Pinellas Driving School serves all of Pinellas County, which includes Oldsmar and surrounding communities! We’ll start by exploring your own neighborhood (if it is appropriate) to evaluate your skill level, before getting out onto some secondary two-lane roads like St. Petersburg Drive and Pine Ave. From there, as you are ready, we’ll start exploring the traffic on Tampa Rd, Curlew, Forest Lakes, and eventually US-19! If we have time, and there is a need, we may head down Racetrack Road to experience some back roads, or even head into Tampa.
Learning to Drive
Learning to drive an automobile in the modern age can be intimidating, especially when you live in the busy metropolitan area of Pinellas County! We’re here to help ease the transition from “nervous beginning driver” to “confident experienced driver.” At Pinellas Driving School, we believe that it all starts with the basics.
Driving School
A lot of folks who teach driving, whether they be your Uncle Ernie, dear old Grandad, your Mom, or sometimes even a professional driving school — they have the tendency to push a new driver out into the world before they are ready. “Here are the keys, that’s the steering wheel, gas is on the right, brake is on the left, let’s go drive across town!” In addition to being potentially very dangerous, it’s completely overwhelming to the student, and it’s a sort of backwards approach.
Sure, the sink-or-swim method can work… eventually (if you don’t end up with a crashed car, or a mentally traumatized student first). Unfortunately, you end up with drivers who know how to navigate city traffic (sort of), but still have no idea what their car can and can’t do. How big is the car? How quickly can it stop? How quickly can it turn to avoid something? How quickly can it NOT stop? What happens if I try to turn too sharply too fast, or try to pull a lane change too fast at 60 mph? These are things that a LOT of people learn “by accident,” and this is why your auto insurance rates for the first 5-10 years of driving are so expensive! Pinellas Driving School is here to help you avoid those pitfalls.
Learn to Drive with Confidence
The Pinellas Driving School approach is to spend the time necessary to ensure that the student is fully comfortable with the car before getting them out into traffic. We try to build confidence with skills such as negotiating turns, smooth acceleration and braking, smooth and confident quick stops, emergency stops, and looking far enough ahead to avoid most of the surprises on the road. Once a driver has mastered those things, then when they get out into traffic, they’re no longer thinking about “the car,” and they can more easily focus on “the traffic.” As a result, we find that students who have completed our driving school course become safer and more confident more quickly than just dumping them into traffic and hoping that they figure everything out while every other driver on the road is trying to kill them!
Pinellas Driving School is a Florida state certified driving school, and we employ driving instructors who are both Florida state certified and trained to teach to our strict standards. But we’re not just teachers, we are driving enthusiasts! We appreciate the privilege of driving a car, and everything that entails. We want to share our enthusiasm for driving PROPERLY with a new generation, and that is why we do this. As a result, we’re teaching more than just the bare minimum of “how to drive a car” or “how to pass your license test.” We teach our students how to be safe, confident and courteous drivers at their core.
If you have questions about anything, feel free to Contact Us by phone or email.
We presently have three instructors. Steve and Loren are the owners of the school. Each of our instructors constantly share their teaching experiences with each other and strive to provide the best learning experience for each student, regardless of their driving history, their skill level, or their background.
Our Instructors
Loren Williams
Loren’s passion for driving dates back to his youth. Like many teen drivers, he made his share of expensive mistakes, and learned from them. One of his goals is to thoroughly teach new drivers so that they can AVOID such mistakes! He understands the physics and psychology of driving, and tries to teach on a deeper level. The more you understand what the car is doing and how your brain relates to what the car is doing, the better you’ll be at driving!
He has been teaching driving since the late 1990’s, and has been a Florida State Certified Driving Instructor off and on since 2006 and has taught behind-the-wheel driving for two of the major driving schools in the area. Most recently, he’s been teaching driving consistently since 2015 and started Pinellas Driving School with Steve Frank in 2017.
Loren’s history includes 8 years of military service, a degree in electronics, years of work in the electronics and information industries, and even a little work in commercial graphics and website design. Hobbies are primarily amateur motorsports and tinkering with cars and computers. He also plays ukulele, and does some bicycling.
He is married with an adult son, and shares his home with his wife, two cats… and three cars.
Steve Frank
Steve also has a great passion for driving dating back to his teen years. As a 30+ year resident of the Tampa Bay area, he really knows his way around and is familiar with the rich history of Pinellas County.
He started teaching people about driving in the mid 2000’s, and became a State Certified Driving Instructor when he and Loren Williams started Pinellas Driving School in 2017. Having absorbed some of Loren’s driving instruction wisdom in addition to his own experience, he has become an outstanding driving instructor!
He brings with him a strong background in psychology, with over 25 years as a psychologist specializing in helping folks recover from brain injury. This is part of what makes him extremely compassionate of not just his students, but other drivers on the road. He’s good at teaching his students that “it’s not all about you.”
Steve shares Loren’s hobbies of amateur motorsports and sports cars. In fact, it is how the two of them met, and they also share ownership in a motorsports club!
Steve has a daughter in college, and keeps busy juggling time between this driving school and his psychology practice.
Jim Marana
Jim comes to us with over 30 years of experience as a public school teacher in Michigan. He taught physical education, health, and driver’s education. He was also very active coaching a variety of sports, including high school football.
Jim currently lives with his wife in Treasure Island, FL. They have two adult sons, and 2 grand-daughters.
In his spare time, he is an avid bicycler and motorcyclist, and enjoys watching sports, especially football.
Jim has retired as a school teacher, but missed both teaching and coaching. This job is perfect for him, and we’re glad to have him!