Corvettes, Crashing and Two Nights in Parhump

The immortal Larry Maiers once said, “A racer, is a racer, is a racer”.

The immortal Larry Maiers once said, “A racer, is a racer, is a racer”.

Not exactly Confucius that, but there is some truth in the axiom. People who like to race motorcycles are a different breed. We are thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies by nature.  We crave the rush of pushing the envelope and deep down, even take pride in the danger inherent in racing. We all know that every time we get on that bike we might be seriously injured (or worse), but we do it anyway, because it makes us feel alive.

Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada is the place to go if you want to learn to drive America’s premier sports car quickly, in a safe (and legal) environment.

For most of us, that thirst for speed does not end with two wheels. I think deep down, nearly every motocross racer thinks he would make an excellent race car driver. We all love big trucks and fast cars, and after all, we already know how to hold the throttle wide open right? Plus, the thought of a roll cage can seem quite appealing after a few decades of getting pounded to a Pulp(MX)® by the terra firma. It does not matter if you are Ricky Carmichael, Travis Pastrana, or Joe Motocross, four-wheeled racing can seem like a natural transition for a motocross racer.

On this last point, I would have to consider myself guilty as charged. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no allusions about being the next Michael Schumacher, but I must admit, I have watched Top Gear many  times wondering if I could lay the smack down to some stupid actor in a reasonably priced car. I always figured that twenty years of doing actual racing would have to give me some advantage, right? Car racing is one of those little fantasies that we all harbor, but seldom get to live out.

In addition to the Corvettes, Spring Mountain offers training in Radical race cars for you “wind in the face” types.

Well, this fall, I actually got to live just a tiny bit of that dream. As some of you may already know, my day job is running the sales department in a Chevrolet store in Princeton New Jersey (a mere 20 minutes from the legendary Englishtown Raceway). As a lifelong car nut, this has been a great opportunity, as it has afforded me the chance to drive all manner of exotic machines over the years. Everything from Porsches, to Corvettes, to AMG Benz’s have made their way through my store over the years and I have never missed an opportunity to take one for a spin.

While driving these four-wheeled grin-mobiles is always fun, you will never get to experience what these cars can really do on a public road. Taking a Corvette Z06 for a drive on a crowded highway is a lot like taking a CR500 on a trail ride. You can certainly do it, but get too crazy with the loud handle and you are in for trouble. If you want to truly experience what they have to offer, there is only one place to go – the racetrack.

In addition to the racetrack, Spring Mountain offers a spa, pool, club house and world-class room accommodations.

Luckily for me, that was just what I was going to get to do. With Chevrolet introducing their new seventh-generation Corvette this summer, I was offered the opportunity to put the new car through its paces in a true racing environment. The icing on the cake was that the training was set to take place at Chevrolet’s official Corvette training facility, the Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch just outside of lovely Las Vegas Nevada. Winning!

To be fair, just outside of Las Vegas may be a bit of an overstatement. In truth, the Spring Mountain facility is in the picturesque middle-of-nowhere, known as Pahrump (rhymes with hump), Nevada. Before making this trip, I had never actually heard of this interesting place, but it is about an hour’s ride up 160 from Sin City. Once you actually get to Pahrump, however, you realize it is about as far from the glitz of the Strip as a place can get.

The yellow Stingray on the right would be my chariot for the duration of my stay at the ranch.

As I drive up route 160 out of Vegas, I am struck by the otherworldliness of the place. Being from the East coast, I find it both beautiful and slightly depressing, with its scenic mountains and desolate, moonscape topography. Homes randomly dot the landscape, with no apparent rhyme or reason to their placement and the only trees you see are the camouflaged cell towers. Every time I come to the desert, I can’t help but imagine seeing Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, off in the distance cooking meth in their RV.

As you approach the jewel of the Southwest, better known as Pahrump, Spring Mountain pops up like an oasis on your right. At night, you can spot it by the big illuminated Michelin banner that attracts gear-heads like a moth to a flame. Once inside the gates, you are treated to an absolutely gorgeous facility that is much more than just a racetrack.

At night, this Michelin sign is lit up like the National Christmas tree and visible for miles.

Spring Mountain is actually a sort of country club; except it caters to grease monkeys, instead of Biff and Buffy. There is an exquisite clubhouse, bungalows for guests, a spa, pool, and of course, a racetrack. The star of the facility is the Ron Fellows Performance Driving School, which specializes in teaching aspiring sportsman how to drive their cars quickly, without rearranging any fragile bodywork (I should have paid more attention to that last part). The Fellows school is GM’s official Corvette performance driving academy and would be doing the training for my excursion to Pahrump.

