Bondurant Advanced Road Racing Adventure 10/31/95 Eric Jacobsen Day 1 (Part 1 of 2). This is the sequel to last year's account of my experience in the four day Gran Prix Road Racing course at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. After farting around with Malibu Gran Prix and autocross practice days for a year, I was ready to get serious again. When an invitation arrived to attend a discounted two-day advanced class, with one-half day in the Mustangs followed by one and a half days in the Formula Fords, it was obvious I needed to sign up. On the day of the class, on my way to Bondurant's track adjacent to Firebird raceway, I had a particularly nasty reaction to some medication I was taking. After hanging around the lobby and patio for a while trying to shake off the dizziness, headache, nausea, etc., etc., it was painfully obvious that I was not going to be able to drive on the track any time soon. I was, in fact, even a little concerned about being able to drive myself home. After a brief chat with the front desk I headed back to spend a forgettable weekend at home, in bend, with the new knowledge that I am allergic to Pyridium. I was bummed. I got rescheduled for the last weekend in October, which coincided with the one-year anniversary of when I took the Gran Prix class, and also, again, the weekend that the Winston Cup GOBs duke it out at PIR. Consequently, when I showed up at the school at 7:50am Saturday morning, the place was deserted. There was only one other car in the parking lot. My first reaction was, "Oh, crap, it got cancelled or I got the date wrong..." or something like that. I wander inside. There is, after all, an advanced class scheduled, and there are only two students: myself and a gentleman from Vancouver, Canada, named Keith (who hadn't arrived yet). Cool! We'll have the track to ourselves and plenty of access to the intructor. After a while there are a few more people milling about and Keith arrives. Nobody's quite sure which classroom we'll use, but Johnny O'Connell will be our instructor, although he doesn't arrive until 8:45 or so, and then only to use the copier. Apparently some connection somewhere got broken, and Johnny was unaware he had a class to teach. After some quick personal arrangements, Johnny is ready to get us in the classroom and get started. The advanced classes are fairly personalized to what the individual wants to accomplish. Keith has been to the Gran Prix class several times at Bondurant, and mostly wants to have fun and go fast (which is precisely the goal of many who attend). I'm considering starting SCCA racing and planning a race weekend in Skip Barber's Formula Dodge series in March, so I do want to improve my somewhat rusty skills in preparation. Johnny wants to start us in the Mustangs on the handling oval (part of Bondurant's three acre paved paddock), then move to the Maricopa Oval on the west end of the Bondurant road course, and then spend the rest of the day in the Mustangs on the road course. Although this deviates from how my course was marketed, it's fine with me. Keith is a little more concerned, particularly since he had been promised he'd be driving on a different track, like Firebird East. Johnny vows to try to see if an alternate track is available, or at least that the carousel part of the Bondurant track can be opened up (since at the time it was blocked by concrete barriers and hay bales from a previous race at the main Firebird facility). Meanwhile, out to the Mustangs and the handling oval. Although the school has a quantity of the new model Mustangs, the older, Fox style, Mustangs are used for the advanced classes since they do not have ABS brakes. The lack of ABS provides a little better feedback for threshold braking since it is still possible to lock up the wheels. Johnny takes us around the handling oval a few times in the SHO, talking us through some review, the point of the exercise, technique, etc., etc., and then turns us loose in the Mustangs. This is a second-gear only exercise, so I can warm up without having to worry about shifting, etc. The handling oval is constant radius on one end, and increasing radius at the other. Use a late apex on the constant radius end, and an early apex on the increasing radius end. Braking and turn-in points are marked on the track, as well as the apex areas. After a few laps of warm up I can smell a little smoke. Keith is getting some wheel spin coming out of the increasing corner so for the moment I assume that's where the smell is coming from. A few laps later Johnny flags me over for a ride-along. Back on the track Johnny measures my lap time with his stopwatch. Twenty-point-three, needs work. I've been getting brake fade and on the next lap I take out a couple of cones on the increasing radius corner. Damn. We switch seats and Johnny drives, pointing out some improvements I can make and demonstrating what to do better. He's timing himself, too: twenty-point-one. I am vindicated. The brakes are fading so badly this car can't get around the track very well. On the next lap they go away again and Johnny misses the increasing radius corner the same way I did. I don't feel quite so bad now. We drive to the shop where Johnny makes sure there are more cars available that are prepped for the advanced classes, since the brakes on this one are toast. I manage to finish the exercise after letting the brakes cool, and we head back the classroom. After some classroom time on technique, line, etc., we're on the Maricopa oval running laps for more line and braking practice. I'm in a different car that has working brakes. Now we're shifting, too, and since this is the first time I've had to do any serious heel-and-toeing for quite a while, my footwork sucks. To make things worse, Johnny has removed all of the marker cones so that we have to find our own lines, create our own references, etc. I'm getting pretty loose