Yahoo Autos We Tried the Newly-Revived Skip Barber Racing School
We’ve all heard the story of George Washington’s axe, right? In the story, someone puts it in a museum, but the wooden handle starts rotting and has to be replaced. A few years later, someone notices that the axe head is rusting, so that, too, is replaced. But it’s still George Washington’s axe, right? Students of the classics will recognize this as the Ship Of Theseus paradox, but the basic concept has application in modern times: At what point in the lifetime of an item, or organization, does the original name no longer apply?
When I first heard about the "new" Skip Barber School, owned and operated by the experienced and well-respected crew at DeMonte Motorsports, I thought it might end up being the driver’s-school equivalent of George Washington’s axe. The owners are different. The cars are different. The home office is different, the list of tracks used by the school is different. DeMonte didn’t bother to buy the assets sold in Atlanta a year ago. The only items of consequence acquired by the new owners were the name and the logo. So what’s the point?
It only took a few minutes with Bruce MacInnes to dispel most of my doubts. MacInnes, who has more than three decades’ worth of experience as a senior Skip Barber instructor on top of an enviable sports-car racing resume, is back on board as senior instructor with the new Skip Barber. "I can hold my head up, working for these people," he told me. "They don’t cut corners and they want everything done right."
As told to me by MacInnes and others, the final few years at Skip Barber under the previous ownership (a company that took over in 2002) had aspects of both comedy and tragedy to them-from the mechanics who nonchalantly swapped the same transmission into multiple cars during a single day just to keep a class session from stalling, all the way to the deadbeat from their race series who disappeared owing the company a couple hundred grand, but was spotted by an instructor behind a set of sunglasses at the World Series of Poker.
"Everybody was giving it their best shot," MacInnes said. "But it was tough to make things happen when there wasn’t enough money to make payroll." When the Skip Barber school finally dissolved in 2017, one of their most prominent creditors was founder Skip Barber himself, who had long since sold the operation to people who then ran up debts with him. Yes, things were that bad.
The DeMonte crew, a polished and forthright group from New York and New Jersey, appear to have a much sharper eye on the business ball than their dissipated predecessors ever had. They also have the credibility that comes from having brought back the majority of the school’s best-loved instructors. To find out just how close the new Skip Barber School comes to the legacy set by the old operation in its best days, we sent three students of varying experience levels to three different programs over the course of a single week at the legendary Lime Rock Park.
Web Editor Chris Perkins, a veteran of many press events and a lot of high-power machinery who has no formal competition experience, agreed to try the One-Day School, which focuses on car control and basic vehicle dynamics. Chris's thoughts:
Most driver's ed programs don't really teach you how to drive. They teach you how to deal with traffic while you happen to be in a car. The Skip Barber program is what driver's ed should be-a methodical approach to demonstrating how to approach the limits of the car and what to do when those limits are exceeded. And even though this isn't racing school, it lays the foundation for what Skip Barber teaches in the more advanced classes. As head instructor Terry Earwood said in his colorful introduction, 'a car is a car,' meaning the skillsets are broadly the same no matter what, or where, you're driving.
This day-long course is all about tires, really. There are three main categories of exercises you practice throughout the day-slide recovery, autocross, and emergency maneuvers, which includes panic braking and lane changes. In each, the instructors work with students to ease them up to the limits of grip, showing what the car is-and isn't-capable of. This is a driving school in the truest sense. It should be mandatory for all new drivers, and I highly recommended it even for those with experience.
Deputy Online Editor Bob Sorokanich, who has plenty of days on a racetrack as part of his job at R&T, attended the Three-Day Racing School. Bob's impressions:
The thing about the three-day Skip Barber Racing School is that it’s methodical. There’s a process, and you’re going to follow it page for page along with your dozen or so classmates, no exceptions. At the beginning of day one, I chafed a little at this. Simple exercises in countersteering to prevent a skid and heel-and-toe downshifting seemed a waste of time when there was a whole race track just waiting for me to set a record-breaking lap time.
