Quote:
Originally Posted by lucid
Dave, this is probably an apples to oranges type of comparison question, but how would you rate the M-School against the 3-day Skip Barber racing school?
Also, do you get more seat time in the 2-day advanced Skip Barber racing school than the 3-day racing school? And, is the 3-day racing school a requirement for the 2-day advanced racing school? They don't really specify on their website as far as I can tell.
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It is indeed a bit of apples vs. oranges and my Skip Barber 3-day racing school was when Brian Till was teaching, before Speed TV.
Skippy was FF and BMW, of course, was big sedans and coupes, which are VERY different dynamically. A small rise in the road was hard to see over in the FF and a rabit running across the track looks more like a deer. If we ignore that, the track time per day was roughly equivalent.
With Skippy we'd have classroom, then watch the instructor and then drive ourselves. Skippy mixed low speed exercises with track speed. They set the telltale and gave us an rpm limit that was raised a little, session after session.
BMW's Advanced M-School was classroom (brief actually) and then trail the instructor. When you're ready to go faster you move up on the instructor's tail and he speeds up, if he thinks you're ready, all the while critiquing your line and performance. They do an amazingly good job of driving at speed while looking in the mirror and talking on the walkie-talkie. I found this was quick learning.
My experience with Skippy was at Hallett in Oklahoma. I learned two skills there that really weren't that useful at VIR. One was trail braking at the end of Hallett's straight, which is followed by a long, neutral corner. Another corner, called The Bitch" is a decreasing radius at 100+ in the FF, leading to a short straight, where we learned to use trailing throttle oversteer to rotate the car at speed. BMW wanted us to keep the MDM on which would make TTO kind of hard to do.
Now that I think of it, even though it was slow, we could have used TTO at The Oak to rotate onto the longest straight. Trail braking could have been used at the end of the start/finish straight. So, maybe we should think of it as an advanced M-School, not an advanced racing school.
I was extremely lucky at Skippy in that there were only five of us there, so I may have gotten more advanced training than is typcial; however, Brian and Duck (Waddle) had an agenda in mind to get us graduated. I probably just got extra track time due to the small class size.
Oh, I'm far out of date about Skippy prerequisits. You'll probably need to call. (Send a video maybe).
Dave