My class was going to be shorter than their usual three and five-day curriculums, as it was designed to be more of a familiarizer course with the new Corvette Stingray, than a true driving instruction class. The two days I would be there were going to be divided between track and classroom time, with several different exercises designed to showcase the performance of Chevy’s newest baby. In addition to the new C7, I would be getting the chance to try some of the best from Stuttgart for comparison.

A good day is when you walk out of your bungalow and are greeted by this glorious sight. Ah, I love the smell of burning rubber in the morning.

Coming into this, I’ll admit I had some preconceived notions about going fast on a racetrack. I imagined myself dazzling the instructors with my driving prowess and line selection acumen. I listened in the class with a wink and a nod and told myself “wait till we hit the track”. Well let me tell you, it only took me a few corners to realize my years of Grand Tourismo on the Playstation and hundreds of laps at Budds had not prepared me for this.

The Spring Mountain race track is comprised of over 4 miles of road course with more than 20 available configurations.

Once on the course, the first thing that is brought to my attention is that I am not looking far enough down the track. Much like staring at my front wheel in the ruts, I was tending to look right in front of the car, instead of down the track to the next turn. While this sounds easy enough in theory, it is actually hard to rearrange my brains expectations of speed and distance. Never having driven a nearly 500 horsepower car on a racetrack before, it is a bit of an eye opener – literally. Those corners come up REAL fast at 100+ mph, so you have to always be thinking well ahead of where you are on the track. 

In some corners, this actually means driving by looking out the side window to find your apex. This, let me tell you, is a somewhat surreal experience if you have not done it before. In the one big bowl turn, as soon as you are off the brakes, you turn your head 90 degrees and start looking for your exit out the driver’s window. It really feels odd at first, but after a few laps of coaching, it starts coming together. Just as in motocross, the car follows your eyes, so you have to remember to keep scanning the track well ahead at all times.

Several times during the weekend, we were all reminded not to be this guy… Yes, I was this guy. (Well, not really this guy, but you get the idea)

Another seemingly simple thing that kept giving me problems was hand placement. The instructor insisted that we keep our hands at the three and nine positions at all times and bring the wheel in very close. This gives you the most leverage and allows you to avoid crossing over your hands, but feels very weird and awkward at first. Much like Gary Bailey yelling for a finger on the clutch, I am reminded several more times during the first day to put my hands back where they belong.

All the Corvette Stingrays in the driving school are 2014 models, equipped with the Z51 performance package. This gives the driver a total of ten possible driving modes, ranging from mild to wild. During our first session, the instructors broke us in easy by putting all the Corvettes in “Touring” mode. This allows the car to make 455 of its full 460 horses, but dials throttle response way back and switches on all of the safety nets.

 

I have always loved Porsches. It was fun to get to drive them back-to-back with the new Corvettes.

In this mode, the Vette is actually quite docile for such a powerful car. It comes on smoothly, with a mountain of torque available at any rpm, but no sudden explosion to break the rear end loose. Steering effort is also very light, with less feel and more assist. In Touring (as well as “Weather” and “Eco”) mode, the car is literally impossible to spin (a claim we got to test on a specially wetted skid pad) and makes you feel like a hero. All the while you are charging the track, the computer is making millions of tiny adjustments to keep you on your intended path. This comes in very handy in one chicane, where the car likes to unload the rear end and get very squirrely cresting a rise (more than a little terrifying the first time this happens).

The view out of my bungalow was not exactly pastoral, but it was certainly lovely to any gearhead.

After a few laps in Touring, we step it up to “Sport” (via a small knob on the center console) and go back out for another twenty minutes of torturing tires. In Sport mode, the computer dials up the throttle response quite a bit, opens up the exhaust and feeds in a little more steering feel, but still has all the stability aids in place. In this mode the car feels lively, but very controllable. As I gain confidence, the instructor allows me to pick up the pace and before long, the other drivers in my four car group are out of my rear view mirror. By the end of the session, we are coming up to lap the stragglers and I am really getting the feel of the car.

It is always cool to see the amazing technology that goes into designing today’s high-performance vehicles.

The funny thing is, at this pace and on a 40 foot wide track, the car feels no more intimidating to drive than a Miata. By flowing through the turns, you never get the sensation of raw acceleration you expect and the Corvette’s titanic grip makes corners mostly drama free. As the laps go on, I grow in confidence and start to think “yeah, I’m pretty good at this”. After we pull in at the end of our second session, the instructor informs me he is going to move me up to the next group, who are faster than my current classmates. As we break for lunch, this guy is feeling pretty good about himself. Maybe that car racing career is not so farfetched after all!

The B-Class Blues:

·      Definition – The difficulty that follows being moved up a class in competition.

·      See also – Hero to zero

·      Example –Ryan Leif, Mike Brown, Steve Lamson, Tony Blazier

After our lunch break and another hour of classroom instruction, it was back to the track for my date with destiny. This time, we got to turn the dial all the way to eleven and select “Track” mode. Within Track, there are a further five settings, each of which dials back the assist in steps, until you are driving like they did in the old days – by the seat of your pants.

