Here are my impressions of the 2012 Fall Performance Driving School in San Diego I attended.
The Friday chalk talk was great and we were introduced to all the driving concepts we would learn and practice the following two days with instructors.
Saturday we had the learning stations where each skill was demonstrated and practiced many times before moving on to the next station.
We 52 students were broken into small groups by vehicle/performance type so the instructors could focus on our particular vehicles handling characteristics and we could watch others and learn as well.
My particular group was the mid engine group which included Cayman/Spyder/Boxsters.
There were a bunch of training stations for;
Throttle Steering on a wet foamy circular skid pad,
Collision avoidance on a wet skid pad,
Threshold braking on the wet,
Early, Mid and Late Apex training on a dry Mini Nascar style track(ie two curves & 2 straights)
Slalom around cones with decreasing spacing dry,
and a Mini Auto-X to put it all together.
Sunday was the all day large Auto-X track with an instructor where we also took a turn doing corner flagging and resetting knocked cones.
I had just gotten my Boxster in May of this year and had rather babied it and wondered what it could do performance wise so I jumped at the chance to get in on this school.
My jaw was dropped and alternating with big grins as we were taught how to make the car handle. Who knew such things were even possible with the Boxster.
Even the most timid in our mid engine group of 12 was able to wring the car out and drive it to the ragged edge after our excellent training.
We were confident afterwards that we knew how to control the car on wet foamy pavement and certainly no problem on the dry.
Many cones flew in the process and knowing what the car will do when you do loose control was good to know as well. I think most of us spun or lost control of the car at least a couple times if not many as that was also part of the learning process.
I was also concerned that we might hurt the car from such vigorous handling but I don't think even one car suffered any mechanical issues.
Tire wear was minimal on my new Hankook V12's and they handled the wet fantastically.
If anything I think mine even handles better now since I broke in the new tires and gave them a few heat cycles at this event.
We all learned so much about how to handle our car at higher speeds than we ever felt comfortable with and our driving safety has probably increased 10 fold.
It was a thrilling Saturday but Sunday was the icing on the cake as it started with an insturctor driving our car around the track 1 time to show us how its done and ended with instructors taking their own cars out and showing the students how to race at perhaps 80% of full bore....that was again jaw dropping great fun.
We were all charging around the auto-x throttle steering through curves, hard breaking for a 70mph stretch to a 90 deg sharp right angle turn, slaloms and everything else in between.
We were learning fast on every lap, refining, making changes looking for a faster line and increasing speed.
It was the most adrenaline pumping, fast paced exciting fun you could ever have in 2 days plus the instructors and volunteers were awesome, fun, easy to talk to, and make the event come off like clockwork without a hitch.
I think Porsche should include a coupon for one of these PDS courses with every car as the owners are entirely missing out in many ways if they never get to learn these things.
Its like buying a Race horse and keeping in your yard to keep the grass trimmed.
Capable of so much more than just looking pretty!
Some Video I took, but not the greatest:
http://youtu.be/8qjm4BTCAqU
The excellent roaming photographer took a literally a couple thousand pictures but here are a select few of me and the folks I got to know.
https://picasaweb.google.com/118388745157890389551/PorschePerformanceDrivingSchool2012
