Trackday Diaries: One and Done.

Jack Baruth
by Jack Baruth

When I was a young pup working the approvals desk at Ford Credit, we called it “First Payment Default”. New car buyer takes delivery of new car and just, you know, never gets around to sending in a check. Most first payments were due between thirty and forty-five days after delivery. By the fifty-day mark, we were either on the phone with the person listening to excuses or furiously skip-tracing. Happened more often than you might think. Some people simply aren’t cut out to be on the debtor side of an automotive loan.

The trackday equivalent to this is the “one and done”. New guy shows up. Sometimes he is full of braggadocio, other times he is a church mouse in a motorcycle-spec helmet. Doesn’t matter. By the end of the day, he will be on the wrecker, having destroyed or seriously damaged his rather expensive and sporty daily driver. With any luck, he’ll be unhurt, but regardless, he won’t be coming back. One-and-done stories are the Beluga caviar of lunch-break stories among seasoned instructors and racers: short and delicious.

Here’s mine.

We’ll call him Goran, because that (ignorantly, on my part) sounds about right for his Eastern European ethnicity. I worked with him at a bank in central Ohio. Tall, hard-faced, and aggressively intelligent, he’d survived the Bosnian conflict as a teenager and made it to the United States a few years later. He made good money and drove a brand-new, manual-transmission, V8-powered Audi S4.

He caught me in the parking lot one day as I was getting into my Lotus Seven clone. (What? Jack had a Lotus Seven clone? Yes. Why hasn’t Jack written about it? When I get around to it.) What did I do with a 1200-lb, 170-horsepower car? Take it to the racetrack, of course. Anybody can go. A place called Nelson Ledges. Cost you a hundred and twenty bucks. Really? He’d see me there next Saturday.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man: Goran met me at the nearly empty track with a motorcycle helmet and a handheld video camera. I took him around Ledges for a few laps in the Seven. This experience usually had an effect somewhere between “bewildering” and “terrifying” for newbies but Goran was unaffected. Enough of the passenger time-wasting. He wanted to drive. I agreed to coach him a bit.

Dear readers, I blush to consider what an excellent driving instructor I already considered myself to be, those nine long years ago. I had internalized everything my instructor had told me and could parrot him at length. I’d read the Ross Bentley “Speed Secrets” books many times and had absolutely memorized them. (A brief aside: A few years later, I took Ross’s “Coach The Coach” class and thoroughly upset Mr. Bentley with my stalker-esque ability to quote him word-for-word and cite specific page numbers in his works. I graduated the class with honors but not without a certain amount of disquiet on the part of the staff. My Facebook friend request to Ross has gone unanswered for some time now.) I’d turned a few fellow street racers into barely legitimate trackday drivers and intended to perform the same magic on Goran.

In the hundreds of coaching sessions I’ve done since that day in 2003, I’ve come to believe that I can teach a driver anything but courage. I can fix shuffle steering, I can adjust your vision, I can fine-tune your ability to sense traction, apply the throttle, and nail the exit — but I cannot give you the desire you’ll need to be truly fast. That has to be in you when you put your helmet on. Well, Goran had that courage in spades. Full throttle from the first corner, no vagueness or uncertainty, no obsession with the mirrors, no worried questions to me. I did my best to restrain the casual violence of his control efforts and temper the instant ABS which pulsed through the car whenever he braked at more or less the last moment.

Nelson Ledges was, and is, not a course for the faint of heart, but for Goran, who had once held his dying brother in his arms after a sniper had shot them both on the grimy Bosnian streets, it was a playground. After two sessions of instruction, he was fast but extremely rough.

“After lunch,” I said, “we should really work the raw effort out of your steering motions, you are relying on the stability control to save your ass and that isn’t good.”

“After lunch,” he replied, “I can drive by myself, it is okay, I know what I want to do.” I pleaded with him for the next half hour to let me get back in the car with him, but he made it plain that he thought I was holding him back from “real speed.” My ticket to ride in the S4 had been revoked. Grudgingly, he agreed that if I wanted to follow him around the track and offer suggestions, I could do that.

