I’ve stormed down the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, taken laps at Sebring, and clipped apexes at Lime Rock, Virginia International Raceway, and Road America. Almost all of this heroic driving was in… minivans. As an automotive magazine art director, the job of piloting a Town & Country around raceways—at lofty speeds of 25 or 35 mph—while a photographer hangs out the open hatch, clicking away at a pretty car behind, usually falls to me. Directions inevitably crackle over the radio: “Let’s follow the racing line for a couple laps.” Back in the paddock, my boss strolls over with a cocked eyebrow, claps me on the shoulder, and quietly says “Todd, that was not the racing line. But nice try!”

Eventually, the boss man decided I needed some professional instruction, so I headed to Chandler, Arizona, just a few miles from the Phoenix airport, for the two-day High Performance Driving course at Radford Racing School. Radford is the former Bondurant Racing School, and while the name and ownership have changed, the curriculum still is firmly based on the instructional philosophy that Bob Bondurant originally implemented in 1968. Some of the older instructors worked for decades under Bondurant’s guidance and are very proud of that heritage. From the moment you enter the classroom for orientation, you feel like you’re in the absolute best hands.

Radford offers programs for all levels of drivers and aspiring racers alike. I was placed in the Performance Street Driving class, which is about 75 percent aimed at street driving, with the rest dedicated to track-driving basics. Radford also offers programs for advanced racers, Formula 4/open wheel, drag racing, and even karting and teen driving instruction.

Like every driving school, Radford begins instruction in the classroom. My classmates were two amateur racers refreshing their skills and a mother-and-daughter team. Mom had taken the same course before and now wanted her daughter to benefit from the same training. Classes are kept small to retain a 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio. After a brief history of the school from chief instructor Danny Bullock, we were given the outline of our course: car control and vehicle dynamics training, accident avoidance and safety techniques, and track driving fundamentals. About 80 percent of the course is spent behind the wheel, out on the track. First, though, we learned some academic basics.

Performance driving, we learned, is all about weight management. Acceleration shifts weight to the back of the car; braking moves it to the front. Simple, but key to everything we’d be doing. Also essential: Always be looking ahead—a longer distance in front of you, not just at the hood of the car. Several of our on-track exercises were built to practice these two concepts. For example, the slalom helped us learn to keep our weight balance even, while the “go, lift, squeeze” exercise helped us look far ahead without automatically slamming hard on the brakes. The point is that even in a full accident-avoidance situation, looking ahead will have you braking and turning earlier to avoid the crash.

With the preliminaries done, it was time to get fitted for a helmet and head out to the course. Radford partners with Dodge SRT, so we were given Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcats. I chose to drive a manual transmission, which put me in a maroon 392 Scat Pack edition Challenger instead. I really appreciated that I was in the same car for the entire school, so I could set all the seating and other adjustments to my liking and have them dialed in every time I got in.

First up were the braking exercises. For the first few, the objective was not to touch the brakes at all. The paddock was lined with cones, making a three-lane roadway scenario. Above each lane was an instructor-controlled traffic light. Red and green. Our challenge was to accelerate to a set speed, which increased after each stage was complete. As we approached the point where the three-lane split emerged, the instructor would light only one path green. The driver was to lift, abruptly turn into the only available path, hit the gas again and drive through. This obviously got harder as the speed increased with each pass, but it really gets you in touch with the vehicle’s weight balance. Avoidance, without braking.

Then came some exercises employing that middle pedal. Cones were rearranged and we set off at the same three traffic lights, this time applying the brakes after the lane switch to stop within a predetermined “cone box” built on one side or the other. This, too, was a level-up challenge as the approaching speed increased. Initial exercises were done without initiating a full-on ABS stop.

This graduated to the final task of the morning, hurtling the Challenger toward a line of cones, with a braking point marked. Success was measured here in being able to stop the car with the nose just at the cone line. I really got a feel for how the car’s weight shifts, and the brake pedal pressure needed. The last few runs were full anti-lock pedal mashes as we sped toward the cone wall. It was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking.

The afternoon of Day One was for drifting. This was the only time we used a car other than the one assigned to us for our course. This unique Challenger was set up with wheels attached to a metal frame built outside the car. These were controlled by a computer with switches and levers on a control box inside the vehicle. This way, the instructor could adjust the amount of “slidability” the car would have.

I was fairly intimidated by this exercise, imagining myself in infinite 360 spins all over the paddock. As I got behind the wheel, instructor Spencer Buckman took me through the apex points where I was to slide and control by opposite steering through a figure-eight setup. My nervousness faded quickly as I slid the car around the paddock. The instructor explained how the different settings he was applying were changing the performance of the car as we modified the direction and speed. Damn, that was a lot of fun. Drifting distilled is merely weight transfer control. Who knew?

