October 2007 - Porsche Club of America – Northeast Region

Another high point of this year was our Watkins Glen event
in late July. It was co-sponsored by Firefly’s BBQ restaurants,
owned by NER member Steve Uliss, and longtime NER sponsor
European Performance Engineering, owned by Jerry Pellegrino.
Steve and his crew brought a catering truck with all the fixin’s
to Watkins Glen and put on a not soon to be forgotten spread
on the shores of Seneca Lake for the event attendees and their
guests. If you did not attend this event and feast, be sure to
visit one of the three Firefly’s locations to see what you missed.
Speaking of sponsors, in addition to Firefly’s and EPE, our last
event was sponsored by Ira Porsche. Special thanks go out to
Dave Hazlett, Ira Porsche’s GM, for being a longtime sponsor of
our NHIS event. This year, Dave provided some great factory-issued
posters that were gobbled up quickly by the NHIS drivers.
In addition to the fun and challenge, there are two major
benefits that result from participating in NER’s DE events.
One is learning and applying high-performance driving skills
on world-class tracks and road courses. The pure excitement
of driving at speed in a controlled environment at the same
venues that the pros drive on is an experience that few can
equate to in other sports or activities. Can you imagine playing
a pickup baseball game at Fenway or playing tag-football at
Gillette Stadium?
The other is the ability to apply many of these skills and techniques
to everyday driving. It never fails to amaze me how often
I apply these skills during my street driving and how much
fun the cloverleaf’s on Route 128 have become! The important
aspect of all of this, however, is that Education is the keyword in
Driver Education.
If you’ve never been to one of our DE events, it is both a
learning experience and fun. They are not the intimidating,
white-knuckle event you might imagine nor are they like the
wheel-to-wheel competition you see on each Sunday’s Nextel
Cup race.
At NER’s DE events, all drivers are assigned to a run group
that most closely matches their skill level of high-performance
driving. NER uses six different run groups, assuring that drivers
are on the track at the same time with others with the same
relative skill level and speed. Here’s a quick summary of each
run group:
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