on the corners and it is obvious that there is more than a little rust in my technique. Johnny rides along with me for a while and gives me hints on heel-and- toeing: "C'mon, rev that baby up! Make it talk to you!" I'm braking a bit late on the corners which is hosing my corner entry set-up. My line needs a little correction, too. We switch seats so he can demonstrate, and then turn me loose again. After a while Johnny flags us over to the 'pit area' in the oval for more instruction. Now he's going to be following us in another Mustang trying to pass. The cars are matched well enough that the only way he'll be able to get around is if we screw up a corner (which means he'll have no trouble getting by me!) Back on the track Keith and I space each other about a half-lap apart and Johnny is intimidating Keith in the third Mustang. After a few laps he's around Keith and on my tail. I am generally not intimidated by a car in my mirror, as I feel I'm his problem, not the other way around. As it is, though, I go wide after a few laps and Johnny gets by easily. He's behind Keith again, and I manage to catch up with them. I'm still getting loose on the corners and on one lap the back end swings into the dirt. One-half loop later I'm stopped on the corner with the rear of the car in the gravel. The car's still running so I goose it back onto the track. After a few more laps we're back in the pit area. Johnny says I'm still braking too late, even later than he does, which is why I'm loose on the corners. The practice is helping, though, and after a little more practice time we head back the classroom and then break for lunch. The last time our Saturn was at the dealer for service we discovered that they had scheduled a picnic for this Saturday. Since we have a little more than an hour for lunch and I just happen to be wearing my Saturn T-shirt, I take the short trip up the road for a free lunch and a look at the 1996 models. I'm an hour late for the start of the picnic and most of the food is gone. I manage to procure a hotdog bun, some potato chips, and a rather dry, flat piece of grilled chicken. Oh, well. A different kind of company, a different kind of car, a crappy free lunch. But what the heck, it'll get me by and I spend a while poking around at the new sedans before heading back to the track. Back in the classroom Johnny breaks the news that the hydraulics on the tractor are broken so there is no means to move the concrete barriers separating the carousel from the rest of the track. Instead, we'll run the Lake Loop and use turn 11 and then a left turn onto the Firebird drag strip, and then another left turn back onto Bondurant's front straight. Later in the afternoon we'll add the Maricopa Oval which means we'll take the blind dive over the hill after turn two. We spend a while in classroom instruction on technique, how we're doing, etc., etc., and then pile into Johnny's SHO for some demonstrations on the track. The left hander from the drag track onto Bondurant's front straight makes a line that exits adjacent to the pit entrance. Johnny points out the marker cone delineating the end of the pit entrance that is on the edge of the driving line. To emphasize good line technique on this corner Johnny puts a one-thousand dollar fine, payable to him, on anybody who hits that cone. We'll see. After a few more laps in the SHO, Keith and I get in the Mustangs and follow Johnny onto the track. By now I'm getting more comfortable in the cars, and the road course is still familiar. I'm behind Keith, who is behind Johnny. A few laps of warmup, a few hot laps, and then Johnny points Keith by on the front straight. Now I'm behind Johnny and we drop back a little bit to give Keith room. After a few hot laps behind Johnny he points me by and I'm on my own. I'm still pretty sloppy, but getting a little better with each lap. The course layout we're using is pretty fun, and gives us a long enough front straight to be moving fairly well by turn one. One of the points Johnny has been pushing on us is to be patient with the throttle in a few corners. The first priority is to get the corner setup right and make the apex properly, and doing so will allow the earliest application of the throttle in the exit. In a few corners this is especially useful to practice and it's helping me to improve my smoothness and lap times. Johnny is riding along with Keith and I'm catching up a little on each lap. This gives me a little incentive and I try to push myself a little harder. Keith pulls in the pit area about the time I catch up so I'm on my own again. A couple of laps later I hose my turn-in at turn ten and loop the car. Damn. It's still running so I get it moving quickly before anybody notices or it'll cost me donuts tomorrow (due to the Bondurant policy: If you spin, bring donuts in.) Johnny eventually flags me over for a ride along and we head out to the track with him in the right seat. He has me turn in later in turn three and the left hander back onto the front straight. A few laps later we stop in the pit and trade places. He demonstrates the difference between my previous line and waiting a bit longer to turn in by observing the corner exit speeds. They're not large differences but there are definitely improvements with the later turn-in. Johnny also observes that this car is pretty tight in left hand corners but fairly loose turning right. I can use this to my advantage by anticipating the behavior, especially in right turns. He's being much more aggressive with the car than I have been, letting it slide on the corners and carrying more speed through the back curves. By the time he pulls in the pit to turn me loose again I have plenty of material for experimentation. The later turn-ins are definitely an improvement and pushing the car hard enough to make it drift in the corners opens up another dimension to my practice sessions. It also makes it a little