Day Two: After a bit more classroom briefing, we headed out to the 1.6-mile raceway. Spencer gave us a track tour in a Charger SRT, carefully explaining the art of corner apexes and the all-important racing line. Then we got to put our new cornering knowledge, and the skills we’d practiced the day before, to use on the Maricopa Oval. It was a perfect space to lap and test two corners, finding the apex point and accelerating out of the turn as we continued to the next.

Finally, I had learned the elusive racing line and was gaining confidence as I picked up speed working this section of track for an hour. Stops to evaluate were encouraged, as were moments to just catch your breath. Spencer would often jump in the car with us, sometimes taking the wheel or riding along as a passenger and providing encouraging feedback.  

Then we did a lead-follow exercise on the entire raceway, all 15 turns of it, at a controlled speed. What an exciting experience to just take lap after lap in the Arizona sun in a great performance car with fresh skills.

My program at Radford culminated in the slalom. Back on the paddock, an autocross course was laid out. Spencer took us on practice runs through the tight series of turns, first in a leisurely manner, and then at full chat, flicking the SRT Charger here and there effortlessly. The first few student-driven laps were practice. Getting a good feel for the layout. The corners. The braking points. Gradually building up speed.

Then, the instructors’ stopwatches came out. Timed runs. I’d done well after I’d settled down in the practice sessions, but being timed brought out the competitor in me. It was a challenge to stay focused and not try to manhandle the Dodge around the course. I couldn’t find a smooth path through a hairpin corner: It was either too much brake on the approach or… not nearly enough. Both slowed me down. Focus. The younger woman of the family pair in my class had it on lock. She continuously made great times, shaving a few seconds off every run. Kudos, miss.

The slalom was a great aggregator for all we’d been taught. Our course was not really about racing, but simply making us better road drivers. Valuable skills, whether you’re a teen or a seasoned racer.

Radford was an exciting, super-informative experience, one every driver should have. Once home, I was proud to apply my gold “High Performance Driving Graduate” sticker to the window of my Focus ST.  A shiny reminder of two days spent meeting great people and the unadulterated fun I had on that raceway in the desert, with not a single minivan in sight.

***

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The post How Radford Racing School Sharpens Your Driving Skills appeared first on Hagerty Media.

For those of us who live in snowy Michigan, spring can’t come early enough. Our cars spend their winters under wraps in storage until a good string of 50-plus-degree days comes to pass. Last spring came with an invitation from my buddy Jim Krom and his wife, Joyce, to head down to Tennessee for the Nashville Boogie festival, a rockabilly and country music jamboree over Memorial Day weekend. My girlfriend, Elizabeth, desperate for a few days in the sun and a break from her energetic little ones, eagerly agreed to be my road-trip companion. Days off were scheduled and rooms were booked. The countdown was on until we hit the highway.

The Nashville Boogie is an eclectic mix of 70 or so live rockabilly and country music acts that for three days fill a half-dozen bars and honky-tonks just on the outskirts of the Opryland resort. But more than that, it’s a celebration of vintage culture, clothes, and style. Vendors with retro goodies set up every few feet, there’s a pinup competition, and, yes, there’s a car show.

My ’62 T-Bird still needed a host of spring tuneups that just didn’t get done in time, so a note to Hagerty HQ yielded the 1960 Plymouth Fury convertible from the Hagerty Garage. After a quick run-through and a handshake from Tony Pietrangelo, who manages our ever-expanding collection, I was off to pack my bags.

On the day of our departure, the rains came down with a fury of their own. I backed our Fury down my driveway and splashed the block east to Woodward Avenue, then onto I-75, which would take us south to Louisville, Kentucky, by nightfall. No top-down motoring for us this morning. Sigh. But we were finally on our way.

The new governor of Michigan was elected on the promise she would fix the state’s notoriously bad roads, and the pockmarked section of I-75 south of Detroit definitely tested the Plymouth’s suspension. Just before the Ohio border, our trip claimed its first casualty: An unavoidable pothole pried loose the right front hubcap. I could barely make it out as it bounced far down a ravine off our passenger side. It seemed too dangerous to stop on a wet freeway in pouring rain to go find it, so Elizabeth searched for a new one on eBay with her phone and ordered it right up. Crisis averted.

