Bondurant's School of High Performance Driving - The Art Of Control

Day one also saw the first of several exercises involving threshold braking without activating the ABS, as well as learning to use the ABS to your advantage.

The braking exercises are meant to increase driver confidence and decrease reaction time in accident or obstacle avoidance situations-something extremely useful on the track and on the street. Here we're about to enter three lanes of cones at 60 mph, a traffic light will flash to signal which lane we must swerve into to avoid a "collision."

After a morning's worth of introduction to the car and basic vehicle control, we were headed to the Maricopa oval after lunch. Instructor Tim Rose gave a primer on the correct way to lap this basic oval track and what to expect. This was also our first practical introduction to the racing line, and the importance of looking ahead and proper trail braking.

For our first day sessions, Tim instructed us to keep it in Third gear and focus on our braking, and finding the line. Sounds simple enough, but it does require reprogramming yourself to not dive into a turn too quickly, and to remember to be light on the pedal and control braking. Simple enough at low speed, but as the velocity carried into the corner increases, slip angles come into play.

The Maricopa oval has a constant radius corner as well as a slightly more challenging increasing radius, but the first focus was learning the basic constant radius. Here's the line we're looking to follow, as well as the highlighted area which represents the zone for trail braking. It's not just for shaving speed; we're transferring weight to the front end where we need traction for the turn. Prior to that is our initial braking and downshift zone; it ends at the apex of the curve, after which we ideally want to be back on the throttle.

Cones and countdown markers are strategically placed on curves to aid students in learning where they need to be doing what. Here, number "4" represents our exit point, numbers "3" and "2" are our initial braking and downshift area, and number "1" is our turn-in point.