On this episode of HOT ROD Unlimited
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MotorTranscript
00:00 (engine revving)
00:02 We're at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance
00:04 Driving in Chandler, Arizona to find out what happens
00:07 when you give six hot rodders with zero road course
00:10 experience brand new Corvettes.
00:12 (engine revving)
00:15 - Good morning, everybody.
00:28 Welcome to the Bondurant School.
00:30 My name's Mike McGarver and I'm the chief instructor
00:32 and I'd just like to start off by saying welcome
00:34 and thank you for coming.
00:35 - For me, going into Bondurant, I really was hoping
00:39 to get some seat time and some instruction
00:41 from somebody that knew what the hell they were doing
00:43 because so far in my career, my only feedback
00:46 on how to race a car has been through
00:48 the video games I've played.
00:49 - Always do all of your hard braking in a straight line.
00:52 But then we'll also teach you a technique
00:54 of what's called trailing brake,
00:57 where we use the brake to help point
00:59 the front end of the vehicle.
01:01 - So the classroom was frustrating almost
01:03 because the whole time you're just sitting there
01:05 like the kid looking at the clock waiting
01:07 for the bell to ring at the end of school.
01:09 You just, you know you have a brand new,
01:12 badass Corvette sitting outside with the keys in it
01:14 and your name on it.
01:15 But it was really, really useful.
01:17 They sat down and they repeated stuff to us
01:19 and they just kind of beat us over the head
01:20 with these techniques.
01:21 - We're gonna go for a tour, we're gonna do a van ride,
01:24 then we're gonna hook you up with some people
01:25 and you can do some driving.
01:26 (car engine revving)
01:29 - The first actual in-car exercise that we did was slalom.
01:33 And it requires a lot more steering input than you think.
01:35 I mean you really turn the wheel and you turn it quickly
01:38 and it's fun.
01:39 (car engine revving)
01:42 It was a good exercise in looking as far ahead
01:49 as possible while you're driving.
01:50 (car engine revving)
01:53 (upbeat music)
01:56 So right now we are running back and forth
02:01 up the track doing heel toe.
02:03 And it's not actually heel toe,
02:06 it's more like toe inside of your foot.
02:10 So, braking, downshift, just barely revving it up
02:16 with the side of my foot, then letting out of the clutch.
02:21 So you wanna be able to get RPMs up
02:23 to make the engine speed match the rear wheel speed
02:26 when you go to downshift.
02:27 If you downshift and don't do this,
02:29 the engine speed low, you let out of the clutch
02:32 and it'll want to lock up the rear tires
02:33 and it's very abrupt.
02:34 And when you're already at the max amount of traction
02:37 that the car's gonna give you going into a corner,
02:39 the last thing you wanna do is do something abrupt.
02:42 So this allows for a smooth downshift
02:44 and smooth slowing for a corner.
02:45 (car engine revving)
02:49 (upbeat music)
02:51 I'm a big proponent of manual transmissions.
02:55 So the fact that we were driving a Grand Sport Corvette
02:58 with a six speed in it was just heaven for me.
03:01 These are race cars with license plates on them.
03:04 The team at Bondurant did very little.
03:05 They put some exhaust on them
03:07 and then some safety things like a roll bar
03:08 and a four point harness.
03:10 But that's about it.
03:11 And these are basically stock Corvettes
03:12 but they were still really fast.
03:15 Next up was the traffic avoidance drill.
03:17 The idea is you have three lanes,
03:18 all of a sudden something bad happens in one of the lanes.
03:21 You have to quickly change lanes and brake at the same time.
03:24 The accident avoidance seemed like a silly thing at first,
03:26 but the more we did it
03:28 and the several times I screwed it up,
03:29 I realized it was not as easy as I thought.
03:32 We are doing obstacle avoidance.
03:35 I'm gonna wind it up to 30 miles an hour
03:37 and then they're gonna change the light signals up there
03:40 to tell me which lane to go into.
03:43 And basically I'm supposed to lift, change lanes
03:47 and then squeeze back on the throttle.
