Racing Schools

Photos by Gil Murrieta

The itch is persisting. In fact it’s making you a little nuts. You want to give vintage racing a shot. Or at least try your hand at driving a car at speed around a real racetrack. You may not be sure you’ll excel at it, but your gut signals that you can meet the challenge of getting around a track at a pretty good clip without embarrassing yourself. And from there, who knows? Question: how to make it happen?

Clearly, racetracks aren’t everywhere — and properly set-up “real racecars” don’t grow on trees. But that said, there are many ways to get into the game. First, a few basic questions and a handful of essential needs:

1. Are you an experienced stick-shift driver?
2. Do you have access to a “club level” racecar or sports car that is track ready?
3. Do you have a street car with stick-shift, good tires, good brakes and decent handling characteristics?
4. Do you have (or can you get access to) a helmet?

For better or worse, most car enthusiasts occasionally drive fast on the street; some more than others, some faster than others, and some more often than others. We’ll leave the details of this subject to your personal sense of judgement, conscience and The Law in your neck of the woods.

But let’s get one thing clear: Street driving – even high performance street driving — is not Road Racing. And while there may be similarities between some of the most basic skills applied on street or track, road racing requires a far greater spectrum of skills, plus the development of those skills at a significantly higher level than street driving in any car or at any level.

Clearly, it’s possible to learn road racing skills on your own or through an experienced friend or family member, provided you can locate and get permission to use a large blacktop area, such as an abandoned airstrip or very large unused parking lot. But the ideal introduction to road racing is through an established racing school or race club that sanctions introduction-to-racing weekend events at actual racetracks.

This website provides a partial list schools and clubs throughout the USA that offer racing basics and competition licenses. The list will be added-to on a periodic basis, for your convenience.

There are essentially three types of racing school programs:

1. Those that require you to provide your own car and equipment.
2. Those that require you to provide your own equipment, but that offer race-prepared cars for daily rental.
3. Those that provide everything for rental, including racecars and any/all race equipment items (such helmets and driving suits).

Costs for the three basic types of racing schools vary substantially, from the $300-range for number 1 above to the $3,000-range for number 3 above.

Starting with number 1, the race club or school that you attend will generally require five basic equipment items:

1. A stick-shift equipped car that has good tires, brakes and handling traits
2. A portable fire extinguisher, securely mounted and easily accessible, inside the car
3. Seat belts: at a minimum, standard lap and shoulder belts with normal quick-release button-latch. However, a five or six-point racing harness is recommended, and in fact required by some schools.
4. A “Snell approved” helmet
5. Driving shoes or tennis shoes (without running shoe lateral stability ledges)
6. Competition driving gloves or thin-skin racquet-sport gloves

Assuming that you’ve located a racing school or race club school event and you have arrived at your track location on Saturday morning ready to rock, the first place you’ll be directed to is a…classroom. Yup, school time before track! But it won’t take long; usually roughly 60-90 minutes of chief instructor orientation to basic skills and safety fundamentals, then off to the track to test out the core principles of cornering, braking and other key race driving fundamentals.

Most schools consist of either one or two consecutive days in duration, eight hours a day. Schedules are generally formatted to give you the best combination of classroom study and maximum track driving experience. Ground school basic training covers the essentials of high speed track driving in its core aspects, including track positioning, cornering lines, speed shifting, downshifting, low and medium speed cornering, high speed cornering, threshold braking and passing. As classroom and track sessions progress, you’ll gradually move into more advanced skill areas, such as trail braking, off-camber corning, strategic overtaking, how to handle spins and other car control essentials.

Many schools begin their processes by offering experienced ride-along race drivers for the students, who offer helpful pointers as you traverse the bends, elevation variants, corners, esse-curves and straightaway sections of the track. This type of real-time mentorship can prove priceless in its immediate in-car assistances and is often far reaching in the benefits it provides from channeling the techniques of driving side-by-side with an experienced race driver.

In addition to in-class and on-track driving sessions, many schools provide a skid pad component to their training. This consists of a specific area, usually adjacent to the track, with a continuously wetted surface. Several car control vitals are learned and practiced on the skid pad, including the basics of maintaining traction under power, drifting the car, braking, trail braking (overlapping throttle and braking), and all aspects of spins – how to avoid them, how to handle them and how to recover from them.