HOT ROD Thrashes Six New Corvettes at Bondurant! - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 24 - video Dailymotion

MotorTrend

On this episode of HOT ROD Unlimited

Transcript

00:00 (engine revving)

00:02 We're at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance

00:04 Driving in Chandler, Arizona to find out what happens

00:07 when you give six hot rodders with zero road course

00:10 experience brand new Corvettes.

00:12 (engine revving)

00:15 - Good morning, everybody.

00:28 Welcome to the Bondurant School.

00:30 My name's Mike McGarver and I'm the chief instructor

00:32 and I'd just like to start off by saying welcome

00:34 and thank you for coming.

00:35 - For me, going into Bondurant, I really was hoping

00:39 to get some seat time and some instruction

00:41 from somebody that knew what the hell they were doing

00:43 because so far in my career, my only feedback

00:46 on how to race a car has been through

00:48 the video games I've played.

00:49 - Always do all of your hard braking in a straight line.

00:52 But then we'll also teach you a technique

00:54 of what's called trailing brake,

00:57 where we use the brake to help point

00:59 the front end of the vehicle.

01:01 - So the classroom was frustrating almost

01:03 because the whole time you're just sitting there

01:05 like the kid looking at the clock waiting

01:07 for the bell to ring at the end of school.

01:09 You just, you know you have a brand new,

01:12 badass Corvette sitting outside with the keys in it

01:14 and your name on it.

01:15 But it was really, really useful.

01:17 They sat down and they repeated stuff to us

01:19 and they just kind of beat us over the head

01:20 with these techniques.

01:21 - We're gonna go for a tour, we're gonna do a van ride,

01:24 then we're gonna hook you up with some people

01:25 and you can do some driving.

01:26 (car engine revving)

01:29 - The first actual in-car exercise that we did was slalom.

01:33 And it requires a lot more steering input than you think.

01:35 I mean you really turn the wheel and you turn it quickly

01:38 and it's fun.

01:39 (car engine revving)

01:42 It was a good exercise in looking as far ahead

01:49 as possible while you're driving.

01:50 (car engine revving)

01:53 (upbeat music)

01:56 So right now we are running back and forth

02:01 up the track doing heel toe.

02:03 And it's not actually heel toe,

02:06 it's more like toe inside of your foot.

02:10 So, braking, downshift, just barely revving it up

02:16 with the side of my foot, then letting out of the clutch.

02:21 So you wanna be able to get RPMs up

02:23 to make the engine speed match the rear wheel speed

02:26 when you go to downshift.

02:27 If you downshift and don't do this,

02:29 the engine speed low, you let out of the clutch

02:32 and it'll want to lock up the rear tires

02:33 and it's very abrupt.

02:34 And when you're already at the max amount of traction

02:37 that the car's gonna give you going into a corner,

02:39 the last thing you wanna do is do something abrupt.

02:42 So this allows for a smooth downshift

02:44 and smooth slowing for a corner.

02:45 (car engine revving)

02:49 (upbeat music)

02:51 I'm a big proponent of manual transmissions.

02:55 So the fact that we were driving a Grand Sport Corvette

02:58 with a six speed in it was just heaven for me.

03:01 These are race cars with license plates on them.

03:04 The team at Bondurant did very little.

03:05 They put some exhaust on them

03:07 and then some safety things like a roll bar

03:08 and a four point harness.

03:10 But that's about it.

03:11 And these are basically stock Corvettes

03:12 but they were still really fast.

03:15 Next up was the traffic avoidance drill.

03:17 The idea is you have three lanes,

03:18 all of a sudden something bad happens in one of the lanes.

03:21 You have to quickly change lanes and brake at the same time.

03:24 The accident avoidance seemed like a silly thing at first,

03:26 but the more we did it

03:28 and the several times I screwed it up,

03:29 I realized it was not as easy as I thought.

03:32 We are doing obstacle avoidance.

03:35 I'm gonna wind it up to 30 miles an hour

03:37 and then they're gonna change the light signals up there

03:40 to tell me which lane to go into.

03:43 And basically I'm supposed to lift, change lanes

03:47 and then squeeze back on the throttle.