The clouds finally broke and I could not wait to activate the power top at one of our many gas stops. Quickly back on the highway, sunglasses on and the wind in our hair, we were now on the road trip we’d been waiting for. In our excitement to worship the sun we had missed all winter (and morning), we forgot maybe the most important lesson in open-air motoring: sunscreen, and lots of it. I learned that lesson the hard way; Elizabeth really learned that lesson the hard way.

Far removed from the shadow of the Motor City, the finned Fury was becoming a curiosity as it cruised down the freeway. Elizabeth and I started playing a game, counting the waves and thumbs up we got as we drove along. We quickly gave up—there were just too many. The Plymouth cut a dashing figure among the mass of awkward-looking Priuses and plain-Jane SUVs sharing our lanes. However, a semitruck’s horn from the next lane, bellowing its approval of our ride, was enough shock to stop a beating heart.

I never grew tired of watching the floating, side-to-side speedometer on the Fury as we accelerated down the road. There was something oddly calming about watching the little red squares fill as I gave the 318 Poly some gas. We wanted to leave plenty of time for side excursions the next day, so we pushed on to Louisville, arriving at the roadside hotel with our headlights on, the sun having set a full hour before.

Elizabeth had never been to a Waffle House, a wrong I had to make right, and right away. The next morning, we parked the Plymouth alongside the diner’s yellow wall and slid into a booth inside. She’s a vegetarian, but I think the experience was still memorable. Me, I’m a connoisseur of the Waffle House, stopping whenever my travels take me south. So my breakfast came smothered and covered, and with as much coffee and bacon as our waitress could deliver.

Lunch was to be a Bowling Green barbecue joint (again, probably not a vegetarian’s first choice) with Jim, Joyce, and some engineers they knew at the Corvette assembly plant. The Corvette friends didn’t let loose any juicy details about the C8 launch, which was still months away, so Elizabeth and I headed over to the National Corvette Museum. During a quick tour, I showed her displays I’d helped art-direct during my former ad-agency life. Then we rolled onward in a final push to Nashville.

After 500 miles on the highway, the country roads we took from Bowling Green down into Nashville were a welcome change. We rolled past farms and roadside diners, some sadly abandoned long ago. A flea market caught our eye, and we parked in the gravel lot. As we perused forgotten treasures strewn in the yard, the shiny Plymouth became a roadside attraction all its own. I lost track of how many people asked to sit in it.

Music City was just starting to fill with the evening’s crush of revelers on Broadway as we arrived at the city limits. We were getting hungry again and needed to stretch our legs, so we pulled in front of one of the many live-music joints lining the main drag to get our bearings. I had bought some new blue suede shoes just for the festival, and now seemed as good a time as any to break them in. I pulled them from a box in the backseat and did my best Mister Rogers. As we sat parked amid the hustle and bustle of the crowds, we instantly became the subject of countless tourists’ vacation photos—so many, in fact, it was actually difficult to leave and find a more long-term parking place for the Fury. Man, that car is a superstar! It certainly fit right in with the reminders of country music past surrounding us on every street corner.

We finally tucked her into a nearby parking garage for some well-deserved rest and made our way to dinner and some local music at Robert’s Western World.

As I’m sure so many classic owners do, I searched out the safest, most remote spot in the massive resort lot for overnight parking, wanting to protect our Fury loaner from door dings and luggage carts. As we were unloading our bags from the Plymouth’s spacious trunk, the Opryland security patrol car made its way over, headlights nearly blinding us. The officer got out and proceeded to ask us about the car. As it so happened, this gent was also a classic-car owner. At the end of our chat, he assured me he’d be patrolling all night and that he would pay special attention to our Fury, parked well at the back. Southern hospitality, and a bond over the love of an old car.

The next two days were filled with good times and good music with friends. No surprise, the Fury was the belle of the ball at the Nashville Boogie car show, too. It was featured in amateur photo shoots, YouTube videos, and podcasts throughout the weekend, alongside the Munster Koach and General Lee, on loan from Cooter’s Place, conveniently located right there on the grounds.

As Elizabeth and I listened to the last notes of the B-52s on Saturday night (I told you it was an eclectic mix), we knew we had a full day of driving back to Michigan the next morning. The plan was to be up bright and early to turn the key, release the stiff parking brake, and push those buttons on the dash that throw the Plymouth into drive, sending her down the open road for the journey home. As much fun as we had taking in all the sights, sounds, and smells—beer and whiskey, mostly—at Nashville Boogie, it’s the memories we made in the Fury along the way that made the weekend one we won’t soon forget, long after that sunburn faded.

The article first appeared in Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Click here to subscribe to our magazine and join the club. 

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