Thoughts from the Curb

Oct 16, 2008 - Behind the Scenes: Surprising Success at Edmunds Track Day

For insurance reasons, the Edmunds family takes a day out of every year to complete drivers' training. This year as last, we went to Willow Springs Raceway to complete our training requirement with Danny McKeever's Fast Lane driving school. Naturally, our enormous editorial team differs in its driver skill level, with some benefiting from more basic car control training, while others being capable of teaching the darn class.

With that as a scale, those in the upper half deemed "more advanced" drivers spent most of the day on the Big Track at Willow Springs in McKeever's fleet of Celica GT-S retired race cars from the annual Toyota celebrity race at Long Beach. I was in that group, however, unlike most of the other editors, I had never been on the Big Track and my track time in general was quite low. Needless to say, I was the Milka Dunno of this Indy 500.

Quite to my surprise, though, I managed to keep up with the pack quite well. Sure, Josh Jacquot and a few others blew past me at points, but they should. Most of the time, Mike Magrath and I kept pace with each other -- him pulling away from me at certain tighter portions of the track and me catching up on faster, bigger turns. When editorial newbie Mark Takahashi passed us both, we managed to pick up the pace even more as we started to learn from the lines of a more experienced driver. That's certainly a good plan of attack, although tips from Chris Walton and the McKeever driving instructors helped as well.

After our Big Track time, we followed up with some laps on the slower, but more technical Streets of Willow and several turns on the skidpad in a rear-drive car.

Go to the below blog entry to see what we did next.

-James Riswick

8:35 am | Categories: behind the scenes at edmunds.com, driving adventures Permalink | Alert Administrator

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