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Racer Boy · 09-26-2019, 02:48 PM

I've been to Miller once, and it was a very interesting experience. I was on a motorcycle trip through Utah with some friends, one of who managed an IMSA sports car team. The end of the trip coincided with the race weekend at Miller. As I was about to head home to Seattle, the guy who was the team manager told me that the team had bought a spot in the driver's school, so the team owner could learn the track. It turns out that the owner wasn't going to be able to make it, and there were no refunds. Since I was the only other person he knew with a race license, did I want to take the class for free?

The thing was, since this was the series first event at Miller, all the pros had signed up to learn the track. In the classroom session, they basically dispensed with any actual instruction and we went straight out on to the track. I was looking around me at all these pros, including a former F1 and Indy Car driver! We all piled into the school's vans, and Jonathon Bomarito (current Mazda factory driver in IMSA) was sitting next to me.

In a nutshell, it was a really harrowing day. We used the full, very long course, and I spent most of time looking in my mirrors trying not to get run over, so I had a hard time learning the 20 + corner track. I was a really good club-level racer, but it had been a few years since I had raced, so I was rusty. But I will tell you that the skill difference between an amateur and a pro driver is really, really large. The Mustang GTs we were driving were on A/S tires, so they slid around and understeered a lot. That wasn't a problem for the pros, the would just pitch the car into the turns, and stand on it to steer the car with the back-end to get the car to rotate. This was on the first lap! None of these guys had ever been to this track, or driven these cars, yet on their first lap they were doing things that looked crazy. And I never saw a car spin (other than me ).

So I never got comfortable at Miller. But there was one other civilian besides me in the class, and I passed him, so I wasn't the slowest guy!

09-26-2019, 02:48 PM	#49
Racer Boy Racer Boy Join Date: Sep 2015 Location: Seattle, WA Posts: 946	I've been to Miller once, and it was a very interesting experience. I was on a motorcycle trip through Utah with some friends, one of who managed an IMSA sports car team. The end of the trip coincided with the race weekend at Miller. As I was about to head home to Seattle, the guy who was the team manager told me that the team had bought a spot in the driver's school, so the team owner could learn the track. It turns out that the owner wasn't going to be able to make it, and there were no refunds. Since I was the only other person he knew with a race license, did I want to take the class for free? The thing was, since this was the series first event at Miller, all the pros had signed up to learn the track. In the classroom session, they basically dispensed with any actual instruction and we went straight out on to the track. I was looking around me at all these pros, including a former F1 and Indy Car driver! We all piled into the school's vans, and Jonathon Bomarito (current Mazda factory driver in IMSA) was sitting next to me. In a nutshell, it was a really harrowing day. We used the full, very long course, and I spent most of time looking in my mirrors trying not to get run over, so I had a hard time learning the 20 + corner track. I was a really good club-level racer, but it had been a few years since I had raced, so I was rusty. But I will tell you that the skill difference between an amateur and a pro driver is really, really large. The Mustang GTs we were driving were on A/S tires, so they slid around and understeered a lot. That wasn't a problem for the pros, the would just pitch the car into the turns, and stand on it to steer the car with the back-end to get the car to rotate. This was on the first lap! None of these guys had ever been to this track, or driven these cars, yet on their first lap they were doing things that looked crazy. And I never saw a car spin (other than me ). So I never got comfortable at Miller. But there was one other civilian besides me in the class, and I passed him, so I wasn't the slowest guy!