C1 Indianapolis Feedback

Thursday-Week Two:
Day Four behind the wheel. Self doubt was crowding my thoughts. Was I the next to be kicked out of school? It was time for me to step it up a notch. In the words of the great Jedi master Yoda, "Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try." I began to like the idea of half a day on the street and half a day on the road. Time was running out and I needed to practice as much as possible. On my previous days driving on the street was smooth for the most part. Only thing was that I was running the RPMs over 1500, which was the norm for upshifting. So on this day I was shifting way too soon. trying to find that balance, even my instructor Terry told me that I was doing horribly compared to yesterday. It gets some getting used to looking at that tach, driving a stick most of my life, I've always went by sound. But this had to change if I wanted to pass the C1 test being one of their test requirements. I believe the reason they want you to shift at a certain time is that it's better for the vehicle to do so. I also was having trouble on my turns, turning too wide and needed some work on downshifting. For the most part, my street was better than my range though, especially since the day before I had only 'straight lined back' numerous times. But this day I mastered straight line backing and I got off side parking down. I was nervous like crazy cause when I got to parallel I forgot the steps to it and totally blanked out. Mess up after mess up on parallel, in one instance I almost even ran over my instructor by turning the wheel to the right instead of to the left, something that rattled me even more. He yanked me off the truck and told me to calm down, missing out on some practice time. It was a bittersweet triumph. I got the reversing part finally down but messed up the parallel almost crushing a human being with a 40 ton vehicle. Of course I'm exaggerating, at that low speed even Cecil the turtle can avoid being hit by a semi, but nevertheless, I had to put my head in the game. This brought my seriousness to a whole other level when driving the Tractor Trailer. It was an eye opener for me. Just imagine if I were out in the real world and I made a mistake like this. Determined to concentrate more and my nerves going berserk, the stress level was reaching it's maximum …

 

Really? ... Why?

 

Friday-Week Two:
Friday was Pre-Trip Test day. If you didn't pass your pre-trip test you wouldn't get to drive the rest of the day. All week the instructors would take some time before we got to drive and go over either Pre-Trip or 4 point brake check and then testing our knowledge on these. The day before, I did horribly on the pre-trip, having an unacceptable score. So thursday night and friday morning involved some serious cramming. Amazingly I only got 7 wrong. C1 only allows you to get 10 wrong (state allows 14). That was a load off. I passed my pre-trip. Now I could concentrate solely on fine-tuning my driving. This day saw me get better on the range. I got to do many repetitions on all exercises and on my good friend, parallel parking, although I didn't feel that I got it down completely; I did feel more confident on it. On the street I practiced more on looking at my mirrors when turning, looking at my mirrors in my intersections, my commentary (something that C1 teaches to calm down your nerves and help you focus on what your doing), not wasting my blinker fluid (I always forgot to take my turn signals off) and finding that happy medium in my upshifting. I also was having a problem with letting my foot off the acceleration pedal causing the vehicle to jump in the low gears. I had a bad habit of driving sticks as if they were my favorite arcade race car video game. Whenever I would push in the clutch I would lift my foot completely off of the gas pedal and vice versa. So this was causing me major problems in those early gears in the big rig. So I worked on that by having a gentler mentality on low gears and shifting faster getting it up to sixth so I can drive in my normal rhythm. Something I also was doing wrong was dumping the clutch. Similar to lifting my foot off the accelerator, I would let go of the clutch rapidly causing my vehicle to stall out in previous occasions. Remember a Tractor Trailer is not a race car, as one instructor told me "a tractor trailer is more like an elephant, the only way to get some speed on it is to shift." Advice that I plan to take with me for a long time. This morning also saw another student in our group get C1 tested on his street. Wow, I thought to myself, it's already testing time …

 

Saturday-Week Two:
First thing that was said to us this morning was, "this is the first day of grad week." It was time to get serious. The instructors were also getting serious cause from this moment on, they wanted your butt off and over to get what you came for, your CDL. The people who didn't pass their pre-trip yesterday got re-tested on it today. Some of them still didn't pass. They did allow however those who again failed to get some driving time in. I went out to the street in the morning. Everything went smoothly for the most part on the driving. Then I went out to the range cause the other instructor wanted to see where I was and check if I could get tested on the range. I didn't get tested but I did well, but I still was not too sure about the parallel, cause even though I did it on my own for the most part, the instructor was stoping me before I messed up a couple of times and helped me on how to think when making adjustments. He told me when pulling up I should "only pull up as much as I needed to but no more than I had to." Another piece of good advice he gave us was when wanting to adjust to "pull up to the side you couldn't see", making a small S maneuver to open up that gap to the side you don't see. Good advice I'll never forget. Then in the afternoon I got pop-tested on the street. I did well for the most part, but I failed when I accidentally did a bump and run (this is when you down shift two gears with your RPMs down at 800) from 10th to 6th!!!! I was trying to go from 10th to 8th but oh well, it went into gear though … but it was too late, I coasted a tractor trailer length, I failed my first C1 test. It was a confidence builder though. I never would've imagined that I was ready to be tested so even though it was a failure it felt like an accomplishment, cause now I was sure that I would be going home no later than the end of the third week ...

 

I got tired of writing the diary style of telling this story ... long story short; I passed ... if anyone else is interested in the C1 Indy process, just ask any questions. peAce