Preface: These are my notes from a McKamey/Evolution driving school, phases 1 & 2. These notes are to help me remember as I begin my run for the SM national Championship ;), and to help my fellow evil DSM pilots.

Instructors: Ron Bauer – former Audi 90 & Quattro driver among others. Car slut.

Sam Strano – Former ESP driver. Current 3G RX7 driver.

Daniel Popp (instructor in training & 3 time BSP Nat. Champ)

Phase 1, morning: Focus was on technique. The "course" was a collection of individual technical elements:

Slalom: Didn’t know there was so much time here. I thought I did slaloms naturally well, because I have a DSM.

Keys:

• You should drive by the back sides of the cones, not the sides. Danny drew a nice diagram I’ll try to scan in. Basically, your car should already be pointed in the correct direction for the next cone when you are passing the current one.
• Turn early. You should be starting to turn for the next cone before you get to the current one.
• Don’t ignore the first cone. I missed the fact it was a 4 cone slalom, not a 3 cone. I was ignoring the first cone because it was part of another element. But I really needed to cut as close to that cone as possible.

Right hand skidpad: eight cones in a circle around a 16’ radius. The table above doesn’t show that my times varied by almost .5 sec between runs before class. The notes here apply for all sweepers.

Keys:

• Keep it tight. You need to be driving inches from the cones.
• SLOW. Don’t go fast on a wider line. You want to be just under the point where the tires start to roll over and protest.
• Feather the throttle. Especially in a turbo. You want to keep exhaust gases flowing so the turbine stays at least partially spooled up. This helps reduce turbo lag.
• Unwind the wheel gently & apply power. Most of the student drivers (myself included) tended to jerk the wheel for the straight line. The tires can’t do that. Ease into it and get on the throttle at the same time.
• Turbos- remember to lead the throttle to account for the lag. We need to plan ahead even more than others.
• Don’t saw the wheel. Turns should be one single sweep. Done correctly, this will make it easier to ride the limit.
• Ron took this 16-20’ diameter skidpad at about 2700 rpm in second.

Left turn: This was a tight left turn defined by 1 cone and a wall of 4 cones. It was one of those where you get used to Miata’s making some magic. About a 90° turn.

Keys:

• Get lined up wide on the entrance.
• Get slowed down enough so the front end won’t wash out.
• The real key to this one is explained in the notes from the afternoon session.

Right hand sweeper & EVIL little box: Everyone HATED this because of the box. Danny said he tried to convince them to open it up a little before class started. There was a LOT of time to make up here. .9 – 1.3 seconds!!

Keys:

• The sweeper & the box entry had to be treated as 1 element, not two. It needed to be a 230° turn or so instead of a180° and a jog. One, continuous movement.
• The car needed to be rotated and pointed towards the exit before it got to the center cone of the box.
• Needed to take sweeper exit wide to set up box entrance.
• SLOW. You can’t turn that tight, need to be going about 20 mph or so.
• 2^nd gear. In first, the power steering giving out was just too much.
• When done correctly, the box looks like a very slow slalom.

Left hand skipad: I was literally inches from the cones on this one. It felt slow, but the timers said it was fast. Much easier to drive on a left hand skidpad by the way. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was fighting the car.

Keys:

• Same as left hand skipad.
• On the exit, needed to make sure to unwind the steering gradually,lead the throttle, and cut as close to the end timer as possible.

I was VERY pleased with my improvement during the morning session. I use to think I was one of the better local DSM drivers. I was even pretty good at DSM Shootout ’99 autox for a stock suspension. You can not argue with a 3 second improvement. Yeah, I might have taken another second off with just more laps. For comparison, my best was 32.446, Danny Popp’s (in my car or his vette, don’t remember) was 32.3, and Ron Bauer’s was 33.064. Don’t read too much into me beating or being close to those guys. It’s pretty impressive for someone else to jump into a completely foreign car, especially a mod’ed one, and drive competitively. Plus, they were spending half their concentration to talk to me during the run instead of driving.

McKamey teaches smooth. I use to think that was complete and utter bullshit. Every time I tried to be "smooth" or "go slow to go fast" my times suffered. When I was aggressive, my times improved by a second or two. I even attributed my early, regional success this season to being able to shift to first on the fly.

