Originally posted to rec.autos.sport.misc on 10/30/94. Here's the last episode in the 4-day Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving experience as told by me. :) Started the day with some more ground school and an actual written test based on the SCCA General Competition Rules. The course and completion of the test is 1/2 of the requirements for an SCCA Regional Competition License. (i.e., this qualifies as "prior racing experience" under the rules). After the test T.J. Clark goes over it with us thoroughly. We get lots of racing wisdom from T.J. just like we got Johnny O'Connell's yesterday. T.J. then gives us a quick briefing of the morning track session, which will be the Lake Loop and Carousel sections of the track again in the Formula Fords. Once we get up to speed on that we'll do the whole course with the nasty dive down to the Maricopa Oval. We go out to the shop to get the cars. One won't start so they quickly swap it out with another from the garage. We'll start with a lead follow again and then get turned loose. I'm still getting used to the Formula Ford a little bit after spending so much time in the Mustang. We head out to the track and the row of orange FFs following Johnny's yellow Taurus SHO has got to look a lot like a mother duck with her chicks behind her. Gradually the speed is picked up and after several laps Johnny drives the line on the end of the carousel rather slow and points two cars by. I'm now behind Johnny with a FF between us. A few laps of that and he pulls over and points by again. I try to get around with the car in front but Johnny cuts in for me to follow. OK. After a while we're clipping along fairly well and I'm cutting Johnny off on the corners pretty badly. Not much comparison between the FF and the SHO in that department. Finally the hand comes out the window of the Taurus and I get a point-by. The first session goes well and I'm finding the line consistently (well, pretty much consistently) and starting to get used to the car. By the end of the session I've gotten some very good laps. The instructors have been hovering around the corners in the SHOs, parked strategically off the course so they can see how we're doing. Johnny's in the tower manning the flags where he can see most of the course at one time. At the end of the session we gather in the tent behind the pit area for a break and debriefing. I'm one of the last guys off the track and out of the car and as I walk up to the tent Johnny is hollering "Who's the guy in number 22?" Uh-oh, that's me. I put up my hands in mock surrender. He says, "Nice job. Very quick." I blather some sort of thank you and head for the water cooler. There's a general discussion about how everybody is doing, tough points on the track and better ways to get through them, etc., etc. We all get some cold water in us and get rested a bit and they turn us loose again. Joey and I still seem to be the fastest guys on the track. I'm passing people pretty regular when they let me by (we're not supposed to pass without a point-by from whoever is in front of us. This way we know they know we're passing.), and when they don't let me by I pull in the pit and wait for the end of a long break in traffic. There's only seven of us on the track, and there's usually a bunch of three or four together so it's not hard to wait for a long empty spot and sneak in then. I'm getting some really good laps and experimenting with the line a little bit. Turns 11 and 12 are very slow and exit into the long turn of the carousel. There's been a lot of discussion about whether to use 2nd or 1st gear there, and T.J. has been saying 1st gives you a little better throttle control. I stop staying in 2nd through 11 and 12 and start dropping to first. The line is a little harder but I can keep the revs high quickly going into the carousel so the acceleration out of 12 is better. I get some more quick laps and all of a sudden I see some orange body work in my mirror with a big number 28 on it. Damn! This 15-year old karter (Joey) has caught up with me on some of my better laps. Now I'm in trouble. Fortunately for me, the yellow flag comes out a little bit later so we all slow down. I haven't seen the usual tell-tale dust cloud on the track anywhere so I can't figure out what happened. I make a couple of slow laps and don't see any trouble anywhere but the yellow is still out. Another slow lap and still yellow. Spence and Joey's dad are in the flag tower. I can use a break anyway, so I pull in the pit area. Up in the flag tower Spence says that in recognition of the NASCAR guys being at PIR this weekend they decided to put out a yellow for no reason. Harhar. Actually they decided we needed a bit of a break but that just slowing us down would do well enough rather than bringing us all in, making us unstrap, etc. Joey's dad is running the stopwatches again and has a clipboard to keep track of how Joey's doing. "So what's the deal here, did Joey catch up with me?", I ask. Ayup, sure did. Okay, Spence is an official instructor dude so I ask him where I'm losing speed. Not getting into 3rd gear on the carousel soon enough, and not using enough track for acceleration in turn 9, he says I'm leaving a good 10 feet of usable pavement going around ten, so I'm losing a little speed there, too. Cool, now I've got some ammo to go after this kid. This is great. Joey and his Dad are wonderful and they're happy that we've got this competition going. Spence flies the green flag and I get back in the car. