Japanese A Licence

I attended the A licence exam at Fuji Speedway this Sunday. Its a full day process. To get the A licence you have to first hold a B licence and must have competed in (and completed) one speed event (Rally, Gymkhana or circuit trial). My attendance in the Mazda Speed Cup Circuit Trial qualified for this. Next step is a racing license - the A licence.

Its a full day course at Fuji run at certain times of the year. You can also do your licence elsewhere but I thought it best to combine this also with getting a FISCO (Fuji) licence on the same day.

To get the A licence you must sit and pass a 30 question test. Passing means getting more than 80%. They were true/false questions, 10 each on 3 different sections which I'll mention in a bit. You then also had a pass a driving test. The driving test consists of driving around Fuji, doing a standing start, flying start and finally obeying all of the different flags you come across. You get 100 points to start with and must complete a minimum of 20 minutes track time with 70 points or more. Break a yellow flag and you lose 20 points for example. One thing of note is that the flag posts are quite far from the edge of the circuit at Fuji so you really have to look around. It's a good lesson though. Makes me wonder how the F1 drivers did it in the rain, but then again they had the help of radio I guess.

As well as these two exams, you must attend different lectures aimed at helping you to understand and pass the exam. Various pages are called out and points are read out so it would be hard not to pass if you speak/read fluent Japanese (which I don't), I speak - "get-by Japanese". The three sections covered by the exam are: General regulations and rules, track rules such as flags, safety car etc and car/driver technical requirements such as clothing, modifications, types of windshields allowed etc. Other lectures covered basic knowledge like driver position, under/over steer etc as well as what they look for when they examine your car before/after a race. Basically, basic stuff you should know before heading out there.

Unbelievably I passed. Actually, I had lots of help for the Japanese exam as I couldn't read the Japanese. They were kind enough to let me sit the exam in a separate room where an examiner read the questions out to me, and read out the section in the book where the answers were. Then I answered true or false. The basic thing they are looking for is that you understand what is being asked and or course the answer. There is no real tricky questions in there if you could speak Japanese. The exam is an hour long and if you could actually understand and read everything it would probably take about 30 mins or less to complete it.

Apparently, I jumped the start on the standing start. I'm pretty sure I didn't but perhaps my handbrake didn't hold up quite as much as I thought it would. Once the lights went out I popped the remaining part of the clutch to let fly but the car infront hadn't started moving. As it was all practice, I stuck the clutch back in. I don't know if that is what they thought was me jumping the start but I'm 100% positive I didn't move until the lights went out. I think I was probably the first to react though so maybe me backing off was what caused the issue. I'm sure on video replay it would be fine.

The flying start was also quite tricky, the guy in front of me braked before the green light line so I had to brake too to avoid passing him. I decided to take it easy for the 30 minutes and not miss any flags due to trying to hard to get a lap time. After about 3 laps though, I got a bit bored and stuck the foot down thinking that in a race you ain't going slow so get some faster laps in while keeping a watchful eye on the posts. I passed nearly everyone at least once as most of them were keeping to my original plan. Had one near incident, where there was a yellow flag just before the hairpin and I was coming up fast on this mini. When he saw me he took over major speed to let me pass cleanly before the hairpin. Only problem was that was before the green flag so I had to hit the brakes again in a hurry to avoid passing him and then proceed to wave at him to move on with lots of arm swinging motions as he was going about 5kmph. A good lesson though and I kept my 100 points.

So now I have an A licence, I have to figure out how to utilize it :-)