Makes Even Experienced Drivers Faster

Recently, I returned to Radford Racing School in Chandler, Arizona, to take a four-day course in car control. This took place almost exactly three years after I first attended Radford in 2022, when I received an introduction to circuit driving that taught me about the racing line, patience and vision. But my biggest takeaway back in 2022 involved braking pressure, since I needed to load up the front tires more to create the grip necessary for turn-in at speed.

Since then, my life as an automotive journalist has included nearly countless track days in supercars, SUVs, astride motorcycles—plus rally training, an experience behind the wheel of a Dakar-winning racecar and even pre-running the Baja 1000. So I returned to the former Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving very curious to witness what an experienced, if not truly professional, driver can still take away from the specific curriculum of Radford’s 4 Day GT Road Racing Course.

As before, Monday kicked off with classroom time to go over basic safety concepts and introduce the controls of the Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack cars that would serve as our training tools for the next four days. This came as something of a surprise, since I mainly drove supercharged Hellcats the previous time around—albeit using the black key to reduce output to 500 horsepower. At 485 horsepower, the Scat Packs are just about there, but lack some of the low-end torque and certainly less drama from supercharger whine. Radford also switched tire partners in the meantime, too, so my Scat Pack rode on a square set of Cooper Zeon RS3-G1 tires.

From the classroom, our main instructors BJ Zacharias and Spencer Bucknum led a mixed group of students out onto the main parking lot, an empty patch of pavement in the desert perfect for drills that taught comfort and familiarity while full ABS braking, upshifting and downshifting for those students in manual transmission-equipped cars and quick evasive maneuvers. Then we stepped up to the Maricopa Oval, at the far end of the school’s main track, to work on trail braking, then eventually introducing an upshift and a downshift while going into, and coming out of, the long corners.

Back in the classroom for more whiteboard instruction, we learned about the principles of oversteer and understeer—and how to prevent and manage both once the limits of traction from the Coopers ran out. On a skid car, or a Dodge Charger equipped with what look like shopping cart roller skates on hydraulic rams, Zacharias and Bucknum repeatedly lightened up the front and rear tires to simulate slides. The students then needed to save the skids, becoming comfortable with smooth transitions through countersteering and throttle modulation, before trying to link up drifts in a figure eight.

The Arts of Oversteer and Understeer

This fairly inconsistent exercise kept us on our toes, as different heights for the rams led to different levels of grip for the front and rear ends. Vision also became the name of the game, since looking in the direction of the slide helped to bring our hands into the right steering angle more naturally. Quite literally, the instructors were trying to throw us for a loop—which became all the more critical when we graduated from the Maricopa Oval onto two-thirds of the main track the next day.

Putting all our knowledge from the first day to work at higher speeds, through varying radius turns, under hard braking and on longer straights, the sheer physical and mental effort started to show. I felt my arms tiring a bit, especially my right wrist doing the shifting and then cranking under the steering wheel due to the Challenger’s seat ergonomics, which prioritize road driving more than track time.

I probably needed to relax a little, too. More warmups and revisiting the basics definitely helped to improve my confidence before we graduated as a group to Radford’s East Track. Out near the 10 freeway south of Phoenix, this much longer and faster loop formerly served as an IndyCar test track (including one day when Ayrton Senna reportedly drove there).

On the East Track, I immediately began to struggle with the first little chicane, a full-pressure braking zone into a tight right then a matching lefthander out onto a straightaway. As Zacharias demonstrated during a slalom drill, I wanted to let the car settle between the two turns, but kept creating understeer then snap oversteer no matter how I experimented with my braking and steering inputs.

The most challenging part of the East Track required more of a diligent foot on the brake pedal, though, testing vision far to the right on a wide, eternally long sweeper. I occasionally got it right, carrying in enough speed and trusting my tires to scrub through as the brakes caused enough rotation that I could punch harder into throttle far earlier than expected.

Finally, a no-brake rise into a high-speed left bend caused the old rollercoaster sensation in my stomach, and I kept lifting off throttle in response to tap the brakes and set the nose before turning—as I had learned my first time at Radford. But that’s not how Zacharias drove the East Track, as I discovered when he took me out for a few one-on-one sessions. Instead, he allowed for more sliding than expected, more skidding, not quite oversteer and understeer but instead, understanding slip angle and how the tires provided grip beyond the limit of straight lines.

