Yesterday you may have read my colleague Colin Goodwin’s learned treatise on why track days suck, so it falls to me to put the case for the defence.
The task is not difficult but would be made simpler still had any of you actually met the man. Colin is one of my oldest, dearest friends but I think he’d be first to concede most people’s brains do not function quite like his. Because otherwise building an aircraft in the small garden of a terraced house despite having neither a pilot’s licence nor the smallest relevant qualification would be regarded as an entirely normal thing to do. Five years, one PPL and 11,000 manually applied rivets later, he flew the result to Malta and back. We all know someone who likes to pretend they’re ‘a bit mad’. Goodwin has no such need, for it comes entirely naturally to him.
So consider what he says about track days also in the context of who’s saying it – namely, a lunatic.