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get into third on the carousel faster. Accelerating more out of 9 is a no-brainer, I just needed that pointed out to me. I keep getting a little sideways or too wide on the carousel experimenting with shifting earlier. This is not working at all. Finally I get a bit of a rythm where I short-shift to third and just hold it back until the apex, then back on the throttle. This works better but still doesn't feel right. Many laps of this and then they pull us in for lunch. A Mustang club is here going through a half day course and they're having a big cookout on the patio. I decide to go over to the museum and play with the slot cars. (There's a little museum with several cars and motorcycles next to the shop and a pretty nice HO scale track with cars and stuff scattered about.) After 20 minutes or so of that I figure I better eat lunch now or I'm gonna be tasting it on the track this afternoon. Back in the lobby Yoshi asks me to write down some stuff about myself and my experience here for his article. He and Nori write for a Japanese auto magazine called NAVI, whatever that is. After a bit of lunch Yoshi collars the Mustang club guy that drove the GM Impact (electric vehicle) that's in the parking lot. We all go out to look at it (GM and the local power companies are sponsoring a research market study for the Impact. There are fifty cars being cycled around the valley to various people for two weeks at a time, this guy was lucky enough to be one of them.) Yoshi, being a charming foreign journalist, talks the guy into a ride. Very cool, silent car. They spin the wheels going down the lane to the highway and then turn around and come back. We all chat with the guy, Yoshi writes down a bunch of stuff, takes lots of pictures, etc., etc. This is turning into quite the interesting four days. After lunch we spend a little more time in the classroom. Now we're going to be doing the entire track and we get the usual warnings about the S and drop to the Maricopa Oval. Lots of discussion about how to do it right in the FFs, (not too much different than the Mustangs, although they stress that the consequences will be worse if we screw it up in the FF). Back to the cars. We do some lead follow to get up to speed and then they cut us loose again. I get a few warm up laps and then coming out of turn nine I'm rolling the throttle on and then pop! it feels like my foot has slid off the throttle. In the FF there's barely enough room for your feet and the air in there, so I'm wondering where exactly my foot slid to and trying to keep the car on the track. I can find the brake, I can find the right wall, but I can't find the damn throttle. The engine is idling and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it, so I let the car roll off onto the dirt away from the racing line and wait for a yellow SHO to show up. T.J. is there almost instantly. The instructors all have radios and are in constant communication. If whoever is in the flag tower (or monitoring a corner) sees a problem they can tell the closest guy in an SHO what's up. I tell T.J. I got a broken throttle cable. He says he'll push me by hand to get it going at idle and then I can roll it in 1st gear to the shop. He waits for a long break in traffic and I take a shortcut back to the pit entrance. (The runoff line from the Firebird drag track cuts through the road course, and it makes a short cut from the backstretch to the front. From there it's a short hop to the pit lane and it's all downhill.) At the shop the mechanic tries to make a guess as to which car in the garage will fit me while #22 gets a new throttle cable. #25 is available and I climb in. Gee, too short, a little more cramped than usual, but I can do with it for a little while. I go back to the track and on the way I think I've made a big mistake. My knees are hitting the bottom of the instrument panel pretty badly and I have to hold myself on the seat rather funny to make the clutch work right. Back on the track I'm taking it easy and figure I can just practice the line and smoothness in this thing and not worry too much about speed until I get #22 back. I'm doing everything kind of slowly but letting the car keep as much speed as I can. I find myself going about at least as quick as I was in #22 but everything is much smoother since I'm not really trying as hard. Wow, that's a breakthrough. Third gear is coming much more quickly on the carousel because I'm keeping it in 2nd through 11 and 12 since this thing is so hard to shift to 1st with me crammed in it. That's a breakthrough, too. Stay in 2nd coming into the carousel. The engine lugs a little bit coming out of 12 since the rpms are down a bit, but I still manage to get third comfortably much earlier than when I was going all the way down to 1st. Cool, this cramped car was a blessing in disguise. Meanwhile, I'm also trying to negotiate the S and drop onto the oval as quickly as I can in the FF, cramped or no. I get off the line a couple of times and manage some nervous last-second corrections going over the crest of the hill. The rear end slides very easily on the FFs (since the engine is back there) and it is not a good feeling getting a little sideways in this teeny car at these speeds going over a blind hill. The checkered flag comes out so we all go in for another break. #22 is ready with a new throttle cable and the mechanic brings it out to the pit area for me. What service. This place is great. Johnny chews us all out a bit for horrible inconsistent lines. Gotta be consistent if we're gonna be fast and all I can think of is my sliding turns going over the hill. Gonna have to fix that. Johnny comes by where I am and says that other than the mistakes on the hill I'm looking pretty good. Cool. After more water, general discussions, and general cooling off, we're back on the track. #22 is much more comfortable for me than that last thing, but now I've got a lot of stuff to work on. I keep using the 2nd gear technique in 11 and 12 and it is paying off well. I'm paying close attention to the line through the S to the hill and hitting the apexes a little later and adding a little more throttle in the second corner. Holding the throttle over the hill and then going flat into the entry to