Porsches, BMWs and Audis: School was never like this.
By Steven Cole Smith, Contributor
Date posted: 11-27-2006
The nearly new
Audi RS4 is strapped to the trailer, about to leave for the nearest Audi dealership. It needs a new clutch. Which is what happens, says Skip Barber Racing School Chief Instructor Terry Earwood, when an over-enthusiastic student shifts from 2nd gear to 5th at top speed. "With all the torque from that 420-horsepower engine, well, he stayed on the gas and just fried the clutch."
Perhaps we've just learned why Barber's new two-day high-performance driving school costs $2,895, which seems pricey until you realize students aren't learning in Dodge Neons or
Chevrolet Cobalts, but in
Porsche 911s,
BMW M3s,
Dodge Vipers and now, with the RS4 temporarily out of service, 340-horsepower
Audi S4s. All straight from the manufacturers, most bought or leased by Skip Barber for this school. (If you plan to purchase a car like this in the near future, you might want to check the car's history and see if it has been leased to Barber. Certainly miles accumulated here are like dog years — multiply the odometer by seven for an accurate wear-and-tear barometer.)
No one in our class at Sebring International Raceway missed any shifts, or at least none of us would admit it. Aside from a minor scuff mark or two from contact with an orange cone, all the cars were just fine. The same could not be said for the tires on the BMW 330s that Barber uses for the wet skid pad training; wet or not, the purpose is to get the cars to slide sideways, then recover. Or not.
Fast times at Barber High
Former Ford SVT and Jaguar executive George Ayres, president and chief operating officer of Skip Barber since April of 2005, oversaw this transition to high-performance street cars for two central reasons: to give actual drive time to enthusiasts who would otherwise not be able to experience cars of this caliber beyond a round-the-block test drive at a dealership, and to give those lucky enough to buy a Porsche 911 or BMW M3 a chance to learn the car's limits — without having to actually risk their own car's delicate bodywork. Ayres says it's working out pretty well. This was before he got the bill for the Audi RS4's clutch.
Skip Barber is, as you likely know, the world's largest driving school, founded by the former Formula 1 driver in 1975 with four students and two borrowed Formula Ford racecars. Barber sold the school and doesn't have much to do with it any more, but the school continues to teach at 20-odd tracks, and still runs the Skip Barber racing series, a stepping-stone to professional series. Barber has long had a contract with Dodge to provide cars and support, but that contract has ended, and Ayres says they'll be announcing an affiliation with a new manufacturer soon. Regardless of who it is, he says, the semi-exotics in the high-performance driving school curriculum will remain.
As for that curriculum: Both days begin with classroom instruction, in our case taught by Earwood, arguably America's funniest driving instructor. Barber has done a good job of attracting, and keeping, professionals: Earwood has won multiple championships in road racing and drag racing. Another of our instructors, Walt Bohren, is a two-time IMSA champion, and still another, Gerardo Bonilla, was the Barber racing series champion and won this year's Star Mazda series race at Sebring. Bonilla also used to drive the monorail at Walt Disney World, but that's probably another story.
Classroom training led to time on the wet skid pad, and on a simple kidney-shaped autocross course, and a shifting exercise that stressed heel-and-toe shifting, which requires the driver to blip the throttle with half the right foot while downshifting and brake with the other half of the foot. All the cars have manual transmissions, so if you can't drive a stick, you won't have any fun in this class.
Back on track
Then, on the last half of the second day, it's lead-and-follow on the Sebring racecourse, where the legendary 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race is held each spring. Most of Sebring is made up of ancient World War II-era concrete, left over from its days as a military base. Speeds on the back straight easily top 100 mph, but it's in the turns where you really see the difference in the three cars we drove on the track: the BMW M3 (last-generation version), Porsche 911 and all-wheel-drive Audi S4. The nose-heavy Audi tends to wallow a bit; gearing in the M3 was less than optimum in couple of the turns, but the Porsche 911... You can see why the Porsche Club of America schedules so many "track days" around the country.
There are one- and two-day high-performance driving school scheduled at multiple tracks around the country in the next few months: Log onto the
Skip Barber Web site for details.
Is the two-day school worth $2,895? Yes, probably, but Barber's two-day advanced racing school, with time in the open-wheel Barber R/T 2000 race cars, costs $3,195, and is such a blast that if it was my money I was spending, that would likely be my choice.
Regardless, any day on any racetrack, in someone else's car, is time well spent.
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