Grand Prix 

Excursion

Driving Learning at the Grand Prix

On Thursday the 30th of March, Alexander Byers and Christina Paizes took eight VCE-VM and one Year 12 VCAL student to the Grand Prix at Albert Park. 

Thanks to me, the journey to the Grand Prix was smooth. I planned out the public transport route ahead of time and sent it to our teachers. At 9:22am the train arrived at Gowrie and we all boarded. 5 minutes into the trip, Mr Byers handed out an OH&S worksheet about sound and tinnitus. Tinnitus is when you experience ringing, buzzling, whistling or hissing in one or both of your ears and can happen when you are exposed to loud noises. When we arrived, we found out why Mr Byers gave us that sheet. The Porsche GT3 RSs doing laps were very loud. 

I felt like a kid in a candy shop. There were classic cars, The Army, The Navy, Victoria Police, different pavilions of luxury car brands, new technologies, food stalls and lots of people. Our work was to interview people working at the Grand Prix to investigate careers of the future and new technologies. 

The activity that everyone was most interested in was the fastest lap activity. What you do is that they set you up by sitting in like a seat that looks like a race seat in a F1 car and compete to get the fastest lap out of the 8 other competitors. If you get the fastest lap, you get to sit on a special Dunlop chair and compete against famous F1 drivers. The game was quite difficult for someone who doesn’t know the true aspects of F1 racing. There were difficult corners, hard braking and high speeds (above 250kph). Unfortunately, no one from John Fawkner College won. 

Later, watching from the stands, there was a collision on the track where a Porsche accidently touched the rear end of another Porsche and it caused the whole car to flip onto its roof into the barrier. Luckily, no one was injured and everyone came out of that accident safe and sound. During our fun time watching the cars race, taking videos and photos, we completely forgot about our rendezvous time and point, so we quickly jumped out of our seats and started to make our way back to the entrance point where everyone was waiting for us. 

I really enjoyed this excursion and hopefully we get more like this. Most students enjoyed it as it was our first time at the Grand Prix in Albert Park. I would recommend this excursion to other year levels at John Fawkner College.

Matthew Khwaja

Class Captain