Bridgestone Winter Driving School

So what else could I possibly do in Steamboat besides ski?



For my 30th birthday, Christine signed me up for a two day performance driving class at the Bridgestone Winter Driving School. I'm not sure if she wanted me to have fun or if she thought I needed to learn how to drive, but either way it was probably the best birthday gift ever.

(This is long, but I wanted to make sure I captured as much of it as possible for my own benefit as much as anything else. I won't be hurt if you don't make it all the way to the end.)

Day 1

Saturday morning, the class of 6 met at the BWDS office near the ski resort. We filled out some paperwork, talked briefly about what the class was about, and were then whisked off to the course. Their facility consists of 3 snow/ice tracks that they create in a hay field and it is unbelievably slick.

The school is sponsored by Toyota, and we started the day in 4Runners equipped with Blizzak snow tires. It may seem a little odd to be driving SUV's around in a performance school, but there's a good reason for it. On Day 1 we talked a lot about using the weight transfer of the vehicle to help us do what we wanted to do. In a SUV with a high center of gravity and some squishy suspension, it's really is to make those weight transfers happen (and it's easy to feel them).

The first day of class was fun but a little frustrating. There were 2 students in each of 3 cars, and the 2 instructors were sitting in their own vehicles at a good vantage point communicating to us over the radio. That made it tough to get meaningful feedback from the instructors. Seat time is valuable, but it would have been even more helpful to have an instructor in the car to help you figure out why your 4Runner was parked in a snowbank instead of cleanly navigating a corner. (That problem was remedied on day 2.)

Our vehicles were equipped with switches to turn ABS on and off, and we got to do some experimenting. The results aren't surprising, but it was fun to play. One of the cool things about ABS is that you can hammer the brakes and still steer the car. Try doing that with a non-ABS car and you'll quickly remember how you lose steering when you lock up the wheels. However, with cadence breaking you can still stop pretty effectively while steering around obstructions. (An important thing to remember with cadence braking is that you need to get off the brakes long enough for the wheels to grip the surface and start rolling before you get back on the brakes.)

Also on the first day, we did some slalom exercises taking advantage of the weight transfer of the car to oversteer every cone, practiced throttle steering on the skid pad, and did of a lot of lapping around the course. I'm not used to driving big vehicles, so I felt a little out of my element most of the day as I tried to get used a SUV. The process involved putting the car into a snowbank here or there. I'm glad those snow banks were soft. :)

Day 2

The instructors called day 1 "the basics", and day 2 the "bag of tricks". As you may expect, screwing around with the bag of tricks was more fun than the basics. We were on a different track for this day, and I was happy because it was wider to give us more room to practice the maneuvers. We started out the morning in the 4Runners again and did some laps to get familiar with the new course. Then we switched to some front wheel drive Toyota Camrys to learn some left foot braking. In this context, left foot braking isn't just using your left foot to apply the brake. It mean using your left foot on the brake and your right foot on the throttle at the same time. It has different uses in different cars.

In a front wheel drive car, left foot braking is sort of like pulling the hand brake except that you have much better control. When you get on the brakes, you lock up the rear wheels but you can overpower the brakes on the front wheels with the throttle. It took a little while to get it down, but once I got it I had a blast. It's just such a juvenile thing to do, and I loved it. I could have done laps like that for a long time. As one of the instructors put it, "This is the only way to go fast in a FWD car on snow." Sure, it's not great on the brakes, but I know what I'll be doing next time I have a rental car in the snow.

After the FWD fun, we hopped back in 4Runners to try left foot braking in 4WD. Have you ever applied the accelerator at a stop light while your foot is on the brake? If you have, you've felt the way the car squats down a bit. Well that's what left foot braking in a 4WD/AWD car does. It causes the car to hunker down which aids in traction. It also gives you a lot of control to make minute speed adjustments because you can quickly modulate the gas and brake. Not as fun as the FWD car, but very useful.

In a rear wheel drive car (we could put the 4Runners into RWD mode), it's not too useful. Mainly, it gives you a way to correct a RWD oversteer. It's not so much a performance thing, but a recovery move.

Some more fun came when we started learning counter skids (AKA Scandanavian flick AKA pendulum turns). Here's a good example of a pendulum turn. You'll notice that the driver steers away from the corner before steering into it:


I forgot to mention that each car had an instructor on board today. For the morning, I was lucky enough to have Matt Johnson (current 2 time Rally America Production GT champion), and he gave me all sorts of great feedback. I actually managed to get a good counter skid on my first try, mostly because of his good instruction. It's not a particularly difficult thing to do, but to do it well takes a lot of practice and skill. Learning the physics of how it works is cool and helps when you're trying to get better at it. (This is long enough, so I won't try to explain the how's and why's of pendulum turns, but I'd be happy to explain it in person.) We did laps on a short circuit doing pendulum turns the whole way and it was really fun.

Later in the day we learned reverse 180 turns. Not something that I would consider all that useful, but it was fun to do. Get the car going in reverse at about 20 miles an hour, give the wheel a quarter to half turn. stab the break after it rotates 90 degrees, straighten out the wheel, slam it in drive and drive off looking like a superstar. Got it? If you're doing it on pavement, you'll need some more speed and you can probably skip the brake part.

We ended the day by doing individual time trials around the course. I managed to overcook a corner early on so I was way off of a good pace. The instructor I was with for this part of the day (Morgan) was the fastest and it was fun to ride with him to see his line and how much he had to work the car.

Day 3
The class was 2 days, but Christine also got me an hour of private instruction in my own car. This was a great chance for me to try the same maneuvers in my own car, and realize that they're harder with my lower and stiffer car. I think I would have been better off with an instructor who was used to VW's, because they *really* understeer and I don't think he was expecting that or knew exactly what we could do to correct it. At any rate, it was still good seat time and a lot of fun. I only kissed the snow bank a couple times in my car. No harm, no foul. :)

What a great time, and a great gift. Now that I've taken the class, I can actually rent the track. I think I'd like to go back and get some more instruction some time.