I did the morning session.
I found it rather a hairy track session. I think there were 60 cars when perhaps 40 would have been better (there was never much of a queue at the end of the pit lane), and there was a mixture of very fast and quite slow drivers, which is frustrating for everybody (faster drivers keep getting stuck in traffic; slower drivers spend the entire session keeping off the racing line), especially at the hairpin where 7-9 car queues formed frequently.
The track has a weird layout, so you’d go down the straight overtaking on the right, then reach Gerrards corner where we were allowed to overtake on the left around the outside of the bend. This meant doing a sort of 100-mph slalom, dodging in and out between the slower cars. Bizarre, and way more dangerous than any other track day I’ve been on!
The other thing that was tricky was that some of the drivers were so far off the racing line that you couldn’t just follow a slower car around - they would (relatively to my car) disappear off to one side and then as I passed the apex, they’d (relatively to my car) fling across to the other side, so it took quite a lot of care to judge where their “orbits” would intersect your own and make sure you didn’t both end up in the same place at the same moment!
In the first hour it was easy to just drive around the outside of cars who were hugging the inside line on Gerrards, but by the end of the session they were all going faster and in the middle of the track so you couldn’t pass on either side. The straights were short, so when people didn’t lift off, you just couldn’t get past before the next corner.
By about half way through the session all the faster drivers had stopped bothering with the “only” overtake on the straights" rule, having realised that the only place you could get past the slow drivers was in the chicane before the hairpin - either out-brake into the corner, or go through and nail them on the exit with a higher exit speed. This got very hairy - sometimes a block of 6-8 cars three abreast and 2-3 deep all heading into the corner at 80-100mph.
Quite a few times I would be part way through overtaking, decide I shouldn’t overtake into the corner, so backed off to tuck in behind the slower car, and then had one or two guys hammer past and shove their way in front in the middle of the corner. Very frustrating, especially when I then got stuck behind them after we’d cleared the traffic! So I wasn’t rewarded much for being careful/polite. (and indeed, I thought my etiquette was much lower than normal as I had no choice but to cut others up due to the stupid overtaking rules)
The last confusing thing was that some cars were indicating right as they overtook, but the entry to the pits was on the right, so people were also indicating right to say that they were intending to pit. Once I thought I was behind a fast overtaking car (we were overtaking, so it seemed logical!) and then they stopped dead in front of me to turn off - I had to dodge through a narrow gap between them and the car I thought we were overtaking. Yikes!
So apologies to all the slower cars that I cut up. I did my best to be polite and give everyone loads of room, but on occasions I found it very difficult to merge back into the traffic (I ended up going through on the inside at the chicane and then hairpin twice when I just couldn’t get back into the long queue of traffic after the back straight!)
I also had two odd moments with the officials.
One was a car with an instructor in. Two of us were about to use our momentum to overtake “legally” on the right, and just as we committed, the instructor waved at us to overtake on the left and his car shot across the track into our path - gave me and the other passing car a bit of a shock as we had to both hang out the anchors and change direction!
The other was near the end of the session. I was waiting for the marshal to wave me out from the pit lane. He clearly gestured for me to go, so I went. But as I went past him, he gave me a funny look, and I found he’d dropped me out in front of 3 cars (me doing 30, them doing 100). Luckily I always check for traffic (even though there shouldn’t be any) and kept right over to allow them space to hammer past. I was then wondering if the marshal had actually intended me to go out - perhaps he was just flapping at a wasp! 
I almost lost it in Gerrards at the end of the session when my right wrist cramped, I wiggled the steering wheel for a moment (at 85 mph in the middle of a corner) and ended up doing an impromptu drift out of the corner - very glad I managed to collect it up!
This is a report on the “exciting highlights”, so it probably sounds a lot more dangerous/exciting than it actually was. It was all good fun and pretty safe, but certainly the most “eventful” trackday I’ve been on. Mind you, I did 143 miles in 3 hours, which is pretty high mileage, so I guess I crammed about 1.5 trackdays worth of mileage into a half-day, so you’d expect to have more “moments”.
I guess the idea was that the slower drivers would take the afternoon sessions, leaving the morning one to the speed freaks, but there were still about 8-10 newbies in the session. I think moving them into a different session from the fast drivers would have helped reduce the speed differential between the drivers, and so make it a better day for all involved.
But aside from the scariness of the overtaking rules, it was a really fun morning. Can’t wait for the next one!
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