About Funkhana
Funkhana is designed so that learning and practicing driving skills is fun. The idea is to become intimately familiar with the behavior of your car, learn its limits and hone your driving skills. Learn to drive your car rather than reacting. Seat time and focused practice is needed to embed good habits.
Funkhanas are run on a large flat level skid pan. The surface is asphalt rolled so that the grip level, when dry, is closely equivalent to a wet public road and when wet approaching iced road grip level.. A course is marked out using orange traffic cones. The idea is to travel the course as quickly as possible. Funkhanas don't have fixed rules like Motorkhana and Hill Climbs and such. Funkhana organisers usually select a subset of the rules of the type of event that the participants are likely to continue on to. In our case, our Funkhanas run using Autotest rules just with no official timing. Generally a cone layout is designed so that several quite different courses can be driven without any change in the setup. This is because we want to practice many different types of turns but not have any time lost with no car on the track changing the setup. We want to get as much of that expensive track time that we are paying for as we can. In competition there are heavy penalties for hitting a cone because valuable track time is lost while the blunder is fixed. There are also penalties for not following the specified course. In Funkhana,we are not competing against the clock so we don't really care about going the wrong way, but wasting track time is still a big no, no.
FYI About Autotest
Autotest is a variant of Motorkhana. Autotests can be run anywhere that a course can be setup with these basic tenants.
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The course is marked out with traffic cones or poles. A box is drawn around each marker in chalk.
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No straight longer than 140m without a substantial turn (>45°)
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Standing Start
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Must pass each marker in the correct order and on the correct side as according to the course map.
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No reversing.
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No necessity to use the handbrake for turns. Handbrake turns may be used and can often be an advantage,
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The finish is as specified at the dirver's briefing. Can be flying, straddle (stop over a line), or stop in a garage.
There are time penalties for errors. The aim is to finish the course in the fastest time.