Lime Rock Park in Lakeville, Connecticut is known as the premiere auto racing facility in the Northeast. It is home to the Skip Barber Racing School and a 1.5 mile track that draws racing enthusiasts from all over the world.
My involvement with safe teen driving has brought me into contact with many people with whom I would otherwise probably never have become acquainted. One is John Berger, of West Hartford, who is an avid amateur race car driver and instructor. Along with Bob Green from Survive the Drive, a wonderful program that brings a safe teen driving message to high schools, John invited me to a Saturday at Lime Rock, attending a class on race car dynamics and then taking a demonstration drive around the track.
As I was driving to Lime Rock, it occurred to me that I was going to show up at a famous auto racing center — with license plates that say “NS Fast.” Yikes.
I sat in on an advanced class for drivers who were about to go out on the track. I learned about the value if keeping your eyes on the horizon and on where you want the car to go, because the car goes where you are looking. Then, John took me out on the track in a 650 horsepower Corvette. It was my first time in a race car, and I told him that I did not need to go “too fast.” He accommodated me — we only got up to about 110-115.
OK, the first lap I was terrified, the second lap a bit better but still foreseeing the car flying off the track into outer space. It was only as I observed John’s calm, smooth, steady handling of the car that I started to, if not relax, understand the beauty of watching a real pro take a powerful car though paces on a track with lots of turns, slopes and hills.
And that, I think, was the point of John’s kind invitation: that high performance driving skills can be learned and applied to everyday driving. That anyone can learn how to make sure that a car’s weight is sufficiently distributed that it does not skid. In one sense, I learned the opposite of what Reid’s car did (go into an uncontrolled and then fatal skid) by seeing how a well-driven car does not skid.
The photo below, me with the car in which I rode, belies my still churning stomach. But I am grateful to my hosts for the opportunity to visit Lime Rock, and to see up close the dynamics of a highly skilled driver and to learn more about the kind of driving skills that, if more people learned them, would make all of us safer.
