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BMW Club Racing School
Ever wonder what BMW Club Racing is like? The BMW Club Racing School is a GREAT way to find out. On September 17 and 18, the school was offered at Virginia International Raceway and what a great weekend it was!
The Venue: Virginia International Raceway is a beautiful facility. It lives up to and beyond its billing as a “motorsport country club”. The full track is 3.5 miles long with 22 named turns and a few sneaky un-named squiggles thrown in here and there for good measure. Elevation and camber changes, and high speed esses make this an interesting and fun track. To learn this track, it helps to think about it as three sections connected by high speed straights: the flat esses, the uphill esses, and the downhill esses. You will find a couple of turn combinations reminiscent of tracks we know well locally: turns 1 & 2 look a lot like 1&2 at summit point, Turns 4-6 are a lot like the esses leading to no-name straight at Lime Rock.
The Students: I tried to pin down the common demoninator in personality types and the incredible insight I came up with is that the students were all, well… studious. People showed up on time for the class rooms, payed attention, asked questions, and were ready to drive when our turns on the track came around. Comraderie was high, egos were kept in check, and all walks of life, genders, ages and any other demographic you care to mention were represented. In short, it was like a lot of our DEs, only more so. A significant minority of the students did not start the class with the firm intention of going racing but wanted to figure out if they might like racing before they gutted the interiors of their daily drivers and started ordering parts. Hint: keep an eye on e-bay for lots of ripped out interior trim pieces from e36 M3s. I have a feeling the pickings are gonna be pretty good in the next few months!
The Instruction: In a word: “superb.” Peter Krause (K&E Racing) was joined by SPEED World Challenge Touring Car competitors Seth Thomas and James Clay (BimmerWorld Racing) and Billy Revis (Motorsprot Connections Racing). The instruction is given in a series of intense class room sessions, interspersed with solo on-track exercises with feedback provided afterwards. The class room instruction is relevant to the point of seeming prophetic: every error I made during the weekend was something we were cautioned about in the instruction (but of course I did anyway). The good thing is, fore warned is fore armed and recognizing an error early in the commission helped us all avoid serious mistakes.
The focus on race craft: it is assumed that your diving skills will come from your DE background. It is also assumed that you are able to be truly responsible for your own car’s condition: no pre-event tech. It’s all about being responsible for yourself, your car, and your judgments on the track.
The students experience a series of progressively more challenging sessions such as a “leap frog” exercise in which students pair up and pass each other successively on the way into designated turns; a “side by side” exercise in which student pairs take progressively faster laps while running two abreast throughout the entire track, and; the final exercise - a series of practice starts followed by a five-lap “graduation race”. The only thing I can compare the intensity to is an autocross (not in terms of busy-ness of hands, but more so in terms of busy-ness of mind). Except in an autocross the intense concentration is over in less than a minute. By the time we finished the last lap of our graduation race I was VERY glad to see the checkered flag.
Guest appearances by Scott and Fran Hughes (who got BMW club racing started) and Ray Korman also provide an added element of history and advice based on present and past years of racing experience. The Tar Heel BMW CCA chapter deserve credit for hosting the event on top of all the other activity they had to manage for O’fest this year.
Should you try this? Absolutely!
By Thom Rossi
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