Aug

Back to school

Posted by Published in Hemmings

A couple weeks ago, I managed to get myself invited to a day of apex-hitting, threshold-braking fun at the Skip Barber Racing School at Lime Rock in Lakeville, Connecticut.

I have a little amateur racing experience and have logged seat date in everything from go-carts with centrifugal clutches to tandem-axle dump trucks with 10-speed Road Rangers, but, uh, as it turns out… I don’t know jack about driving a race car on a road course.
I did however memorize a few things that I consistently do wrong:
• I turn-in to corners too early, thus compromising the all-important line out of the turn, at which point I should be accelerating like Warren Johnson instead of foundering around looking for the groove;
• I accelerate and brake too abruptly rather than squeezing the controls on and off in fluid motions; and
• Despite being of average build, weight and girth, I seem to have a problem with breaking zippers in fire suits. (I broke the one the Skip Barber folks let me use for the day and I broke my own in a race a couple of years ago.)

The funny thing was, before attending that one-day session, for media

types, I always looked askance at the school’s Formula Skip Barber race cars—which are small open-wheel race cars with rear-mounted 130hp Dodge Neon engines and a four-speed non-synchro gearbox—figuring that I would feel increasingly at domestic driving a high-performance street car.

Wrong again.
I absolutely loved driving the open-wheel race cars and, by the end of the day, couldn’t have cared less about driving one of the school’s BMW M3s or Porsche Caymans. (I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it’s true.) whether I were to return, I’d sign up for one of the Racing Schools (in which students drive the formula cars) rather than one of the Driving Schools (in which the students drive street cars).
None of the schools are cheap, but whether you participate in any kind of racing, or whether you just want to sharpen your street driving skills, Skip Barber is the place to safely and methodically improve your credibility as wheel man or wheel woman.— All photos by Rick Roso courtesy Skip Barber Racing

Original post by Mike McNessor