Day 1 of the Skip Barber school was all about learning some basics. Day 2 taught us some useful techniques and gave us more experience with the racing line. The purpose of Day 3 was to put it all together and do so within the context of racing.
Day 3
Threshold Braking
After a typical morning start, we went into our first technical session, which was braking. It might sound simple, but this was one of the most eye-opening lessons for me. One point was to get us comfortable with threshold braking. Threshold braking describes that point when the braking force you apply is right on the border of causing either your brakes to lock up or your ABS to kick in, if your car is so equipped.
You want to threshold brake in some cases, because that means you are using all of the braking force available to slow the car down. You can imagine if you’re driving down a straight and brake at 50% force, it might take you 200 feet to slow down enough to make the corner. If you threshold brake at 100%, maybe you cut that down to 100 feet. These numbers are completely made up just to illustrate the concept. What that means is you can brake later, which lets you spend more time accelerating – the perfect trade-off in racing.
Finding the threshold point in your car can be difficult. I still don’t really know where mine is in my Miata. It requires that you have enough open space to get to a decent speed and brake hard. To find that point, you will first need to go past it and this can be dangerous in an uncontrolled environment. The best place to practice, of course, would be the track, but there will be other cars around you. You will need to pick a time where nobody is behind you and you have enough pavement in front of you in case your brakes lock and you go too far.
This is why the Skip Barber school was a great place to learn the idea. Yes, it’s not your car, but you can still experience it. To start off, they had us drive to 80 mph down the front straight and, once we got to a cone marker, stand on the brakes. These cars were equipped with ABS, so we were told to brake hard until it kicked in. Being race prepped, these cars stopped quickly.
Trail Braking
The next steps were where things got interesting. The goal was, again, to drive up to 80 mph and begin braking at the marker, but then we started to turn into turn 1. Over each of the three attempts, the instructors moved the braking cone 100 feet closer (we started at 300 feet from turn-in). Each time they moved the cone closer to the turn-in, I was sure the car wouldn’t stop in time, but it did. On the final attempt, they actually had us maintain braking as we turned in. This is known as trail braking, which is another technique that can be hard to practice, because a trail brake gone wrong can easily result in a spin.
I really enjoyed this braking exercise. It was exhilarating and enlightening. I never would have thought a car could stop that quickly. You read about braking distances in car magazines, but it’s a different ball game when you do it yourself, in a race car, hurtling toward a hairpin turn. As illustrated with the fake numbers earlier, it is also one of the best ways to improve your lap times. This is a technique I’m going to try hard to practice during my upcoming HPDE’s.
Racing Starts
After the braking exercise, we did more stop-boxing. I explained this in day 2, so I won’t repeat here. In the afternoon, we learned racing starts. The Skip Barber school is an accredited racing program recognized by the SCCA. That means successful completion of the school will qualify you for a novice SCCA racing license. In order to be accredited, they need to teach race starts.
In this case, we practiced rolling starts. We lined up on grid and then set off for a formation lap led by a pace car. Coming out of the Corkscrew, the pace car gave a signal to get into formation and line up behind the person ahead of us and be in line with the person beside us. As we approached the start/finish line, an instructor in the box waved a green flag, and we set off. Of course, this wasn’t a real race, so we were told to reach 80 mph and stop before turn 1. We did this three times.
From a technical perspective, this was a simple practice. What was useful was experiencing the flurry of commotion that happens during a rolling start. Everybody is very close, and things get very loud, very suddenly. Actually going into a turn would add a whole other level of difficulty, but this exercise was still very helpful.
Open Laps
Day 3 ended with open lapping sessions. The 80 mph speed limit was removed, and we were left to drive without any stop-boxes. We were finally able to put everything together to try to run consistent, albeit untimed, laps.
And that was it for the Skip Barber school! It’s an expensive program for sure, but the experience is invaluable if you’re at all interested in improving your racing craft. You can learn a lot from HPDE instructors, but they likely aren’t professional racers themselves. The quality of feedback you get from a true professional is amazing, and that’s what you’re really paying for. If you find yourself with the means to pay for it, I highly recommend it. And make sure to choose a track you’d really like. I had to pay more money for a flight and hotel, but there’s nothing like lapping around a historic track like Laguna Seca.
