Doing an ARDS Test

You may wonder why a Skoda Octavia picture made it into this post, but we’ll clear that up later.

In our last post we talked about what we planned on getting upto and that we needed Matt to take his ARDS in order to get going. We actually missed a step; first of all you need to order your “Go Racing” pack from the MSA. If you don’t do this first, you won’t have any paperwork for your ARDS examiner to sign off and you will have wasted your time, and your money… So don’t do that!

In the Go Racing pack you will find a medical certificate (I asked my Dr. to fill mine out ahead of time), the ARDS exam paper and a DVD plus a booklet. Study all of these carefully and the written part of the exam will be a piece of cake.

The exam itself is around an hour of your examiner talking you through the DVD, with 30 multi choice questions. Our examiner left the room for ten minutes and I must confess, we did have a little peek at each others answers. Although to be fair, it felt like he was giving us the opportunity to do just that.

So, with that out of the way and everyone passing, it was on to the driving test. We all got our lids on and hopped into the Skoda VRS estate (pictured!) for a few laps around Thruxton circuit. It was a busy day, Tiff was there in a souped up M4 on some kind of Pirelli demo day for customers and there were a lot of people out in various experience cars. After our 5 demo laps, the instructor asked who wanted to go first. With no hesitation, Matt piped up, wanting to get it out of the way.

“Would you like the Porsche Cayman S, or the Skoda, for your demo laps, Matt?” the examiner asked….

We would love to say that Matt made a bold choice here, however…

3 Laps in a Skoda estate later, Matt had passed his exam (he does want to be a racing driver, we promise..).

Overall the experience was good but like everyone says, if you’ve done a number of track days before, it is pretty much a non-event and a tick box exercise to ensure you’re competent and pay attention.