03:49 Oh, we're in the wrong way.

03:53 (laughing)

03:55 I think I just killed us.

03:57 The drag racer in me was anticipating

04:00 which lane I was gonna go to.

04:02 So mentally I'd already committed, I'm going right.

04:05 Don't anticipate what the lights are gonna do,

04:07 just react to what you see.

04:09 So day one's over with.

04:14 We got to learn heel toe shifting,

04:15 which I was getting better at,

04:17 but I was really fired up for the next day

04:19 to see how well these Corvettes worked on a road course

04:22 and how well I could keep one on the track.

04:24 (car engine roaring)

04:27 - Bandaran is a legend.

04:35 He won in the time, the era of racing that I just love.

04:39 He helped race with Shelby,

04:40 beating out the Ferraris with the GT40.

04:43 He got into a really bad accident at Watkins Glen.

04:45 - The doctors told him he wasn't gonna walk again.

04:47 And he said, you know what, I gotta do something else.

04:49 So he decided to open up a school in 1968.

04:52 And today it's a great facility.

04:54 He hand laid out the track out in the middle of the desert.

04:57 - Bob actually is involved with the school.

05:00 He comes there every day.

05:01 He checks on the instructors, he checks on the students,

05:03 and he came over to talk to us.

05:04 Getting to talk to somebody like that

05:06 and have them watch you run in a car,

05:08 doesn't happen every day.

05:13 - The beginning of day two,

05:14 we started out on an oval course that's specially designed.

05:17 It's not like a traditional oval course,

05:19 like a NASCAR or something,

05:20 where every corner is kind of the same.

05:23 The two ends of the track are drastically different.

05:25 The first one has a very gradual turn with a late apex.

05:29 And the second one had a very early, very sharp apex.

05:33 And then you wanted to accelerate smoothly

05:35 out of the corner.

05:36 So it keeps you on your toes.

05:37 (car engine roaring)

05:40 The instructors laid down cones

05:42 and told us where the driving line was.

05:44 And it wasn't necessarily your natural instinct.

05:46 They wanted you to stay way on the outside

05:48 before entering the corner.

05:50 I really want to cut that corner.

05:52 I'm way too anxious about the corner

05:54 I'm getting ready to enter into.

05:56 So I ended up jumping in too early.

06:00 These cones force you to stay out.

06:02 Then turn in when you need to.

06:07 This is why we're at an instructing school.

06:09 'Cause as I'm talking,

06:11 acting like I know what the hell I'm doing,

06:13 I slide the car sideways.

06:15 (laughing)

06:17 (upbeat music)

06:21 - The skid car looks like some sort of weird transformer toy.

06:29 It's a Cadillac with extra wheels,

06:31 sort of casters, outriggers on the side.

06:34 And the instructor has a control panel inside

06:37 that can allow him to use those wheels

06:38 to lift the wheels of the car off the ground.

06:42 Front, rear, both rear, all four.

06:45 And that can simulate different driving experiences.

06:48 Like when a car's pushing oversteer and understeer

06:51 if you're driving on ice.

06:52 That gives you a chance to practice

06:54 correcting a skid, basically.

06:56 - Look where you want to end up.

06:57 That's the key part of this.

06:58 So when it starts to slide,

07:00 keep your eyes focused on where you think you should end up.

07:03 And then everything else will be so much more

07:06 second nature, almost.

07:07 It'll be kind of a, it'll just react with it.

07:09 - So are you messing with it right now?

07:10 - Uh-huh, a little bit.

07:11 - So should I be doing something different?

07:13 - You're just fine.

07:14 You're coming out of the gas pedal like you should.

07:15 I'm giving you the easiest of the two skids.

07:17 But then when I transfer into something like this,

07:20 then you're a little bit busier.

07:22 - I really like the skid car.

07:26 Everything else was pretty intimidating.

07:28 I haven't had a lot of experience in new cars.

07:30 I never trusted the brakes.

07:31 It was my first time ever driving anything with ABS.

07:34 But skid cars, that's something I know about

07:36 because when it comes to making smoke

07:38 and correcting a skid, I know how to do that.