This isn’t the kind of situation which would fly in a NASA HPDE or with many of the other organizations for which I have coached — but there was no organization here. Goran had paid his $120 and he had the right to kick me out. Fair enough.

With my friend Miles in the right seat holding Goran’s camera, I pulled the Seven out of pit lane and started shadowing Goran. Wow. From his pace, it appeared that I had been holding him back. He was fast immediately, but very rough with it. I could see the ESP repeatedly cutting in as he sawed at the wheel and banged the brakes in midcorner. Still, he was more or less at the limit of his tires and the S4 was reasonably fast to begin with, so I found that I needed to pay a bit of attention to keep my car on his tail, particularly down the back straight where the Audi could kiss 130mph and the Seven couldn’t break a buck-ten.

It was on perhaps the fifth lap that Goran went wide in the Turn 5-6 complex. He put two wheels off, overcorrected, and slid down the steeply cambered grass away from the turn. Traveling at perhaps fifty miles per hour through the turf sideways, it looked like Goran was in for a mildly exciting ride. “HOPE THIS TEACHES HIM A LESSON,” I yelled through my helmet at Miles…

…and then the S4 seemed to trip. Ever so slowly, it rolled, banging the roof once, twice, then coming to rest on its wheels in the tire wall. There weren’t any corner workers around (this was a very casual affair, you see) so Miles and I pulled off and went back to help out. Goran was already out of the car with his helmet off when I reached him, laughing.

“DID YOU SEE THAT?” he said. “IT MUST HAVE LOOKED BAD FOR SURE.”

“We have the video,” I told him, and handed him the camcorder. He watched it again and again, chuckling all the while, as we waited for the wrecker to pull him back to the paddock. At some point, he accidentally erased most of it trying to show it off to one of the very few other trackday participants. Only the last few seconds of the tape remained, from which I later frame-grabbed the header picture of this article.

I felt sick. I felt like I’d let Goran down. When I expressed these sentiments to him, he laughed and clapped me on the back. “How could it be that you let me down? Was me driving the car.” I consoled myself with the fact that Goran had basically refused to let me coach him any further.

Some people have a knack for resolving situations. After a few heated conversations, State Farm agreed to pay off the S4, which had all of perhaps five thousand miles on it and was completely totaled due to a heavily creased roof and C-pillar. Goran got a new GTI. I changed jobs shortly afterwards and didn’t see him for years. When we finally crossed paths again, he regaled me with tales of “stage 3 boost” and 150-mph freeway antics. I suggested that we try going to Ledges again, perhaps this time with a full day’s worth of instruction,

“Why would I?” Goran said, while attacking a hamburger with two-fisted ferocity. “I’d just crash again.” I started to raise an objection, but then realized that sometimes it’s just best to call it quits. One and done, indeed.

Jack Baruth
Jack Baruth

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  • JEC JEC on Jan 21, 2012

    I recall one of Jay Leno's lines - something along the lines of "every guy thinks he can make love like a pro and race a car, until he sees someone better doing it" I ride sportbikes as my daily drivers. I have many friends who egg me on to go on a trackday. I always politely turn them down, because I know my limitations, and would prefer not to have my prized classic Ducati binned into a tire wall. I'm realistic about my skill level after riding for 10 years and have no delusions of motorsports grandeur to cloud my judgement. The same applies to "spirited" backroad blasts. I keep things sane and with a wide margin of safety. I've seen too many people get off and get killed hooning around on public roads.

    • Robert.Walter Robert.Walter on Jan 22, 2012

      Largest hooning accident on record? Costa Concordia of course! As Harry Callaghan might have said: "Man's gotta know his limitations and Captain Schitto did not."

  • Funkdariaa Funkdariaa on Jan 22, 2012

    I just had a teacher suggest those books to me. I really do need to pick some of them up!

  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.
  • CanadaCraig I would like for this anniversary special to be a bare-bones Plain-Jane model offered in Dynasty Green and Vintage Burgundy.
  • ToolGuy Ford is good at drifting all right... 😉
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