Do a Driving School This Year - Especially If You've Never Done One
by Evan Weaver, Contact January 2002

If you've attended a BMW Club of Canada performance driving school (or a similar event), skip this article. It isn't for you.

If you are still reading this, then you've yet to take the plunge. Since you are a BMW enthusiast, it is practically a given that you are at least interested in high performance driving. There must be a reason why you have chosen not to learn more about it.

Perhaps you don't know what the "schools" are.

The BMW CC advanced driving schools are gatherings that take place several times a year at race tracks throughout the country. Each participant brings his or her own car to the event, in order to learn driving techniques that are more advanced than those most people ever learn, despite years of practice. The school, normally a one- or two-day event held on a weekend, consists of a mixture of classroom instruction, driving exercises held in a large parking lot with traffic cones to dodge, and in-car instruction
while driving around the race track.

Each of these three components is critical to developing a higher level of skill. The classroom instruction prepares you for the driving portions by covering the principles of performance driving, and by discussing
the in-car experiences you have during the school. You will learn about the theory of driving and also about practical matters concerning driving around the particular track at which the school is taking place.

The parking lot exercises let you experiment with the limits of traction at fairly low speeds, in a very safe environment. This gives you the opportunity to practice reactions you will need out on the track, and helps you hone your sense of how under control the car feels.

The track driving is the part where it all comes together. Here you get practice, lap after lap after lap, with a qualified instructor next to you, helping you learn when and how much to brake, turn and accelerate in order to get the most out of your car. You will find that you develop an intimate knowledge of the race track, your car's limits and your personal limits. (If you are anything like I was when I attended my first driving school, you will discover that prior to the school you really had no idea of what the limits are). It is the track driving that "hooks" people, and keeps them coming back, school after school.

But maybe you already knew all that about the schools. Perhaps you are just too intimidated to attend a "racing" event.

I can understand this. It took me two years after joining the club to build up the nerve to send in an entry form for a driving school, even though I was interested in the idea of advanced driver training long before I joined the club.

While the schools teach most of the same principles that race car drivers use, and while some of the advanced students achieve speeds similar to those in races, the driving schools are most definitely not
competitive events. In fact, no timing equipment is permitted, and there are very strict rules about passing.

Participants are grouped by experience level, so that beginners won't have to cope with advanced students breathing down their necks. The instructors are quite used to dealing with a wide range of students, and will only be disgusted with your driving if you consistently refuse to listen, something that happens very, very infrequently.

You will not be expected to be an expert driver right away, even though you probably have years of driving experience. The instructors know that high performance driving is a learned skill, and will be quite disappointed if there is nothing they have to teach you. For an instructor, there is nothing like taking a ham-fisted, sloppy or nervous driver and turning that person into a smooth, consistent and confident driver in a day or two.

Indeed, I might even venture to say that if you are not at least a little bit intimidated by the prospect of attending a driving school, then perhaps you should stay away - a little bit of fear helps to breed a healthy respect for the rules of physics, rules which no driver, no matter how good, can break.

Well, what if intimidation isn't exactly what is keeping you from attending a school? Perhaps you simply don't want to participate in a dangerous event.

If that is the case, consider that right now, you drive a car without any real knowledge of what you can and cannot do with that car, on roads full of other people with a similar amount of ignorance. That is what I would call dangerous. The only reason that the whole thing more or less works is that most of the time everyone drives so far below what is possible that mistakes generally are masked. But whenever, for some reason, an undertrained person does approach the limits imposed by physics, invariably one mistake or another is made, resulting in a so-called "accident".

Just as they say it "takes money to make money", you need to expose yourself to some risk in order to learn how to manage that risk. If driving is an essential part of your life, you will be much safer in the long run to expose yourself to the risks involved in the closed, controlled environment of a driving school, than to continue to drive, undertrained, in the uncontrolled environment of the public roads.

Knowing that driving is inherently a dangerous activity, safety is the foremost concern for Club-run schools. As mentioned before, timing equipment is strictly forbidden. Once people start comparing lap times, they start focusing on time rather than on how the car is reacting, and this is potentially dangerous. For similar reasons, passing is only allowed on straightaways that are long enough, with the full cooperation of the person who is being passed. Most of the crashes you see in races occur when one car tries to pass another in, or going into, a turn, with the person being passed being uncooperative.
Also, all participants must wear an approved helmet.

Having people drive their own cars also contributes to the safety of the event. While people might not be that careful with equipment that doesn't belong to them, if you are driving your own baby you are less likely to take unnecessary risks, especially if you need your car to get you home.

It would be misleading to say that nothing will happen to you or your car if you attend a driving school. While we haven't had any two-car incidents at our schools, there are times that cars have been driven into walls, or similar solid objects, either as a result of driver error, or mechanical failure. But the club takes as many steps as possible to reduce the risk.

For example, there is always an ambulance on hand, in case of an incident. In the event that the ambulance is away (for example, to take a participant who has crashed to the hospital for further evaluation), the school is put on hold until the ambulance returns.

To decrease the likelihood of mechanical failure, every car participating in the school must be inspected for fitness for the event by a professional mechanic prior to arriving at the track.

And one of the main duties of the instructor is to keep the participant driving at a safe level. To help your instructor in this endeavor, you should listen carefully to any instructions to "slow down", "brake more" or
"take it easy" - these are all telltale signs that your instructor is not comfortable with the speed at which you are doing something. Don't worry about being slowed down by your instructor - once you've shown you can consistently drive at a particular level, you will be encouraged to pick up the pace.

Still, maybe safety concerns aren't an issue with you. Perhaps you feel that attending a driving school just costs too much.

Studies have shown that driving an economy car costs a minimum of five or six thousand dollars a year, between insurance, fuel costs, maintenance and depreciation. Admittedly, attending your first performance driving school won't be cheap. There will be the cost for the school (roughly $400 for a two-day school), the cost of a Snell-rated helmet (unless you can borrow one), the cost for a technical inspection plus any repairs the inspection turns up as necessary, and travel costs. Still, considering that the necessary repairs, if any, should be done for safety reasons regardless of whether or not you attend a driving school, the costs will be a fraction of what you'll spend on driving for the whole year. And the first time that your new-found driving skills help you avoid a nasty situation, those costs will be easily recouped.

If driving is a required part of your job, you probably will be able to claim the driving school tuition as an educational expense on your tax return. The BMW Club of Canada driving schools are recognized by the federal government so that we can issue receipts for tax return purposes. (You should check this out with your accountant to see if such a deduction applies to you).

If you end up getting "hooked", and attending many schools, you will eventually start to spend a lot more money on upgrades to your car, and on wear parts such as brakes and tires. It seems that the faster you go, the faster you want to go, and the faster things wear out. But for beginners, the wear-and-tear is minimal, and you'll want to learn to drive what you've got before you start trying to modify it.

But perhaps that's it. It's not the cost of the first school that is dissuading you. You are afraid that if you do attend a performance driving school, you'll want more. And more. And pretty soon, you'll be spending more time and money on your car than you can really afford.

Well, I don't have a good response to that concern, except to say that if this does happen to you, you'll be in good company.