Without question, the most fun that I have ever legally had in a vehicle was when I took my 250+ horsepower mini truck to an autocross-like event at my local air force base. It was put together by a driving school, which I had heard about through a friend of a friend. The driving instructors were mostly made up of crash Spec Miata racers, who all had decades of real racing experience behind them. Needless to say, it made for an extraordinarily thrilling day for everyone in attendance.
Since we were going to be brutally beating driving our own vehicles on the course, we began the day with pre-race vehicle inspections. The driving instructors needed to make sure that none of us had any planned trips to the nearby hospital. Once all of the vehicles passed the safety test, we signed a waiver and began learning the basics of autocrossing. Certain cones meant certain things, and if you ignored the rules, you would likely end up looking like a jerk in one way or another. Got it. The walk around the track and basic training eventually wrapped up, and it was finally time to run our cars (ehem… trucks…) with our new driving, racing, and acronym knowledge.
The following several hours were spent pushing our vehicles to the limits, and generally having the times of our lives. It has now been about 3 or 4 years since that fondly remembered summer day, and I still get overly excited thinking about how much fun it was. The amount that I learned, and the amount of fun that I had is simply inexplainable to this day.
Fast forward to last week, and I just so happened to come across an extremely cool website. It takes the place of my “friend of a friend” by helping you find the nearest auto racing schools to where you are. It’s known as: “Auto-Racing-Schools.FindTheBest.com“, and if you are reading this, you should definitely check it out. Some of the racing schools listed on the site are far more serious than what I did, but I would bet the knowledge gained is exponentially more serious as well. The other excellent part of this website is the fact that if you are a driving or racing school, you can add your business to the list and potentially get your name out there to the masses. Look, we all just want to drive our cars like we stole them, and we want to do it without landing behind bars. So go tell your family and friends to pool together a birthday present for you, and get yourself into the racing scene! Even better, bring me along!
Went to one several years ago that featured ‘mini-sprint’ cars. Yeah, they were a little under powered but the smaller size made it feel faster! Everybody gotta go to one of these. An absolute BLAST! The really neat aspect, other than safety, is it ain’t your car. You truly can drive it like you stole it!