As I said in the previous post, there will be one
additional post published each month in this blog that are re-postings of
articles I wrote for the National Auto Sports Association (NASA) digital
publication, Speed News. These posts cover outings in High Performance Driving Events (HPDE) over the course of almost a decade. Having been asked how to access these articles and
realizing the magazine was a NASA members-only benefit, I have elected to
publish them all here in order for there to be a more reader-friendly way to
check them out.
If you have ever had thoughts about taking the family
car onto a race track to circulate for lap after lap with like-minded
enthusiasts, then it’s very clear that you have to start somewhere. The value
proposition that came from joining NASA is that they provided instructors along
with a ladder up which you could progress until you reached a point where you
could choose a race group to join. Or not! Readers may recall that I started
posting about these weekends to this blog back in 2008 and if your interest is
tweaked then you may want to turn back to that very first post, Off
to the races ...
So welcome to the very first introductory article where I endeavored to take some of the mystery out of that very first appearance at a race day weekend ...
THE
HPDE JOURNEY
A colleague of my wife, Margo, and mine, Hal Massey, a
regular in American Iron racing in NorCal back in the mid ‘90s, stopped by for
lunch one day awhile back and, walking through our garage, locked eyes on our
two Corvettes – a C5 Z06 and a C6 Coupe.
“Do you take these to the track?” A big gulp followed
by an exchange of furtive looks between Margo and myself. “Can we take these
Vettes on a track? How much does that cost?”
Three months later, following social outings to Sonoma,
Big Willow and Buttonwillow as Hal’s guest, we were hooked!
Seated in my Corvette, staring through the windscreen
and checking out the cars ahead of me, I’m oblivious to who sits next to me. It’s
a big, white full-face helmet of someone I have only briefly met (and visible in the photo above). And
yet, here I am, a true novice, surrounded by others not much better than me.
Welcome to day one in NASA HPDE at Willow Springs International Raceway, or Big
Willow, as it’s called. What am I doing here? What was I thinking? And then the
cars roll out of the pits and onto a hot track, fortunately, under full-course
yellow as protocol dictates.
The guy in the white helmet was my instructor, Tom, and
I was in HPDE1. It was summer 2008, and after Tom slipped a pair of headphones
under my helmet, we began conversing and in no time at all he determined that
it was a first for me, and I had no idea what to do. Yes, I was a competent
driver and yes, I drove the nearby hilly roads pretty quickly, but that was not
going to help me today.
Barely driving above idling, we completed the first lap
of what was only going to be six or seven laps for the first 20-minute session.
From day one, the takeaways were that track designers really mess with your
head and that yes, we were truly novices. And, oh yes, stay hydrated!
For the most part, I was driving a far-from-optimal
line around the track simply because I was focused on the tip of the Vette’s
hood. Fear? Disorientation? Walking into the mandatory download that follows
every HPDE session, I was asked “How many flag marshals did I see?”
How many what? What flag marshals? On a large track map
hung on a wall, what was depicted on the map was almost unrecognizable from
behind the steering wheel. But that is the point of HPDE1 sessions and why HPDE
participants begin with the fundamentals.
As our group director, John, had said at the outset,
“Be safe and yes, go fast!” and as much as he smiled at us, he knew we were all
babes. The uninitiated. A gung-ho group of wannabes! The only question he
didn’t ask was how fast had we gone because from his perch in the timing booth,
he knew it, and it wasn’t pretty.
It is so much fun, no question about it, and NASA
spares no expense to ensure our safety. The quality of instruction each of us
receives that first time out is a fun mix of encouragement and chastisement,
but through it all, a sense of wanting much more develops. So much so that the
next NASA event seems so far away!
On the trip home along the freeways into L.A., we
exercised our newly developed skills. Perhaps the best instruction we received
all weekend was situational awareness. And the biggest lesson learned that
first weekend on track! Along with a newfound and sudden need to find a PC, that
is, and to register for the very next HPDE event!
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