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Well it’s not every day that the company you buy a car from invites you to Oran Park for the day, so I thought I should take up the offer! Mazda Australia have a great Advanced Driver Training Day they offer free to owners of their higher performance cars and sports models.

It’s a great day out and you learn a lot more about your car and how it will respond in emergency situations as well as the theory behind a lot of the technology and acronyms that litter a modern car and most people don’t look at again after reading the sales brochure. You also tend to learn a little about your own responses and limitations too in a safe environment, which is of course the whole point of the exercise.

Also great to see some of the members of the OZMazda forums were in attendance too. The forums is  a great resource if you own or are looking at buying a Mazda and is worth a look.

The driving instructors were great and it is a lot of fun. This is the second such course I have attended and put simply, there is no way I will allow my two sons to get a driver’s license when they are old enough without attending one of these courses.

If you have never done a course like this, there are advanced driving schools in all states that run similar courses. This will be a great investment in being a safer driver for your family, so go and grab your significant other and book a day now!

Action stations! After receiving a briefing from our instructor, we all head back to our cars to start the slalom part of the training. My car is the black Mazda 6 MPS is the background.

From the drivers seat as I wait for my turn. In front of me a sea of Mazda 3 MPS's and a lonesome Mazda 3 SP23.

Team MX5. There was a good selection of RX8's, MX5's, MPS 6's and MPS 3's at the day.

Highlight of the day is at the end, where you are allowed to do sixteen laps of the main Oran Park circuit at a very good rate of knots. :) Certainly learn't to have a new appreciation for  the handling and perfomance of the MPS 6, which is an awesome car.

At the end of the day we all went home with our certificate, a bag of goodies from Mazda, some new skills, some old skills sharpened and hopefully some bad driving habits broken.

My thanks to Mazda Australia for the day.

P.S. For the geeks among'st you these photos were taken on a HTC Touch phone camera.