Higher Speeds and Greater Consequences

Somewhere halfway between circuit racing in a downforce car and the constant sideways drifting of rally racing, Zacharias turned the boatlike Challenger on questionable tires into something approximating a low-power momentum car. After swapping spots, I seemed to find a similar rhythm—admittedly, at a slower pace—and settled in with a bit more confidence.

Then we went over to a coned-off autocross course, which required exactly the opposite confidence. I generally hate autocross, since the short courses typically don’t allow much time to find rhythm or flow. But Zacharias and Bucknum had us do two laps, which helped, even though I spent my first two outings trying to purposefully drift the whole time, properly tearing the Coopers off my rear wheels. Finally, on the third attempt, I took the drill more seriously and drive more smoothly, managing to take second place among our group just half a second off the best time on a 59-second lap.

Thursday featured more time on the main track, including race restarts that provided the closest thing to legit wheel-to-wheel of my life thus far. Though the restarts never approached the exhilaration of driving a Formula 4 car on day four of my previous Radford course—Radford canceled that program after too many students discovered the limits of racing slicks in a lightweight open-wheeled racer—I still felt my adrenaline start to pump immediately.

As Buckner predicted, though, I focused too intently on beating my fellow students and redlined immediately after the first flag. Lurching forward, then needing to shift belatedly, I gave up the line to the driver at my left and came in second place. The goal in this drill was more not to lose than to win, really, and I asked after the next restart if almost putting someone into the wall counted as proper track etiquette. I had the line and he was going for a gap, reminding me of when Senna himself famously once said, “If you no longer go for a gap that exists…”

The day ended with almost endless lapping back on the East Track, which wound up as the most valuable sessions of the long four days because we got to spend some time with a data recorder laying all our strengths and flaws bare. But while warming up as another student used the data, I finally made a major breakthrough in my technique.

Because I had learned so much since visiting Radford previously, and picked up enough confidence to find more pace, I had clearly started going overboard on my braking. I now discovered that by changing my brake modulation to a microsecond of soft pressure, then as much strength as my leg had in it, then a slower-than-slow trail braking technique, the rear tires started to take on more grip right as I initiated steering angle.

Doing so allowed the rear tires to contribute more traction through the corner, counterintuitively—to me, at least, after my previous Radford instruction—preventing understeer despite actually unloading the front tires a smidge. As a happy byproduct, this then helped me avoid oversteer past apex, which translated to noticeably more speed, and flow, through each corner and out onto each straight.

I’d been overdoing it previously, braking hard then even harder to load up the tires more to create what I thought would be more grip. But that only lightened the rear tires, preventing them from helping out the fronts, and therefore causing the dreaded understeer shuddering sensation (not to mention tire wear) at corner entry.

Finally Making a Serious Breakthrough

By the time my turn came for the data recording session, I had started finding so much more speed that I actually needed to let even more air out of my tires—Buckner checked with a gauge and let out an almost absurd 10 psi. Once I got back out on track, I immediately discovered even more grip, and therefore even more speed, and managed to link up most of a solid lap.

Checking the data, Zacharias pointed out my strong sections and weak moments, when I held the most speed and when I needed to either brake more or less, coast or edge into throttle earlier. Still, my best lap came within four-tenths of the best student’s best time on a 1:07 lap—a guy whom, later that day, Zacharias called one of the handful of best students ever to attend the school. So I wrapped up feeling okay, plus the data recorder showed that my times were more consistent and I steadily held more speed through that eternal sweeper, something I attribute to the extensive rally and dirt driving.

The class came to an end with some light joking and plenty of appreciation for the fact that we all avoided any serious mistakes that might lead to more paperwork. Zacharias jokingly declared that “the king of understeer lives” as he handed me a certificate that I can now use, along with a doctor’s physical, to earn my full SCCA competition license.

Meanwhile, I came away impressed by the Scat Packs and the Dodge V8 engines, which took an absolute beating with engine oil temps consistently above 290 degrees and just kept running. The Cooper tires, despite clearly lacking some performance, provided something of a similar exposé as the heavy Challengers: revealing even momentary errors that needed correcting.

Of course, the four-day course having dropped the Formula 4 cars and even the Dodge Viper that I drove previously left me a little bummed. I can also always use more track time, especially after my revelation on the East Track that last few hours. But that’s racing: always improving and always refining. I left impressed by how far I’ve come in the past few years, but also fully aware of how much more I can still learn. As even the instructors at Radford will readily admit, every driver is still a student.