Guess I’ve got religion. The first thing Sam did was get me to stop shifting to first. I thought he was nuts. How can you give up the incredible acceleration in first? Well, first, I can’t keep the wheels from spinning in first and turn at the same time. The car is all over the place in first. Second, the power steering cutout runs any hope of a smooth line. Third, by being smooth, I carried more speed through the corners. So I came out at higher rpm and at part throttle (turbine partially spooled up).

Sam has had the nefarious Dennis Grant in his schools. I guess DG posted a tirade to the Team.Net mailing about how McKamey really didn’t help him. I missed that post. I don’t want to put words in Sam’s mouth, but one of the guys there 9don’t remember whether it was one of the instructors or another student) said I shouldn’t have much trouble with DG.

There still may be special circumstances where shifting to first, done well so it doesn’t upset car, might help. But you lose .2-.4 seconds even on a good shift, more if the sycro balks. And then there is the time lost because you upset the chassis and are offline and in the wrong position.

For those who think DSM’s, especially laggy 16G’s, can’t be competitive, my Talon was close to Danny’s BSP championship car. True, there wasn’t a place for Danny to open it up. And the ‘Vette broke a swaybar endlink at some point.. I was just estatic that a DSM was anywhere close.

Structure:

For the morning, we had 3 solo baseline runs, 1 run with instructor as passenger, 3 runs as passenger with instructor driving, then 4 runs with instructor as passenger. Two timers were used and split times recorded for each of the elements. Think of the morning session as the compulsories in figure skating (I know, a waste of good hockey ice).

No one gets their times until lunch. That’s really weird. But it lets you concentrate on learning, rather than worrying about how your buddy is doing. And no one counts how many cones you hit. We didn’t hit many in the first session, except in the box and the occasional one in the slalom.

In which the students learn to look ahead. Way ahead.

The same course was used for the afternoon. Due to some printer problems, we never got our afternoon times. It doesn’t really matter.

I knew that not looking ahead was one of my big problems going in.

Simple principle: the car will go where you look. You do NOT look at the gate or slalom you are going through. You look at the next one. Once you are set up for a gate, the car will go there. So if you’ve already turned in for a corner, you shouldn’t look at it. You should be looking at the next corner, apex, or wall you will be aiming towards. If you do this, all of your lines will flow together.

This style is very strange at first. You don’t look where you are driving, you look where you will be driving. You have to "know" where the cone is in relation to the car, because you looked at it before. It’s the whole spacial-locational ability to put it in psychology terms.

Think of it this way: if you are going around and apex cone as you pivot the car around it, you will keep going around it.

Keys:

• Look FAR ahead
• You will drive where you look
• Look where you want the car to go in the future
• Don’t look back (Sam yelled at me about this). You can not change the past.
• Do not fixate on a cone. It’s easy to focus on a cone and never shift to the next one.
• If you are looking ahead, you become smooth by default.
• Carve simple, smooth arcs

We didn’t talk about late apex, early apex, where to brake, etc. We were depending on our brain to instinctively know all that. Yes, young Jedi, you focus on where you need to go and let the Force take care of driving the car.

It would take me quite a while to write out all the equations of motion for my car entering a corner. Luckily, I have a computer in my head that does all that instinctively. I even give this computer lots of practice every day.

When you look far ahead, you don’t saw with the wheel. Watch someone drive through a sweeper. If they are jerking the wheel back and forth, they don’t know what they are doing. Look at their eyes. They should be looking ahead.

One of the strange things about this technique is you have to be able to control the balance of the car by feel. As you get to higher preparation levels, you will have a faster reacting car that has more of a tendency to oversteer. I asked Ron about this, and he said that yes, you do need to be able to balance the car by feel while looking in a different direction. So you lose some of the close range visual clues to the cars balance. I found this to be particularly difficult when entering a sweeper that required a lot of braking. The rear end would get light and the car would start to bounce around at the corner entry.

Short note on tire pressures: I tried to keep a constant 41 psi front, 39 psi rear. After three runs, these could climb to 46 front, 40 rear. Obviously the fronts are doing a lot more work. Later in the day, the sun came up. At 44-45 psi all round, the car oversteered. It started to look like Danny’s Vette. At 48.5 F/ 44 R, the car oversteered greatly.