03:49 Oh, we're in the wrong way.
03:53 (laughing)
03:55 I think I just killed us.
03:57 The drag racer in me was anticipating
04:00 which lane I was gonna go to.
04:02 So mentally I'd already committed, I'm going right.
04:05 Don't anticipate what the lights are gonna do,
04:07 just react to what you see.
04:09 So day one's over with.
04:14 We got to learn heel toe shifting,
04:15 which I was getting better at,
04:17 but I was really fired up for the next day
04:19 to see how well these Corvettes worked on a road course
04:22 and how well I could keep one on the track.
04:24 (car engine roaring)
04:27 - Bandaran is a legend.
04:35 He won in the time, the era of racing that I just love.
04:39 He helped race with Shelby,
04:40 beating out the Ferraris with the GT40.
04:43 He got into a really bad accident at Watkins Glen.
04:45 - The doctors told him he wasn't gonna walk again.
04:47 And he said, you know what, I gotta do something else.
04:49 So he decided to open up a school in 1968.
04:52 And today it's a great facility.
04:54 He hand laid out the track out in the middle of the desert.
04:57 - Bob actually is involved with the school.
05:00 He comes there every day.
05:01 He checks on the instructors, he checks on the students,
05:03 and he came over to talk to us.
05:04 Getting to talk to somebody like that
05:06 and have them watch you run in a car,
05:08 doesn't happen every day.
05:13 - The beginning of day two,
05:14 we started out on an oval course that's specially designed.
05:17 It's not like a traditional oval course,
05:19 like a NASCAR or something,
05:20 where every corner is kind of the same.
05:23 The two ends of the track are drastically different.
05:25 The first one has a very gradual turn with a late apex.
05:29 And the second one had a very early, very sharp apex.
05:33 And then you wanted to accelerate smoothly
05:35 out of the corner.
05:36 So it keeps you on your toes.
05:37 (car engine roaring)
05:40 The instructors laid down cones
05:42 and told us where the driving line was.
05:44 And it wasn't necessarily your natural instinct.
05:46 They wanted you to stay way on the outside
05:48 before entering the corner.
05:50 I really want to cut that corner.
05:52 I'm way too anxious about the corner
05:54 I'm getting ready to enter into.
05:56 So I ended up jumping in too early.
06:00 These cones force you to stay out.
06:02 Then turn in when you need to.
06:07 This is why we're at an instructing school.
06:09 'Cause as I'm talking,
06:11 acting like I know what the hell I'm doing,
06:13 I slide the car sideways.
06:15 (laughing)
06:17 (upbeat music)
06:21 - The skid car looks like some sort of weird transformer toy.
06:29 It's a Cadillac with extra wheels,
06:31 sort of casters, outriggers on the side.
06:34 And the instructor has a control panel inside
06:37 that can allow him to use those wheels
06:38 to lift the wheels of the car off the ground.
06:42 Front, rear, both rear, all four.
06:45 And that can simulate different driving experiences.
06:48 Like when a car's pushing oversteer and understeer
06:51 if you're driving on ice.
06:52 That gives you a chance to practice
06:54 correcting a skid, basically.
06:56 - Look where you want to end up.
06:57 That's the key part of this.
06:58 So when it starts to slide,
07:00 keep your eyes focused on where you think you should end up.
07:03 And then everything else will be so much more
07:06 second nature, almost.
07:07 It'll be kind of a, it'll just react with it.
07:09 - So are you messing with it right now?
07:10 - Uh-huh, a little bit.
07:11 - So should I be doing something different?
07:13 - You're just fine.
07:14 You're coming out of the gas pedal like you should.
07:15 I'm giving you the easiest of the two skids.
07:17 But then when I transfer into something like this,
07:20 then you're a little bit busier.
07:22 - I really like the skid car.
07:26 Everything else was pretty intimidating.
07:28 I haven't had a lot of experience in new cars.
07:30 I never trusted the brakes.
07:31 It was my first time ever driving anything with ABS.
07:34 But skid cars, that's something I know about
07:36 because when it comes to making smoke
07:38 and correcting a skid, I know how to do that.
