A BMW Car Club Chapter Is Banning Some New Bimmers from its Trackdays (UPDATE)

From Road & Track

Many years ago, when I was heavily involved in the BMW Car Club of America, one of my closer friends asked me exactly what it was we did at club events. "Do you just sit around and talk about your BMWs?" he asked, with an expression on his face that belies his readiness, even eagerness, to express his contempt for said leisure-time activity.

(BMW has issued the following comment to R&T regarding the Genesee Valley CCA's Banning of cars with driver aids on track:

The Genesee Valley BMW CCA Chapter created and published an unauthorized policy banning BMW's with Driver Aids from participating in HPDEs. The national BMW CCA office does not share their opinion and is discussing the issue with the chapter.

BMW NA is working closely with the national BMW CCA office to educate and develop a nationwide procedure for including BMWs with Driver Aids in HPDEs. Most advanced driver aids like lane departure warning and blind spot detection do not affect the ability of the driver to control the car on-track at high speed. In addition the systems can be shut off so that they are also not a distraction to a student.

Update 4/12: The Genesee Valley CCA has retracted the ban:

"Not at all," I replied, quite archly. "We never discuss the cars we actually have. Instead, half of us sit around and talk about how we can't wait to buy our next new BMW. The other half sits around and complains about how complicated the new Bimmers are, and how difficult they are to repair, and how only a fool would spend his hard-earned money on them." My periodic interactions with the club over the past thirty years have only served to reinforce my confidence in the above characterization.

The faction of BMWCCA members who don't like or trust the new cars has always wielded considerable power and influence, to the point that one issue of the club magazine about ten years or so back actually contained a recommendation on the part of a columnist that everybody who really wanted a good car should buy a brand-new four-cylinder Honda Accord coupe instead of a BMW. This is the kind of raw honesty that you will never get from any of the Porsche-centric mags.

Though there has been considerable agitation on the part of the CCA faithful on topics as diverse as flame surfacing, the SMG gearbox, and the eta engine, none of this has ever managed to intrude on the club's core activity of racing-slash-drivers-education trackdays. The customer who takes delivery of a new standard-ride-height BMW automobile and then joins BMWCCA has always been able to count on being able to participate the next time his or her chapter holds a trackday. In many ways it is the glue that holds a very diverse membership together and allows the greasy-knuckled fellow with a head full of Kugelfischer troubleshooting procedures to peacefully co-exist with the venture-capital hotshot and his new M4 GTS.

Until now, that is. In a recent announcement, the well-respected Genesee Valley chapter of the BMWCCA announced that it will no longer permit certain new BMWs to participate in their driver's education programs. The chapter has stated the following:

As the little duck says at the critical moment of every Wonder Pets episode on Nickelodeon, "This… is… SEE-WIOUS!" On one hand, it's easy to see the rationale behind the club's decision. I've been flat-out shocked by some of the decisions made by modern "lane-keeping" systems during my testing. Some of the systems are very good, and some are less than good, but all of them are entirely capable of giving the wheel a solid yank when you least expect it. The same is true for the automatic-braking systems.

Very little imagination is required to conceive a situation where the sudden and unexpected intervention of these systems during a trackday could cause some very expensive and regrettable problems. For example: It's common for inexperienced drivers to move a bit too far out of the way when they are being passed, and it is also common for inexperienced drivers to "skim around" cars they are passing on track. If the lane-keep system responds to a white line at the track edge during a passing situation–or even something like a blend line–you could have one car swerving into another one.

Automatic braking could also cause trouble, because those systems are optimized for normal freeway speeds and situations. Most modern BMWs can reach 150mph on the back straight at Mid-Ohio. To the automatic braking system, that's autobahn speed. When the car ahead of you slows for the Esses, that's going to look a lot like an accident situation. Cue automatic emergency braking and an accordion of $75,000 cars.

The natural response to this situation is "Just turn the assists off." That seems reasonable when you're sitting at your office reading this webpage but it's quite a different thing for a student and his instructor to reliably ensure that everything is turned off before every session. The only way to do it would be a preflight-style checklist–and that would not guarantee that something wouldn't happen to trip the systems back on during the session, the same way that my Porsche Boxster silently re-engages stability control any time the ABS is activated.

For these reasons and many more, I understand why the Genesee Region doesn't want these electronic goblins intervening during a high-speed track event. Unfortunately, their decision to ban cars with those features places them in direct and mutinous opposition to BMW's explicit future plans. The day is coming very soon where every new BMW is likely to have these systems fitted as standard equipment. It won't take anything more than a few aggressive ambulance-chasing attorneys to make that happen; "Do you mean to tell the court that your company had technology that could have prevented this accident, but you didn't supply that technology because it cost extra money to do so?" Cue the multi-million-dollar judgments and the addition of crash-avoidance tech to the already-mandatory ABS and ESP.

I don't know what the fallout will be from this decision, but I can tell you with certainty that every other trackday organization in the country, from the Porsche Club of America to the for-profit go-fast hucksters, will be following the situation closely. It's a decision that all of them will eventually be forced to make one way or the other. The good news, if there is any, is that all of those bitter codgers in the BMWCCA will finally have an unassailable point in their favor when they say that the old cars are better. What use is an "ultimate driving machine" if you have to leave it in the paddock?

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a wee

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