more fun. With every lap I'm gaining a little speed, a little confidence, and a little more smoothness in technique. After a while, though, the car starts cutting out coming out of turn ten. Must be getting low on fuel. The little yellow gas pump light is on and the needle shows between an eighth and quarter tank. Turn ten is a fairly tight right hand corner and the fuel is sloshing away from the pickup. It's not having a problem anywhere else on the track so I figure I'll live with it for a while. It gets worse with every lap and by the time Johnny flags us over I get very little acceleration between ten and eleven. We head back to the classroom for a break, some water, and more wisdom from Johnny. We'll be adding the Maricopa Oval to the course now which means we'll be driving turns one and two much faster and then the blind drop into three. Johnny won't ride along with advanced students using this part of the course, but we will do some lead follows. I ask about the difference in technique between pushing the car hard enough to consistently drift in the corners or letting it track and when each method is appropriate. He replies that since most amateur races (e.g., SCCA, since I had expressed an interest in that) run only 30 minutes or so, drifting and using the tires can provide an advantage. In his professional racing experience, he drives consistently on the edge of a skid, never quite letting the car slide. This provides optimum performance without overheating the tires. In other words, in longer races tire management becomes critical and overusing them is detrimental, but short races allow tires to be abused more in favor of higher speeds. Johnny gives us some more classroom instruction on various points, not the least of which is the need for consistency. If we're doing our jobs right on the track our lap times will be very consistent, preferrably within a one-half second window. Consistency is particularly essential for testing and car setup, where you need the lap times to reveal the effects of changes made to the car, not the shortcomings of the driver. Back on the course Johnny is driving us around in the SHO. Since we'll be coming over the hill with quite a bit of speed, we need to brake fairly early going into turn four to avoid going off the course at the end of the Maricopa Oval. Between turns two and three Johnny explains why he doesn't ride with advanced students when using this part of the course. Turn three is a descending right hand turn following turn two, which is a very fast left hand turn. To the left of turn three, perhaps ten meters off the course, is a light pole surrounded by a tire barrier. Mistakes in turns one or two could lead to a spin putting the passenger side of the car into the pole. The amount of speed carried in this part of the course is substantial, and I can certainly understand not wanting to put one's self in unnecessary danger. For me this is the most worrisome part of the track, since mistakes here carry the worst consequences due to the speed. Careful attention to line and throttle management get you through and over the hill easily, though. After some more coaching and a couple of laps at speed in the SHO, Johnny puts us in the Mustangs for a lead-follow session. Johnny leads in the SHO followed by Keith and then me. As usual we start out a little easy and then build up speed so that after a few laps we're running full tilt. Coming onto the front straight I notice nobody has hit the $1000 cone yet. Johnny points Keith by and lets him get some space ahead of us. After a few hot laps I get pointed by also. Things are going pretty well and I'm mostly concentrating on line and technique. After a while I notice I'm slowly closing on Keith, and after several laps we're running pretty much together. The speed difference between us is not great and I'm content, for the moment, to stay behind him. A couple of laps later, coming out of four, Keith misses the turn onto the back stretch and heads into the gravel. It's a slow turn with little chance of really hurting anything in an off-course excursion. As I go by I can see he's kept it moving and trying to get back on the track. With open track in front of me I push the pace up a little to see what I can do. Keith lost only about eight car lengths but I'm increasing the gap a little bit with time. After quite a few laps I notice that every time I'm coming out of Maricopa, Keith is coming through three over the hill. A little while later it's time for a needed break. Johnny gives us the usual helpful critique and lets us rest a bit and get some water. Keith says he hosed up his downshift into turn four and got distracted by it enough to miss the corner. Johnny is a little surprised that he didn't get stuck in the deep gravel out there, but Keith had kept it moving well enough that he hadn't even lost much track to me by the time he got going again. Once we're rested and done with track stories Johnny sends us back out for more practice. This time I get out before Keith so I've got a lot of space to myself. The practice is certainly helping. During an earlier lead-follow session with Johnny I'd missed shifts twice and almost gone off the course once because of it. Now I'm in the groove enough that things are coming much more smoothly and I can tell I'm getting through some corners a lot faster than when we started. Johnny's been drilling us on experimenting with braking lighter instead of moving braking points up, since this allows you to take time to set up for a corner better. I've been doing this as well as moving a couple of braking points up, and being able to trade the two methods has made it easy to experiment with various corners. After quite a few laps I can see that Keith has pulled off for a break, so I've got the course to myself. I'm concentrating mostly on getting the last corner onto the front straight right so I can get third gear