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| - So,
It's done, I completed the 4 days on Friday and it was pretty good. I learned a lot and hopefully am a little smoother and faster now. The total cost was 4200 for the 3 day school which I extended to 4 days at 4800 USD. I paid 300 dollars for insurance (still a 6k deductible!). Hotel was the Wild Horse Pass Sheraton at a Bondurant rate of 130 a night and this is a nice hotel. Looks like Disney designed it. I flew there on Sun Country for 340 bucks return.
Day 1:
Day 1 was class room, braking drills, lane change drills and heel and toe drills. No track time but drills. This was annoying me at the time because it looked like no track time till after lunch on day 2 and that didn't strike me as a lot of track time. The drills were basically illustrating steering the car with brake and throttle inputs, spin recovery in the special Caddy and getting used to the car. They also have an oval with an increasing radius turn and a constant radius turn for practising heel and toe and trail braking. Bondurant is huge into trail braking and when you see the instructors do the oval then it's pretty impressive.
The cars were 08 C6 vettes with less than 100 miles on the clock. Very fast (430bhp) but almost completely stock except for corbeau seats, a 4pt harness, performance friction high temp pads and good year eagle tires. The stock pedal position meant I couldn't heel and toe at all well in them. The throttle pedal is in a different zip code than the brake and is 'high' when you're on the brake. I had a lot of trouble down shifting as a result. Most people were managing just fine so I think this was just me as far as pedals go but I'd use sneakers rather than racing shoes no matter what.
Day 2:
Skid car day and this was fun. Driving in an oval pattern, and a figure of 8 as the instructor using the outboard wheels to induce varying degrees of oversteer and understeer. The importance of vision and smooth pedal inputs were pretty clear here and it was fun all around.
We went to the oval in the morning but I almost wrecked the car in a tire wall basically because I over focused on downshifting and given my difficulties and having the instructor in the car with me, I brain farted and was lucky to escape with just a dusting. I switched to my clogs (Keens, I kid you not) in the afternoon and shifting was much easier than in my racing shoes.
We went to the track in the afternoon on the medium circuit with the carosel and the lake loop and now it becomes a lot more fun. The racing suits that are provided are kart suits which were uncomfortable in the heat. I used my Sparco XL suit on the following days and it's a TON better and for the money, I guess it should be.
The afternoon sessions are where the drills before started to make sense. I needed to smooth the pedal inputs and trail brake more. I was focusing on my turn in point rather than looking through to the apex. This meant I was overslowing the car and then was unable to trail the brakes most of the way around to the apex. I improved at this steadily but I'm no where near as good as the instructors who drive the vette like a momentum car in to the turns. Pretty cool
Day 3:
They did some skid car again and then ran the same circuit as the day before. They opened the full track in the afternoon which is pretty manic. Couple of elevation changes and you can almost get to 4th gear. The vette is a pretty powerful car and you can definitely start to feel the whole car under your right foot exiting corners. I got better at vision, lighter braking into turns for higher entry speeds and extending trail braking times. I got better opening up the steering at apex and then using the throttle to push the car out to track out etc. This became a lot of fun after a while. We got around 5 hours of track time this day. I was doing a lot better towards the end and was hanging with a PCA instructor doing laps so it was fun seeing where he was catching me and where I was pulling away and it evened out of course as the laps piled on.
Day 4.
Switched to a Formula Ford 1600 (1200lbs, 110bhp) and then just did laps again for the whole day. Maybe 6 hours of track time on day 4. Cars were very fast through the corners and you can use all the gears on the full track but I didn't try to grab 4th and just worked on better trail braking, carrying more speed in to the turns and going faster out of turns with gas. The instructor again was wicked fast, sometimes a gear higher than even the fast guys in the class. We did two race starts and a restart in the afternoon to do all the SCCA stuff.
Class wise, I was in the middle part of it I think. There were 3 guys from Bridgestone (tire test drivers) who were very fast. Then there was an older guy who could hang with them. Then there was myself and 2 or 3 others and we were about the same. The class was 12 people altogether.
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