Dinner with Denise McCluggage

Denise McCluggage is a wonderful woman who paved the way for women race car drivers! For those of you don’t know Denise, she is like the Amelia Earhart of auto racing! My father and I recently met Denise at European Motor Sports where she shared many of her valuable pointers about controlling your car.

One of the many pointers Denise mentioned was to “Drive the car you’re in! Not the car you wish you were in, and not the car you drove yesterday!” You need to adapt to your surroundings and understand how the car handles. Driving a pick-up truck is very differentfrom driving an Aston Martin! Another great pointer was,”Celerate,” her own made up word. This does not mean to accelerate or decelerate, but to keep a consistent rate of speed through a turn. This will help a car balance and keep all four tires on the ground! It’s like manual cruise control for a race car! We even had a demonstration on how to keep the car level and all four tires firmly on the ground. Five volunteers, four as tires and one as the driver, showed us how the car would react when we put it through certain maneuvers, like slowing down, quickly taking a hard left, then accelerating into a straight away.

On the wall right behind Denise were two beautiful murals, crafted by Paul Chenard’s steady hands! It was a nice addition to the loft of European Motor Sports! I was so impressed with the murals that I decided to purchase my very own so I could hang it in my bedroom!

It was really nice of MMR (Motorsports Marketing Resources) and European Motor Sports to organize this discussion! I learned lot from this informative talk, which just happened to be right before Denise’s birthday! I would love to see Denise again!

Denise And Chris

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