Learning to Feel Your Car: A Lesson in the Basics

From the squealing of tires to the grumble of performance engines to the smell of gasoline in the air, the High-Performance driving classes at Road America are a joy from start to finish.

Coming in at a cost of only $40 more expensive than a track day, or $10 more than your first five track-day events to be worth the $350 price tag which comes attached to the class. 

For that admittedly not cheap price, what are you getting to make it worth your time and money? Why spend more money for less time on track? Well for starters you get a lot more one-on-one time with a group of serious racing instructors. You also get some drill work focused on smooth inputs to the car, as well as the highlight of the advanced course, three 20-minute sessions around the four-mile circuit. 

I was offered the opportunity to spend the day with the second and more advanced High Performance driving course to observe and take in what it would be like for the students in the course. I came to the course as a person who has watched motorsports for a good part of my young life, though I have never been on track myself. Looking to soak up as much information as I could while I was there, I readied myself to focus on the fundamentals the instructors brought up, as I would not be participating in the driving exercises. 

I joined on a day with six students and three instructors. Kurt Hider, the classroom instructor for the day has years of experience with circle tracks, but absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to road courses. When he isn’t cracking jokes and grinning, or offering advice to the students in his courses, instructor Dave Maxwell is roaring around the track on motorcycles, a passion he started before venturing onto four wheels. Things get no less interesting with the final instructor. Craig Sletten started racing open-wheel cars in the 1990s and has since transitioned into endurance car racing and instructing. 

The main sections of the course were broken down broadly into classroom sections and driving sessions. Hider took charge at the top of the course and ended up running the classroom sections throughout the day. 

As one of the premier road courses in North America, Road America offers a total of four driving classes, and a handful of motorcycle classes as well. On top of offering two High Performance Driving courses, they also offer a Teen Driving course and a Winter Driving course. According to the instructors they offer around 15 of the High Performance courses each summer. 

According to Sletten, most of the drivers who sign up for the High Performance courses are people interested in doing things correctly. He said that it is common for people to take the courses back-to-back and even for some drivers to retake the course in order to learn as much as possible. 

After a brief set of introductions, Hider went over the basics from the first course before sending the students to the first driving session of the day. 

The first session involved 360-degree turns and a timed test through a set of slalom cones. Some of the drivers were content to ease into the lesson, while others chose instead for the squealing tire method. The biggest takeaway from that first session? Smooth and subtle inputs when driving. That message as well as that of safety would ring constantly throughout the day.

“Remember, you have to drive your car home at the end of the day,” could be heard by any of the instructors periodically. 

Following the cone work, the students followed one of the specially colored Elkhart Lake Blue Metallic Corvettes down to the Motorplex for more work on cornering. The Motorplex is a smaller circuit located within the four-mile road course at Road America. Hider set up three cones for each corner: a turn-in cone, a cone for the apex, and a track-out cone. 

The turn-in cone quite literally was to signify where the students should begin turning in towards the apex. The apex was the target for the farthest into the corner they should reach, and the track-out was the goal for where they should make it to stay on the racing line. 

After watching the students go through the course, Sletten asked Maxwell to take me around the course so that I could see and feel the difference between getting the turn perfect and getting it completely wrong. 

With Maxwell in the driver seat of the Corvette, we went through the course doing things incorrectly. First, he would turn in a bit late, then a bit early, explaining to me the different outcomes each time, asking if I could feel the difference in the car. On the second lap around, Maxwell went through the course sticking directly on the racing line. Grinning ear to ear, he would row through the gears, happily clicking the paddles as he threw the car into the corner managing somehow to maintain traction the whole way through. The acceleration was made only better by the roar of the V8 engine sitting right behind the seats. When Hider got on the brakes, I was thrown forward into my seatbelt before each following turn would throw my body into the bolstering on the seats. 

“You’ve got to feel the corner in the car,” Maxwell told me. “If you turn in too early, you may end up having to brake in the turn and turn the wheel a second time.” 

Still grinning as we went into our third lap, Maxwell chuckled and decided to catch a student in a BMW ahead of us. When we began the lap, the BMW was midway through the first turn on the circuit. Maxwell had the student caught by the end of the third turn and couldn’t have been happier for it. 

The group broke for lunch after the Motorplex exercise with many of the drivers leaving to fill up their cars with gas. Sletten joked that everyone had the option of filling up at the track, saying that gas cost a mere $14 a gallon. 

Following lunch was a roughly hour-long classroom stint going over each of the 14 turns on the circuit. Hider led this discussion again and afterward took the class on a two-lap “tour” of the circuit in a bus, explaining the turns again with visual representation. 

Following an hour of sitting in a classroom watching a slideshow, the bus tour offered a taste of the driving to follow. Having gone to Road America for years as a spectator, it was an entirely new experience to see the track up close. To see the fluctuations in the pavement, the marks on the track showing turn-in points, and the different iconic markers like the Sargento cheese bridge from the track, all offered a new perspective as a fan. 

The students were broken into two groups based on relative speed for the final part of the day. The highlight of the advanced course is at the end of the day when the students get to take their cars out for three consecutive twenty-minute sessions on the main four-mile circuit. It proves to be the cherry on top and really pays for the track time. 

Unlike the first High Performance Course, where the track offers rental cars, for the second course, students must provide their own car for the day. All the drivers for the day I sat in, brought performance-oriented cars. The track sessions at the end of the day were an option for them to really use the car that they had spent so much money on. 

In similar fashion to many novice level track days, the track sessions were a lead-follow format. Sletten and Maxwell led the two groups in separate Corvettes, with the three drivers changing position at the end of each lap. 

The amount of track time offered, paired with the expert advice from the instructors is where the value of these classes comes in. The instructors rode a very fine line of allowing the fastest cars to push themselves while also catering to the slower cars in the groups. 

I sat right seat with Sletten as he took the fast group around the circuit. Unlike on the Motorplex where the straights were too short for the car to get to speed, on the main track, the acceleration in the corvette seemed to have no limit. Much like on the Motorplex, I was awed by the braking power and cornering speed in the Corvette. The instructors were able throw the car towards the apex at a high enough speed to give me an ounce or two of worry, but the back end refused to slip, and we flew through as if on rails. 

“We’ve got to work double duty here,” Sletten told me. “I need to focus to hit the racing lines perfectly to show them where to be, while also keeping track of the drivers in my mirrors to catch their mistakes.” 

When all was said and done, the perfect-no-crash record for the classes remained intact, and all the drivers were able to drive their cars home. Maxwell told me that in terms of what he wanted drivers to take away, he was more focused on precision than speed. Sletten laughed and said that he wanted people to take away the basics, supposing that the basics included track vision, racing lines, breaking, and smooth inputs to the car. Just like at the beginning, it was clear that safety for the drivers, and safety for the cars was a central focus of the class. 

“Remember, these are your cars,” Hider could be heard saying again. “You want to drive them home.”