07:40 - Wanted on record that that was not my fault.
07:49 - There she really had no chance to do anything
07:52 'cause the whole car was off the ground.
07:54 (upbeat music)
07:56 - So we finally got to the road course.
08:02 And it's not a very big course.
08:04 You can't run about like three cars wide on it.
08:06 But it's very, very technical.
08:07 Bandarant specifically designed this course to train
08:10 and he did a really good job of it.
08:11 Every single corner was drastically different
08:13 than the corner before it.
08:14 And it was a lot of fun.
08:16 - Everything we've done this far has built up
08:19 to us driving these cars on the road course.
08:22 (upbeat music)
08:27 (car engine revving)
08:30 - Oh wow, that makes so much more sense now.
08:51 So I had a revelation on the track
08:53 where I discovered what trail braking is.
08:55 They had told us what trail braking was
08:56 but I didn't really have faith in it
08:58 or completely understand it
08:59 until I did it for the first time.
09:00 I discovered trail braking coming out about the third turn.
09:04 Nice swooping turn.
09:06 There we go, there we go, there we go.
09:07 Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
09:10 I was on the brakes a little bit
09:11 and the car went exactly where I wanted it to go.
09:14 The idea of trail braking is to brake hard enough
09:17 that you're putting more weight onto the front tires.
09:20 There's a fine line there
09:21 and trail braking gets you to that max.
09:26 To be honest, I never wanted to leave the track.
09:29 I had so much fun driving on it
09:31 and every lap I'd find something I did wrong
09:34 and I'd hurry up and go around the track
09:36 to get to that same section
09:37 and try to improve upon what I did the lap before.
09:40 The 30 or 40 minutes we had, I did not waste.
09:43 (car engine revving)
09:46 So up until now, all of my coworkers and I
09:49 were all in the same boat.
09:50 We're learning the same skills
09:52 and nothing is really graded.
09:54 There's no time.
09:55 We don't know who was the fastest around the road course.
09:58 So right before we left,
10:00 the instructor set up an hollow cross
10:01 and gave us each one warmup lap to figure out the course
10:05 and then one lap around it to see who's the fastest driver.
10:09 (dramatic music)
10:12 (dramatic music)
10:15 Before coming to Bondurant,
10:38 I thought Mike would be my main competition
10:40 and then I saw Tom driving
10:41 and Tom really surprised me.
10:42 Tom was pretty good.
10:43 (car engine revving)
10:47 When I watched Mike on the autocross,
10:51 I was really nervous 'cause the car looked nice and balanced
10:54 but I think he was just going slow.
10:57 - I really assumed Jesse would be the fastest guy
11:02 'cause he's from North Carolina
11:03 and all of those guys at North Carolina that I've ever met
11:05 are into NASCAR, they're into dirt tracking.
11:07 So I figured he's the guy to beat.
11:10 Julia had the seventh quickest time.
11:15 - Seventh quickest.
11:16 - Alina, sixth quickest time.
11:19 - How political.
11:20 - Tom was the fifth quickest time.
11:22 Brandon.
11:23 Mike.
11:26 - Nice Jesse.
11:28 - Nice work.
11:29 - Jesse!
11:30 (cheering)
11:30 - You get to drive us home 'cause you're the best driver.
11:33 Yeah!
11:34 - I don't care, I'm excited about that.
11:37 - So Steve McQueen has a quote about life
11:40 is just waiting when you're gonna race again
11:42 and that's exactly how I felt
11:43 when we got back here to the offices.
11:45 I jumped into my Ford Escape and drove home.
11:49 I'm just waiting to get behind the wheel and race hard again.
11:52 This was by far the coolest thing I've ever done
11:54 working for Hot Rod.
11:55 It gives me so much more knowledge.
11:57 I wish I would have done this before the introduction
11:59 of the new Viper, I got to go to it.
12:01 We raced on Sonoma Raceway
12:03 and I really wished I would have had this knowledge
12:05 beforehand but I'll be ready next time.
12:07 (upbeat music)