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| - If you have lots of money or a very very nice dad, you can do some pretty cool stuff in life. One of the things you can do is drive really fast cars for two days in Arizona. Thanks Dad!
The class starts with a classroom lecture about driving really fast. This is where you get to size up the other students, your competition... a father and his 16-year-old son who's about to get the hand-me-down M5 when they get home... a Stanford student on Spring break disposing some extra book money... a Lotus dealer from the UK... the driving instructor from a police department... a corvette collector. The instructor takes this last opportunity to remind students about the optional insurance and how much all the car parts are going to cost you if you wreck them without insurance.
After the lecture, it's time for a tour of the track. Students pile into full size vans and buckle up. This part was probably the most fun of the whole class. Our driver violated about ten different laws of physics behind the wheel of that van. I suppose you get good at anything you do every day, but he made carving turns in this bigass GM G van seem pretty unconscious.
The rest of the class was made up mostly of various exercises in a Corvette Z06. Almost all of it was at speeds under 50 mph on a large asphalt lot marked off with orange cones... slaloms, breaking, heel-toe shifting, a pseudo orange cone racetrack, etc. We also did one exercise in a specially rigged Cadillac sedan that could simulate front and rear skids on dry pavement.
The last couple of exercises were more like real racing. We used an oval track to practice entering and exiting from turns. Finally, in the very last exercise, we donned helmets and followed the instructor around the real track a couple times. That was pretty fun.
My main complaint about the class is with the number of breaks we were taking. We seemed to be taking another break every five minutes. I'm not sure if this was because the cars needed to cool down or what. It just felt like we were always just standing around waiting to get back to driving.
I had a good time, but not a great one. Even though I was there as a gift from Dad, I think the thought of how much money it costs just dampens things. If you compare this with the much lower cost-to-smiles ratio of, say, go-kart driving at the local miniature golf spot, it's hard to see the value of it all.
I would recommend this to someone who has more than a little extra money to burn. But if this is you, I would recommend bringing a few extra hundred dollars to spend on the karts. Those things are badass. Zero to a hundred to zero in ten seconds. I think I would have preferred a kart class to the Corvette one.
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