Welcome to the AMG Driving Academy. It's a curriculum imported from Europe where we have one, two, and three-day courses. We'll get to experience virtually the whole line of AMG vehicles provided for you. World-class driving instructors at some of the greatest race tracks in North America. Hi, I'm Tommy Kendall. We're a four-time trans-amp champ and host of Test Drive on Speed Channel. Welcome to the AMG Driving Academy. I hope you enjoy these short films that take you through a little bit of the curriculum that we teach at the Academy. In this episode, we're going to cover seating position and line of sight. Now before we even get on the track, we need to cover some fundamentals. And no one likes fundamentals. Everyone wants to run before they walk. But I heard a story about John Wooden, the coach of UCLA, greatest basketball coach of all time, with college players at their first practice. He taught them how to put on their shoes and socks. Assuming that some of them might have been doing it kind of wrong or not optimally all these years. And it's no different with the stance in racing. Every sport has its ready stance. In driving, that's basically your seating position. So first thing you want to do is set the distance for your legs to the pedals. You want to have a nice bend in your knees so that when you're pushing hard on the brake pedal, you'll be able to generate the leverage. But also, in a panic stop, the last thing you want is when you're trying to stop faster is have a straight leg and not have any more travel to push harder. The steering wheel here is too far away. What I want to do is you can either tilt the seat back up a little bit or use the telescope and bring it towards you. Your wrist should hit the top of the wheel. And that way when you bring your hands back here to 9 and 3, you'll have plenty of reach when your hands at the top of the wheel you won't be stretching. When your hands are up here, they can kind of be a pendulum. Whereas when they're down here at 9 and 3, it's more of a push pull. And you'll notice you never have to take your hands off the wheel. You know where straight is again. When you get into a big slide, sometimes a tank slapper is caused by the person not knowing where straight ahead is. And by never keeping taking your hands off 9 and 3, you never have to worry about that. Another thing is with your thumbs locked on the top, and this is a really nicely designed wheel. When your thumbs are in here, you don't need to hold the steering wheel tight because you've got so much leverage on the wheel. Shift paddles are right where you want it to be. And one of the comments I hear most from my TV show is how relaxed we are when we're driving. We're doing these big power slides, high-speed corners and so forth. And never holding the wheel tight. You'll also burn a lot more energy if you don't have a loose grip on the wheel. Speaking of energy, the dead pedal, this nice stainless steel plate over here where the left foot goes, that is actually pruning your key points of bracing. You've got the seat designed to wrap around you and really hold you in. But between the dead pedal and the seat belt and a race car, the reason you want your seat belt is it helps hold you in place. I had my belts come loose during a race once and the G-loads under breaking. I had to slow down, hold the steering wheel with my knee and get the belts done again because I just couldn't, as brave as I wanted to be, couldn't control the car because I wasn't held in place without my belt. Vision is probably the most important thing we teach and it here is almost all the other ills. Not only do you have to have an unobstructed view that seems fairly obvious, but what you do with your eyes is really, really important. And if I see a driver making lots of little corrections, I know they've got low eyes. They're looking too close to the front of the car. If you're in a skid, you look where you want to go, not where the car is heading. We call that looking towards hope, not towards reality. Without doing anything else, the number one way to improve your driving, if you get your eyes up, you get the information sooner, you tend to smooth out all your inputs. And it's, again, that's a habit that has to be developed because when the adrenaline goes up, the eyes go down. And so it's really something you have to work at. So those are the basics, the fundamental, the stance, if you will. Now let's go. Let's burn some gas. As if you didn't know, all the content is filmed on a close course by professional drivers who do not try those on public roads. Always wear your seatbelt and drive responsibly.