Bondurant - Afternoon

When we got back from lunch we were chomping at the bit to get onto the race course. First, we did time trials through a road course in a large open lot marked with cones so we did not do any damage to the cars. The road course included straight-aways, hairpin turns, S-turns and two or three different types of curves. Once we got into third gear, we kept the car in third and did not downshift. The course took about 60 seconds to complete. We ran the course once or twice slowly to get a feel for the turns and then started the time trials. My three times were in the high 59 seconds, low 59 seconds and high 58 seconds, but each time I lost time either because I was too tentative, took a bad racing line, or was too fast through a turn and almost lost the back end of the car. SO started out with a first run of 68 seconds, but by the third run she was keeping up with the boys and was in the mid 59 second range.

Next, we went on the Firebird main oval track to practice finding the racing line and hitting the apex of the curve. Of course, the oval is not a perfect oval (see link above); on the east end of the oval you take a high line coming into the curve and smoothly turn through the center of the curve and hit the apex on the inside of the curve and accelerate when you are parallel to the apex. At the west end, you accelerate straight into the curve, brake hard (and you should downshift but we were novices), take a sharper angle into the curve and hit the apex and accelerate. Cones are set up and there are markings on the curves to show you the racing line but it is still hard to hit the apex on each turn. Also, my left shoulder was slamming into the side of the car on each turn so by the time I got out of the car my shoulder was killing me!

Finally, we got onto the Bondurant Road Course and tried to assimilate all of the information that we learned over the course of the day. Our instructor led the way and we tried to follow him maintaining the same racing line. Although we never got out of third gear, we were going well over 100 m.p.h. on the straight-aways and through the S-turns and over the blind hills. We were hitting all of our racing lines and accelerating out of the apex of the curves like professional race car drivers (sort of). It was really exhilarating! When we pulled into the pit area ending our driving school adventure, we were disappointed that the day went by so quickly.