Like Father, Like Son

I think it all began with the bus.

“Come on, you guys, Corey’s gonna take you around the track in the bus,” said our head instructor, Mike McGovern, his Southern accent slipping out of his mouth under reflective glasses.

Corey was Corey Hosford, an extremely gifted driving instructor. The track was the road course at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving (www.bondurant,com), a little piece of asphalt heaven cut out of the desert and cactus and rapidly disappearing solitude just south of Phoenix, Ariz.

And the idea was simply exhilarating: two days in a Grand Prix driving school with my 65-year-old father, Otto, as a birthday gift and a belated thank you for making me a better driver 20 years ago in a red Volkswagen GTI.

Dad has always been the best driver I had ever known. Two days at Bondurant would make us both even better. And Bondurant was the perfect school to learn it all.

The school offers classes for everyone, from an amateur who wants to drive a racecar, to professional training, to teenagers whose parents want them to learn to safely navigate busy roads.

Back some 25 years earlier, one of Bob Bondurant’s books sat on our shelf at home. My father had always believed driving was not just an exercise in finding Point B. It was the constant discovery of perfecting the journey.

Everyone thinks they know how to drive, he used to say. We thought so, too.

And that’s where the bus comes in.

It was a non-descript 15-seater that could have been used to pick up school children.

And in our first exercise at Bondurant, Corey took us to school.

“Alright, ya’ll,” he warned, “hang on now.”

He slammed the gas pedal, jerked the wheel, slammed it some more, hit the corners, exited the corners and floored it on the straightaway. In less than five minutes, he left us all in awe, if not a bit green. My father was just as floored as the gas pedal.

Corey had turned a basic form of transportation into a racing machine.

And how?

“Because he just knew how to drive well,” my father said. “Anyone can do what he just showed us. They’ll show us how.”

And they did.

In two days under the warm Arizona sun, we learned how to drive racecars, street cars, cars in simulated snow and rain conditions and cars that need to avoid collisions. We learned how to brake correctly. How to accelerate out of a problem. And how to do the opposite of what you might think is right.

For us it was instant competition again, a reminder of the times when we would go-kart when I was a kid or see who could get home from the same location quicker. Legally, of course.

This was a bit of the same.

We were put into a small group of four — three students and our instructor, Kevin Krauss — and began in white Cadillac CTS vehicles on the skid pad, a long piece of black asphalt where Bondurant does most of its limited, low-speed tests.

On the skid pad, Krauss showed us the first rule that would come in handy later in the Formula Ford open-wheel race cars which we would later take to the track.

Krauss had me take the wheel first.

“Teach your dad a thing or two, OK?” Krauss said with a chuckle as I took the wheel of the CTS with Kevin in the passenger seat and my dad and another student in the back.

Krauss then had me follow the outline of a small, white circle that had been painted on the parking lot, gradually increasing my speed. As the speed increased, the CTS moved farther and farther away from the center as the energy of the vehicle and the pressure on the tires forced it outward. At maximum speed, Krauss asked me to suddenly take my foot off the gas.

Presto.

Off the gas, the vehicle’s weight shifted and the car immediately dove back to the center by itself.

Lesson Number One learned.

By taking my foot off the gas, I could see how fast the weight shifted. Over two days they taught us that good driving is all about knowing where the inertia of the car is. Hit the brake, it all shifts to the front wheels. Hit the gas, it goes to the back. That helps you understand how to avoid other drivers in sudden stops.

Dad did an even better job at holding the car on the circle.

“Taught the kid something, didn’t you, Otto?” Krauss joked again.

Our mutual experience blossomed from there.

We learned about proper vision and racing lines (the fastest way around the track), accident avoidance and acceleration techniques in our own Chevrolet Corvettes on the race track.

All the while, I chased my father around the course, trying to out-drive him using the principles that were taught to us in the classroom and the parking lot.

By the end, we put on red racing suits and helmets and were allowed into the open-wheel racecars for about 30 minutes.

We both realized that we were applying all of the principles we learned to that point, including that first lesson on the skid pad.

Now when we approached a turn too quickly, we both realized that if we immediately got off the gas pedal, the race car would hug the corner. We drove faster and faster. Again, chasing each other out there under the desert sun.

When we were done, they gave out scores based on how much you improved during the two days.

I scored a 3.4 out of 5.0 (“no one gets a 4.0,” they said.). My dad was a 3.0.

Our own challenge over, he bought me dinner in a Phoenix restaurant.

The experience was incredible, the skills learned were very applicable and the result was what it should be:

Two days. A father and son. Doing something they both would never forget.

Jason Stein is a feature writer with Wheelbase Communications. You can drop him a note on the Web at www.wheelbase.ws/mailbag.html. Wheelbase Communications supplies automotive news and features to newspapers across North America.