earlier. Refining the line through the back curves is helping a little, too. Keith comes back onto the track and after a long time I eventually catch up with him. After following close for a couple of laps I pull in the pit and wait until we get about a half-lap spacing before going back out. Once in a while I get a lap that is largely mistake-free. I'm only making mistakes bad enough to lose noticeable time every few laps, and bad mistakes are, happily, not frequent. Although the car got filled with fuel after the last session, I notice it is missing again in a few corners, and especially at the end of the straight. It's getting a little bit worse with every lap, but since the day is wearing to an end anyway, I decide to live with it. After quite a few laps Johnny gives us the last lap sign. We run a cool-down lap and then leave the cars in front of the shop before heading back to the classroom. Johnny's been timing us and our fast laps are nearly identical. I had a 1:06:00 and Keith had a 1:06:07. Since the seven-hundredths is certainly within the tolerance of Johnny's button pushing, I figure we were essentially equal although Johnny says I have the pole position (which, since we're done for the day, is only ceremonial). As it turns out, though, Johhny was in the middle of timing laps when Keith had stopped for his break earlier. He had a chance to see the lap times and, at the time, I had run a few laps about a second faster than he was running. This got him motivated and his very next lap out was the 1:06:07. Later I figured out that, on average, of the eleven laps that were timed, I had about a half second advantage. In the classroom, Johnny goes over the lap times with us and again makes the point about the need for consistency. My times run from 1:06:00 to 1:07:03, and Keith's run from 1:06:07 to 1:07:57. Johnny bludgeons us with this a bit since we're both way over the desired half-second spread. I think, "Not bad for a couple of amateurs," but the point is well taken that we can improve, and need to if we want to be serious about this stuff. After some more wisdom and critique from Johnny, we get to ask questions, and I've got a bunch. I ask about the left foot braking I see the on the NASCAR foot cams occassionally, especially where the guy has the throttle mashed to the floor and is pumping the brake at the same time. Johnny explains that left foot braking is a big technique issue, although it is unnecessary for most people and probably not a good idea unless you have some pressing reason to do it. The brake pumping on straights is to push the disc pads close to the disc before a corner, since vibration and suspension play can push the pads away from the disc. Since I'm planning on participating in the Skip Barber Formula Dodge race at PIR this spring, I ask what's the best way through turn one on the PIR road course. Every road race I've seen at PIR is an investigation into how many different lines you can see people drive into turn one. I've also heard many times that the PIR turn one is one of the harder corners in road racing. Johnny draws a pretty decent depiction of the corner in question on the board and says, "This is a decreasing radius corner. How should I drive a decreasing radius corner?" I reply, "Double apex." Correct. Johnny draws a double apex line through the corner and gives a brief description of how he gets through it. It is pretty straightforward and follows Johnny's philosophy that a race driver is "a simple animal, and doesn't have to be a rocket scientist." He continues that in his continuing quest for speed and technique improvement, his latest focus is in hitting apexes correctly and consistently. Hitting an apex correctly requires proper setup for the corner, which means the approach to the corner must be executed correctly. Taking a little extra time, by braking a little earlier and a little lighter, can make corner setup much easier without sacrificing lap time. This allows the best line through the corner with the best apex and earliest application of throttle coming out of the corner, which is the real goal. It seems like we spend a long time talking about driving, and at some point Johnny says that one of the reasons he likes instructing is that he gets a chance to see how a lot of different people do things. A student may use a useful new technique or a different approach to a problem that he wouldn't have thought of. "For instance," he says looking at me, "riding with you there were a few corners you were on the throttle so early I just knew we were going off the track, but you kept it on somehow." It's a complement, I think. Johnny has obligations for tomorrow (Sunday) so Mike McGovern will be our mentor. Mike stops in the classroom long enough to introduce himself and chat a little bit. He's going to try to get the carousel opened up for us if at all possible, which would make the course the full 1.6 mile length. Tomorrow we'll spend all day in the Formula Fords, which is quite a change from the Mustangs. Johnny quizzes us again: "What's the main difference from the Mustangs and the Formula Fords?" "Engine's in the rear," we reply. "What else?" "It's lighter." "So?" "Brake later." He suggests starting out with our braking references not too far from what we were using with the Mustangs, and then moving them up as we warm up to the cars. Eventually the discussion moves to racing in general, and Johnny tries to make a point about the difference between car setup and driver talent, "Name a backmarker driver. Somebody that's always in the back of the pack, besides Hiro, we pick on him too much." "Ross Bentley," I say, and immediately realize I've picked Keith's hometown driver, "Ooops! Not to pick on Canadians or anything!" On our way out, Johnny reminds us to get a good night's sleep, etc., since we'll have a lot of track time tomorrow in the Formula Fords and will need to be alert. Good advice.