Every year the Ferrari Club Nederland (FCN) organizes a training day for its members. Whilst it's open to all the members it is generally the more modern Ferraris that take part, except for the occassional Dino or similar. Several skills are tought by professionals and I think that the classic drivers need those skills even more then the modern drivers, what with their power steering, traction control and all that kind of modern technology.

For the safety of the members and the enthusiasts this event has always been kept quiet so there won't be too many spectators. Every year takes place on a circuit such as the TT circuit of Assen in the North East region of the Netherlands and this year - like last year- it was the turn of Zandvoort which is in the dunes of the Midwest Netherlands. Both beautiful circuits by the way but with facilities not from this century.

Because it's only April there's always the question of the weather at Zandvoort, lying directly on the North Sea but this year we couldn't complain. There were about 50 or 60 participants and they were divided into several smaller groups to keep the waiting time as short as possible and it worked fine. Last year one of the instructors was Tom Coronell, now driving in the Le Mans 24 hours, but this year I didn't met any famous drivers but professionals they certainly were.

One group had to drive a short track markedout with cones within a very short time and - of course - keep the car on track. I saw some very fast driving and drivers who didn't recognise the track and went the wrong way, but in general they did alright. Another group had to spin their cars in a circle and keep the car going as fast as possible. It cost some tyre rubber but was very spectacular to see and it seemed very difficult to keep the car going . Somewhere else on the track were brake tests and others drove laps on the real circuit and all this changed so every group could do every excercise.

At the end of the afternoon all cars went on to the track for some anti-clockwise laps. This gave the few enthusiast present the possibility to take some rare photos! Finally there were sprints off the grid, every time randomly with three cars and I think the results were sometimes very surprising. A very nice and successful day I'd say.