But Skip Barber has stuck with this method for decades, through multiple owners and years of good and bad business alike, for a reason: It works. My mild frustration at practicing skills I’d developed years ago was short-lived. After lunch on the first day of the three-day class, we turned our first laps of Lime Rock Park, and we kept lapping throughout the rest of the course, each student amassing an impressive amount of time on track at speed. Classroom sessions were direct, with clear, concise explanations and illustrations of each new technique. Every time we were taught a new skill in the classroom-threshold braking, braking while downshifting, finding the apex, and eventually, passing slower cars-it was immediately followed by several lapping sessions of hands-on practice. There was never a moment for boredom; the curriculum kept every student fully involved, with new skills added at just the right speed. It was always engaging and never overwhelming.
That’s beauty of the Skip Barber method: It keeps you constantly learning, adding new skills progressively as your speeds on the track increase. Eventually, and almost without realizing it, you’re doing full-speed laps around this legendary circuit, passing or-in my case-being passed, utilizing the same skills that former Skip Barber students with last names like Hill and Andretti learned from the same curriculum years ago.
At the end of the three-day course, I felt knowledgeable and well-practiced in the art of driving on a race track, having received a ton of personal attention and advice from a staff of experienced racer-instructors. Everything was taught in a way that uncovered bad habits, dismantled them, and replaced them with best practices, and every student walked away with a mental toolkit that will allow them to apply these skills to any track in any car.
Our final student was my wife, the infamous Danger Girl, who in addition to racing experience with SCCA and AER in her MX-5 Cup car has six days’ worth of classroom time with the previous iteration of Skip Barber under the belt of her Sparco race suit. She did the Two-Day Advanced Racing School. Her takeaways:
Everything about the traditional Skip Barber curriculum-the drills, the observation from the corner station, the feedback in their infamous "stop box"-that’s all the same. They’ve gone back to a printed curriculum, which was a part of the original school that got economized out in the last years.
The cars-that’s a big change. As the owner of an NC-generation Mazda MX-5 Cup car and an ex-Skip-Barber NC-generation MX-5 Club street car, I was apprehensive about the change to 4.6-liter Mustangs. It’s a bigger, faster car where the mistakes are harder to correct and the walls come at you in a hurry. But they’re also in outstanding condition and perfect repair. And many of the skills are just as easy to learn in the Mustang as they were in the NC-generation Miatas.
There’s additional lead-follow time in the new school. At a track like Lime Rock, where a small variation in the line can have major consequences, that makes a big difference. We’re not talking about a low-speed, press-event-style lead-follow; sometimes the instructor was behind me, pushing me to bring my pace up, and sometime I was the following car, learning the nuances of the preferred line. That’s much more than the school used to offer and it’s a big help.
And the vans ... Don’t get me started! You can actually see out of the new Ford Transit vans that replaced the vintage Econolines. The A/C even works. The new vans are almost enough reason to go back all by themselves.
The new operators are truly earning the right to use the Skip Barber name. They have the best of the old staff with much-improved equipment and some genuine business sense behind the operation.
The positive vibes expressed by our staffers were echoed by the other students at Lime Rock, who ranged from a 13-year-old kart racer getting his feet wet in full-sized sports car racing to a few late-middle-aged former Skip Barber graduates looking to come back up to speed in a new and faster generation of school cars. Everything happened on time, from the briefings to the meals. There were no mechanical issues or last-minute car swaps.
At the urging of MacInnes, I hopped behind the wheel of a school Mustang and followed one of their instructors around Lime Rock. I found it to be both instructional and enjoyable. There’s also something to be said for having a loaner suit and helmet that don’t date back to the Reagan Administration.
In the near term, the DeMonte team is working on delivering a consistent and repeatable Skip Barber experience at Lime Rock, New Jersey Motorsports Park, and a few other tracks. In the long run, they believe that the program will be successful on a nationwide basis. They’re working on doing it right before they attempt to do it nationwide. Simple as that.
There’s one final thing you should know about the new Skip Barber series, because I think it speaks to the character of the people involved. One of the students in the Three-Day School was one of the very last registrants under the previous ownership. That company took this student's money and canceled his class out from under him. When DeMonte heard about it, they offered him their class free of charge. Needless to say, he’s a satisfied customer who is now in possession of an SCCA competition-license letter. DeMonte’s people didn’t tell me about this; Danger Girl got the scoop directly from the student himself. Which suggests to me that the new Skip Barber school is more noteworthy for the people who bought the name than for the name itself. Either way, it’s worth a look.
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