the oval is really quick but takes a little nerve. I can do it consistently, though, and not a hint of sliding so it feels good. Makes the braking and shifting on the end of the oval critical because of the speed I'm carrying, and I just barely manage to keep the wheels out of the dirt a few times. If I could do *that* consistently I'd really be quick. We get pulled in for another break after quite a few laps. The practice is helping tremendously. After more water (it's nearly 90 degrees if not hotter and the usual Arizona blazing sunshine), more pointers from the instructors, etc., etc., they turn us loose again. Now they're saying we're all looking pretty good and I am noticing that it's getting harder to pass people. This time Spence is in an FF. I'm the first back in the car and on the track, but Spence is not far behind me. I'm trying to keep it a little slow until I get warmed up but he's on my butt in a big way in no time at all. He's infinitely more experienced than I am so I point him by on the front straight hoping that I can follow him a while and watch his line and technique. No way. He keeps his speed when I slow down and point him by so he rockets past and there's no way I can get the distance back. Damn. After another lap or so I'm up to my full tilt level and working on line, smoothness, etc., etc. I manage to keep a lot of momentum on the dreaded S and hill and am amazed again at how fast you can take that stretch if you do it like they tell you to. After a couple of slower laps for experimenting, Joey is behind me again. Cool, now we can have some fun. I pick up the pace to about as good as I can and the practice is paying off. I'm pulling away at several places on the track but he's catching me on others. We do this rubber band routine for quite a few laps until we catch up with some slower traffic and get stuck. We're only supposed to pass with a point-by from whoever is in front of us and then only on the carousel and the front stretch. Joey moves inside me on the end of the carousel and cuts me off. I'm slow because of the traffic in front but he's an opportunist. I had wanted to get behind him with nobody in front of us so we could chase each other around with me watching his line, so it's not so bad. We still gotta deal with the guy in front and he's not pointing us by. At the end of the front straight going into the evil S Joey makes a bold move on the slower car. Man alive there's two cars in front of me where only one fits on the line and this is not an easy stretch of track. I'm hoping we're not in for big trouble but the slower car sees Joey is not giving up on this corner and slows a little more. Joey gets by easily now but I have to slow down even more to keep from collecting the car in front of me. I lose a lot of momentum and have to give up on playing lead follow with Joey since he managed to keep a lot of speed over the hill after the pass. We do manage to get quite a few more good laps in before they bring us in for the last time. I take my time unstrapping and try to wind down a bit before I get out of the car. The instructors are all with us now and Spence is rolling up the FF he was using. Johnny says we've been doing real well and it's been a long time since they had a class this quick. Very cool. I'm chatting with Spence about how I wished I'd been able to follow him a bit. He had apparently tried to get around so that we could do that but the traffic was such that he was never able to get back to where we were on the track. Joey and his Dad and I have a great time talking about our cat and mouse session and this amazing passing maneuver that he had made. Again, he clocked us with very similar lap times and we're still the quickest in the class. Personally, I think Joey was quicker than I was, probably not in small part due to 5 years of kart racing experience under his belt. He had managed to stay right with me despite my best efforts to get away and I can't help but think I held him up a little. It would have been great if we could have made a few runs with him in front and me behind so we could tell for sure, but unfortunately we never did get to do that. All in all this has been a wonderful experience. I never counted on all of the interesting stuff that happend: watching Crystal Barnard running hot laps, doing donuts in the Skid Car with the NASCAR wives, etc., etc. The curriculum and teaching process at this school has been perfect for me. I never felt pressured to go beyond my ability and at the same time felt encouraged to challenge myself as much I wanted. The instructing staff has been wonderful as well. One of my goals and yardsticks was to be able to start getting smooth like the professionals you see on TV and still be fast. I've learned an awful lot about how to go fast and why you do it that way, and got an awful lot of practice at doing it. Near the end of our sessions in the Mustangs and even more into the sessions in the Formula Fords I felt like I was starting to get there. Nothing is going to replace more experience and more practice for getting the rest of the way there, but I've been given a grand start by the last four days. I certainly couldn't guarantee that everyone would have the same experience that I have been fortunate enough to have, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this place to anybody interested in learning how to drive fast. As far as I know nobody at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving knows that I'm posting this, so this is definitely not an advertisement. I'm doing this solely as an individual sharing his experience in some electronic net catharsis in the hopes that someone will either enjoy the reading or be able to make some informed decisions about driving school. For more info, the school has an 800 number, 1-800-842-RACE. Now I just gotta figure out what I'm gonna do to hone these new skills...! l8r