07:40 - Wanted on record that that was not my fault.

07:49 - There she really had no chance to do anything

07:52 'cause the whole car was off the ground.

07:54 (upbeat music)

07:56 - So we finally got to the road course.

08:02 And it's not a very big course.

08:04 You can't run about like three cars wide on it.

08:06 But it's very, very technical.

08:07 Bandarant specifically designed this course to train

08:10 and he did a really good job of it.

08:11 Every single corner was drastically different

08:13 than the corner before it.

08:14 And it was a lot of fun.

08:16 - Everything we've done this far has built up

08:19 to us driving these cars on the road course.

08:22 (upbeat music)

08:27 (car engine revving)

08:30 - Oh wow, that makes so much more sense now.

08:51 So I had a revelation on the track

08:53 where I discovered what trail braking is.

08:55 They had told us what trail braking was

08:56 but I didn't really have faith in it

08:58 or completely understand it

08:59 until I did it for the first time.

09:00 I discovered trail braking coming out about the third turn.

09:04 Nice swooping turn.

09:06 There we go, there we go, there we go.

09:07 Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.

09:10 I was on the brakes a little bit

09:11 and the car went exactly where I wanted it to go.

09:14 The idea of trail braking is to brake hard enough

09:17 that you're putting more weight onto the front tires.

09:20 There's a fine line there

09:21 and trail braking gets you to that max.

09:26 To be honest, I never wanted to leave the track.

09:29 I had so much fun driving on it

09:31 and every lap I'd find something I did wrong

09:34 and I'd hurry up and go around the track

09:36 to get to that same section

09:37 and try to improve upon what I did the lap before.

09:40 The 30 or 40 minutes we had, I did not waste.

09:43 (car engine revving)

09:46 So up until now, all of my coworkers and I

09:49 were all in the same boat.

09:50 We're learning the same skills

09:52 and nothing is really graded.

09:54 There's no time.

09:55 We don't know who was the fastest around the road course.

09:58 So right before we left,

10:00 the instructor set up an hollow cross

10:01 and gave us each one warmup lap to figure out the course

10:05 and then one lap around it to see who's the fastest driver.

10:09 (dramatic music)

10:12 (dramatic music)

10:15 Before coming to Bondurant,

10:38 I thought Mike would be my main competition

10:40 and then I saw Tom driving

10:41 and Tom really surprised me.

10:42 Tom was pretty good.

10:43 (car engine revving)

10:47 When I watched Mike on the autocross,

10:51 I was really nervous 'cause the car looked nice and balanced

10:54 but I think he was just going slow.

10:57 - I really assumed Jesse would be the fastest guy

11:02 'cause he's from North Carolina

11:03 and all of those guys at North Carolina that I've ever met

11:05 are into NASCAR, they're into dirt tracking.

11:07 So I figured he's the guy to beat.

11:10 Julia had the seventh quickest time.

11:15 - Seventh quickest.

11:16 - Alina, sixth quickest time.

11:19 - How political.

11:20 - Tom was the fifth quickest time.

11:22 Brandon.

11:23 Mike.

11:26 - Nice Jesse.

11:28 - Nice work.

11:29 - Jesse!

11:30 (cheering)

11:30 - You get to drive us home 'cause you're the best driver.

11:33 Yeah!

11:34 - I don't care, I'm excited about that.

11:37 - So Steve McQueen has a quote about life

11:40 is just waiting when you're gonna race again

11:42 and that's exactly how I felt

11:43 when we got back here to the offices.

11:45 I jumped into my Ford Escape and drove home.

11:49 I'm just waiting to get behind the wheel and race hard again.

11:52 This was by far the coolest thing I've ever done

11:54 working for Hot Rod.

11:55 It gives me so much more knowledge.

11:57 I wish I would have done this before the introduction

11:59 of the new Viper, I got to go to it.

12:01 We raced on Sonoma Raceway

12:03 and I really wished I would have had this knowledge

12:05 beforehand but I'll be ready next time.

12:07 (upbeat music)

HOT ROD Thrashes Six New Corvettes at Bondurant! - HOT ROD Unlimited Episode 24

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