familiar with our HPDE’s, I encourage you to reach out to myself or Brian to ask any questions you may have. While this is a PCA event, we accept all marques as long as they can pass our safety inspection at the track. We even had a 1990 Mercury marquis running with us! The DE’s are all about providing a fun and safe environment for our participants. Our past events have proven that

My thanks to all of the participants, instructors and volunteers for their support of these HPDE’s. 

Please come out and join us at our next events on September 6,7th and November 29,30^th.

Peter George

LVPCA

HPDE Chair