[Philostang]

Late last month (May) I attended the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, taking their 4-day Grand Prix Road Racing course. I’ll say up front that the experience was nothing short of fantastic! So I wanted to just sum up my experience for those who might be curious and encourage those who might be tempted to follow suit.

I went there with two basic goals in mind, to form a solid foundation of car control skills that I could further develop and also to increase confidence. Both goals were more than met. On top of that I got to meet great folks and drive some great cars.

I count myself extremely fortunate to have been paired with Pete Miller, my instructor, who gets my personal vote for instructor of the year (sorry Danny, you’re great too!). He’s just an outstanding instructor and one seriously amazing driver. He’s also pretty clearly on the same basic page as the other instructors, which makes the entire experience really feel like a school, not just a few days of driving around. In fact, I came away with a sense of having been systematically trained at car control. They start out with basic skills and quickly work up a ladder of skills and more challenging environments. By the end you’re on the full course (Bob Bondurant designed it himself, and it’s a pretty demanding run) using all your new-found or recently-refined skills.

The cars the Bondurant School is now using for their Grand Prix courses are the latest gen Corvettes (C6 with Z51 suspension package) and the Formula Mazda. I spent 2-1/2 days in the Corvette. At the end of the 3rd day you swap over to get acquainted with the Formula Mazda, and then you spend the entire 4th day in it. You get a bunch of seat time every day.

The C6 Corvette is a fine machine, very well suited (IMHO) to learning to drive. It can do plenty on track, and it can get you out of many of the more stupid things you may do in it. And then there’s the Mazda. This is a proper race car. The Formula Mazda is an open-wheeled, single seat, F-1 style race car, that just flat rocks! What a fun car to drive. I loved it! I don’t know when I’ll have a chance to climb into one again, but I can say it’s already been too long.

Last word. If you look into it, you’ll see that the 4-day school is not cheap. For most, this would be hard to justify (to oneself or one’s spouse). I justified it in the following way. I had spent a couple of summer’s tooling around road race courses in HPDE events, and I had no idea what I was doing, just trying to go fast. I knew that I was mostly clueless, but more importantly I knew that I was building up bad habits. I needed a firm foundation, a really solid grasp of the basics as well as insight and instruction on advanced techniques, and I needed to be able to do this in a timely manner. Also, it was very important to me that I felt I could trust the source of instruction. That pretty much narrowed the field to about three different schools. As it turns out, they were all pretty comparable in terms of cost (comparing 3-day classes to 3-day classes, Bondurant is the only one to offer a 4-day class). What tipped the scales in favor of Bondurant was that they were the only ones that had the dedicated facilities and equipment to execute their training.

So what do you get for your bucks in this regard? First the class qualifies you to apply for your SCCA license, which I viewed as an added bonus but not the reason I took the class. You get multiple dedicated tracks (to focus on specific car control skills, one at a time, before you put them together). You get a skid pad with skid car (again, specific skill development, in this case control during slides). You get your own cars (no sharing) fully developed and tuned (they worked on dialing in the new Mazdas for months before letting them loose to students). You get multiple sources of expertise (the mechanics who maintained all these were just as willing to answer questions and offer insight as the instructors). You get multiple driving/ride-along experiences. For example, you get to drive the Corvette and the Formula Mazda and the skid car, but you also get ride-alongs with your instructor in the Cadillac CTS…and then there’s the van-tour. OMG! The van-tour is a freak show on wheels, or as one of the drivers said, “It’s a totally stock cargo van, but a highly modified driver.”

That brings me to the most important justification. I have spent twice this amount of money on modifying my car for both handling and aesthetics. Last year I witnessed a guy kick the living crap out of me in a near-stock Mustang of the same year as my own. Driver mods. To me that’s more important than the next upgrade I was planning. I thought, I could use the money to make my car “be badass” or I could use the money to learn to “drive badass.” So what’s more important? That you have something that’s great, or that you can use greatly whatever you happen to have? It came down to bragging rights or skills? I chose the latter.

Best,
-j