For our purposes, we would be lapping in the least aggressive of these settings. It would allow the car to drift and get sideways, but would intervene if a spin were imminent. As it would turn out, this was a good thing indeed.

I tried to keep my ultra-trick personalized Bell lid as a souvenir, but could not manage to smuggle it out. #Factory

As we make our way back out onto the track, I am anxious to see how I will stack up against my new classmates. In the first group, I was easily faster and felt so without leaving my comfort zone. In this group, however, I feel things might be a little bit more difficult.

Right from the start, I can tell the car has a very different feel. Track mode ramps up the shock damping to the point where I can feel every pebble on the tarmac. The throttle is much more sensitive to input and it becomes harder for me to drive as smoothly. The car no longer feels planted and stable. It is now twitchy and alive coming into corners. The transformation is so dramatic, that at first I wonder if there is something wrong with my car.

The Spring Mountain facility looks like an oasis in the middle of the desert wasteland of Pahrump.

As I try to latch onto the red C7 in front of me, I find things are happening a bit too fast. I am no longer sweeping the turns, as I should. Instead, I find that I am going in too deep and “early apexing” the turns.  This puts me at an awkward angle coming out and makes getting back on the power difficult. As I try to keep up the pace, I find the computer kicking in more and more, where I never felt it before.  Coming out of the tight hairpins, I ask for more power, but get none, as the Corvette decides that it is in both of our best interests not to give me all 460 horses. This of course, only frustrates me further, as I can see the cars in front of me pulling me out of the turns. As the laps click off, I realize I have broken out in quite a bit of a sweat. My left leg is hurting from bracing myself against the dead pedal and my shoulders are starting to burn (hey, I thought this car racing thing was supposed to be easy).

The new Stingray interior is a huge improvement over the previously sub-par Corvette materials.

It is at this point that a very familiar feeling comes over me. It is that feeling where I know I am riding over my head, but I am too stubborn to slow down. Whether because of pride, machismo, or just plain stupidity, I insist on trying to push through my lack of skill and experience.  Time and time again, I miss my marks and my frustration builds. I am overdriving the car badly by this point, and sometimes it feels like the computer is cutting the power for a full two or three seconds coming out of turns. I am forgetting to unwind the steering and the stability system is trying to prevent me from pirouetting off into the yucca bushes.

SWAG

Now I am really becoming frustrated and mentally fatigued. I am trying to make up time by braking late and powering early, but I am forgetting to flow through the turns and be smooth. The harder I push, the worse it gets, and the farther I fall behind. I know I am screwing up, but by this point, I am thoroughly on tilt. Then with one lap to go in our final session and a white Vette all over me, I completely blow the tight right-hander after the main straight and shoot my $60K yellow Chevy into the lovely Pahrump countryside.

This may or may not have contributed to driving over my head…

To say I feel like a total tool at this point would be a major understatement. After hours of class instruction on how NOT to wreck my new Vette and be “that guy”, I had managed to do just that. Thankfully, there are no trees in Pahrump, so I avoided turning my Stingray into a yellow pretzel. After waiting for my class to finish their final lap, I was allowed to limp my car back onto the track and proceed to the pits to inspect it for damage. To call this final tour my lap of shame, would once again be a bit of an understatement.  Although nobody made me feel bad about crashing the car, I still felt like a complete idiot.

After the conclusion of my driving experience, Matthes and Pookie were kind enough to leave the Circle and join me for dinner. Appropriately enough, we ate at Chevys.

So what did I learn from my lovely two days in Pahrump? First, I learned that driving fast cars on a racetrack is fun, but a lot harder than I thought it would be. In spite of years of motocross racing experience and a familiarity with fast cars, I was completely out of my depth once I got bumped out of the C class. I had the minivan set covered, but once I hit the guys with some track experience, I was in trouble. Out there with the second group, the harder I pushed, the worse I made it. I also learned that technology is a wonderful thing and the more you turn it off, the worse I drive. Early on, it was keeping me out of trouble, but the more you dialed back the assist and ramped up the feedback, the more overwhelmed I got. In full-on Track mode, the docile Corvette street car becomes a kidney-busting beast, which demands respect (and more talent that I posses).

Believe it or not, even after wrecking one of their cars, they let me get close enough to take a picture.

For me, this was one of those bucket list type deals that I can now mark off with a check. I have always wanted to do a track day and see how I would measure up. In truth, I did not perform quite as well as I had hoped, but I did have tons of fun and got to drive one of the world’s highest performance cars at the limit. Yes, I did crash said car, but at least they did not make me pay for it. Any way you slice it, that is winning in my book.

For your daily dose of old-school moto goodness, make sure to follow me on Twitter-@TonyBlazier