Yahoo Autos Skip Barber: Turning Tahoe-Driving Prep-School Moms Into Racing Drivers Since 2016
Townes van Zandt once sang that "to live is to fly." I like to say that "to live with me is to fly around a racetrack." My first wife was a courageous passenger and also no slouch herself as a casual autocrosser and trackday participant. In the years that followed our split, I dragged any number of hapless and/or helpless young ladies into the right seat for road-course laps in machinery ranging from automatic-transmission economy sleds to six-figure supercars. Their reactions varied from terror to delight and sometimes both at once, but there was really just one girl whose first words after we came to a halt in pitlane were, "This is something that I could also do, right?" I started calling her "Danger Girl." We also call her "Mrs. Baruth" now.
Mrs. Baruth spent the first fifteen years of her driving life behind the wheel of various trucks and SUVs. As a prep-school girl and later prep-school mom in New Mexico, she could tell you chapter and verse about the difference between a Tahoe LTZ and a Yukon Denali. But she didn't know much about race cars until she bought one of her own: an ex-Playboy-Series MX-5 Cup car in a sort of metallic sky blue. It was an impulse purchase, but also a serious one. She wanted to be competent behind its D-shaped, faded-suede OMP wheel.
Luckily for us, there is a place where they teach you how to handle the NC-generation Mazda Miata at speed: Skip Barber Racing School. I've never had a chance to attend the school myself, but I did pick up a couple of podiums in the Skip Barber Mazdaspeed Race Series eight years ago and I have tremendous respect for their people, their processes, and the results they achieve. So we signed Danger Girl up for their Three-Day Competition License School at NCM Motorsports Park.
In an era of paddle-shifted, digital dash open-wheel "school cars," multiple-axis computer simulator stations, real-time radio coaching via telemetry, and 1080p on-board video, the Skip Barber method seems at first glance to be hopelessly old-fashioned. The cars are nearly a decade old, dented everywhere, patchwork-quilted with wrong-color body panels and showing all the signs of having driven more miles on a racetrack than most cars record on the freeway in a lifetime's worth of commuting.
The basics of a Skip Barber school haven't changed since the first Clinton Administration. The students split up into two groups. Both groups receive classroom instruction together, then Group A will drive around the track in the Miatas while Group B stands in various flag stations with the instructors. The drivers in Group A will check into the pits periodically and have quick radio conversations with the instructors before setting back out. After thirty minutes or so, Groups A and B switch, with "B" driving the cars and "A" watching.
Simple it might be, but it's also very effective. I attended all three days as a spectator, standing in the flag towers with the instructors and chatting with the students between runs, and I saw all fifteen of the students make real progress. Some of them arrived with years of black-group trackday experience in fast cars, just looking to satisfy the SCCA's license requirements. Others were previously-licensed racers looking for a "tuneup" after a few years off track for family or business reasons. A few were like Danger Girl, relative novices. One young lady arrived not knowing how to drive a manual transmission. By the end of Day Three, she was heel-and-toeing into NCM's fast first turn at over 100mph.
I watched my wife acquire the racing mindset one turn of phrase at a time. The night after the first day of school, our dinner conversation focused on braking points. The second evening, I chewed a steak thoughtfully and listened to her talk about the challenge of holding maintenance throttle over a blind curve. By the third dinner, she was focused, laserlike, on getting the wheel unwound after the clipping point. It was smoke from a distant fire burning in her. She signed up for the Two-Day Advanced School the next morning.
We returned to NCM a week later. To her immense delight, Danger Girl's favorite instructor, Ray Scott, had also returned. "He looks," DG whispered to me, "like The Intimidator. We should ask him to race our car with us. He's just so cool."
"I'm right here, you know," I tersely replied, rather annoyed with her schoolgirl driving crush, "I'm your husband, and I am, as you know, a racer of mild repute myself."
"Then you should be the one to ask him," she said. This conversation was going nowhere.
I won't say that Skip Barber made my wife particularly quick-she was about ten seconds a lap behind the best students, a few of which had years of pro racing under their belts and were just at school to have their own favorite instructors give them some feedback on various minor points. But she became inhumanly consistent under their patient tutelage; I watched her record four laps in a row, all of them within 0.1 seconds. And she had big eyes, never missing a flag station or spinning car ahead of her.
She left NCM with a certificate and a big smile. A few weeks later, she had her SCCA comp license. That makes her a relative rarity among my autowriting friends and co-workers; at the most, about one out of every 20 well-known writers in this business has ever been SCCA or NASA credentialed. So I insisted that she come back to NCM a few weeks later for our Performance Car Of The Year testing and turn some laps with us. It was my first chance to sit right seat with her post-school, and I was anxious to see what she'd learned.
She was pretty quick around NCM, and she was remarkably aggressive, spinning our Lotus Evora 400 in one of the track's faster turns and then nonchalantly rejoining the racing surface without so much as a hint of agitation. I liked her constant hand positions, her disciplined motions, and her ability to clearly articulate afterwards what each car was doing. Five days of school had turned her from a woman who was most comfortable behind the wheel of a three-ton SUV on a New Mexico freeway to an authentic rookie racer.
On the way home from PCOTY testing, Danger Girl expressed her delight that she'd be racing her very own Miata before the end of the year. The question she'd asked me nearly three years ago in the pitlane of Sonoma during our third date-"This is something that I could also do, right?"-had been answered to both of our satisfaction. I call her Danger Girl, but you can call her the owner of the #176 Mazda MX-5 Cup car, the first driver on our roster. And just two months after leaving Skip Barber, she took her first stint behind the wheel of that MX-5, heading down Mid-Ohio's back straight in a pack of Corvettes, Bimmers, and other Miatas. She wears her skin like iron, as Townes would say. But that's a story for another time.
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 week.
You Might Also Like
