Hrecommended: BMW Performance Driving Course

A few weekends ago, I took the BMW Performance Driving Course. It was held in the Pontiac Silver Dome parking lot. It's always a shock when you find out how little you know about driving cars at the limit. The course consisted of skid pad work were they had you induce understeer and feel what it feels like. Then they had you induce oversteer and then steer the car with the throttle. Finally, they went through skid recovery techniques. After that they went through some drills on the use of maximum braking power with cars that have ABS, had us go through a slalom course with decreasing cone spacings and finally we ran a giant autocross course.

The class was a lot of fun, but every part of my body hurt (except for my forehead) from the sustained g's (all .87 of them) and being thrown around (modern seatbelts don't cope well with autocross driving behavior). The class is taught in BMW 330s and Z4s. The cost, $495, includes all the tires you can melt and all the cars you can break. I went through one set of front tires on the skidpad and we lost another car to a cracked bushing during the autocross.

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