I attended the course a few days ago on the 4th and I was blown away, truly an amazing program!
Couple of quick things I took away from the day that I wanted to pass along:
1) If you track your car or run it hard anywhere, do not just turn it off, you need to let it idle for aprox 10+ min or longer to let the engine come down in temp, it will help give your engine a longer life.
2) when your engine is hot and you go to park it DO NOT engage the parking brake, when it clamps down on that concentrated spot on the rotor with than much heat it WILL crack the rotors or possible cause them to explode. Yeah that got everyone's attention in the room when the instructor said he's seen rotors explode shooting out the sides of the car after the parking brake clamped down coming off the track. The parking brakes on all the Track Attack GT350s have all be disengaged, they are just limp sticks when you go to pull them.
3) If there is a malfunction on our car it can go into "limp mode" and when it does that the rev limiter drops down to 7,200 rpms
What to expect;
Reception dinner/registration the night before - pretty boring and somewhat pointless and the buffet dinner kind of sucked, I went out for dinner after. But you do get to hear where all the drivers are from in the introductions.
Day of: the classroom instruction is really good.
One key note; we were given instructions to drive in SPORT mode only and to never put it into TRACK mode, reason given was that track mode allows for a lot of slip angle and can put you into a a wall in a hurry. Sport mode obviously gives more driver aid and helps save us as we start to loose control of the car. I got a first-hand demonstration of this when an instructor took me out for a hot lap and he was putting the car sideways through the turn in track mode (video down below), had it been in sport mode the car would have been fighting his control.
FYI these cars are identical to ours, same tires as we have and they are set to 38-40psi hot off the track, 32psi cold
Every driver had a car assigned to them to use with their last name on the windshield, here was mine
Right away we did a couple of sighting laps around the track in a follow-the-leader style.
Then onto the slalom course, this was very easy and fun, instructor rides along with us.
We then drove in the skid-control car, this was really cool. Instructor does his best to throw you into an out-of control spin and it's your job to keep the car under control. I can honestly say I did fantastic in this drill, I was was stoked, wasn't sure what to expect going in.
We then did extreme hard braking drills to the point of the ABS kicking in, this was great. In this same drill they had us practice heel-toe technique. I spent a couple weeks practicing this tequniqe on the street so I would be prepared for the track, don't bother! they don't give you the chance to use it on the track, when we finally got to do hot laps on our own we were instructed to stay in 3rd gear 100% of the time, no shifting
Lunch break and back into the classroom, lunch was fantastic by the way. Water & sodas were available to us though the entire day.
The worst part was when the instructor rode along with us in our cars there was NO passing, so we were limited to the slowest driver in front of us which created a log jam. Instructor was still able to give me pointers for corner entry & exit but it was not at speed cause I had a really slow guy in front of me. I could have gotten a lot more out of the instruction at my pace.
The best part was our last session they let us go out on our own for 20 min., but with the instruction we could only pass in 1 place on the track; the front straight only, and only if the driver in front of us waves us by. Me and another fast guy had to follow the slow guy around for 1 lap before he waved us by and then we had a clear track, and next lap he waved me by so I was able to run a wide open track for the rest of the session at my own pace and the other driver followed, sometimes he fell behind but hung with me for the most part, it was the best part of the day (video below).
Then came the last event of the day; instructor demo ride, I was the passenger. OMG the braking was so much deeper and putting the car sideways in the turns, these guys really push the limits of the car. (video bleow).
Regarding Video: every car has 2 cameras mounted inside and a USB slot in the dash, I purchased the video package for $179 and they gave me a little USB drive to plug into the dash, then you hit the record button and both cams sync up and rec together as 1 file but the video angles are independent. I edited them together as a picture-in-picture window. Also I knew the audio would be shit because we drive with the windows down so I brought my GoPro and mounted it inside the truck to get the exhaust sound, that's the audio you hear on these 4 laps:
Video of my last 4 laps on the track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ukkRNob4bk&feature=youtu.be
Video of my ride with the instructor driving, we were in a different car so the audio is from the cameras inside the car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95G9Mwoarw&feature=youtu.be
Upon completion of the course you get a graduation trophy, a cool shirt, a USB thumb drive of all the photos that the pro photographer was taking all day (no charge) and some other goodies as well.
