It's a Gas Gas Gas!
On This Track, Average Joes and Janes Get Their Motors Running, and Hearts Racing
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Friday, August 29, 2008; Page C01
SUMMIT POINT, W.Va.
Gentlemen and ladies, start your engines!
And we do mean ladies, because pulling out of the pits and onto the track at Summit Point Motorsports Park is Sandy Shapiro, the rookie out of Baltimore! Quite a story here, sports fans: Mom of two college kids, a pediatric speech pathologist, and yet hitting the track with her 500-horsepower 2008 BMW M5 like Danica Patrick on maternal steroids!
Shapiro is pulling into the starting lane, shifting into first. She revs that German engineering and -- thunka thunka chunk. Stalls out!
"I'm terrified!" she wails. Then, to herself: "Breathe. Breathe."
She cranks, she revs, she shifts and holy cow, she's swinging into the first turn!
This has to be one of the more thrilling moments here at Friday at the Track at Summit Point, a day where you pay your nickel and take your chances, driving your very own car as fast and furious as you like. (Well, pretty much. Details to come.) But is this not glorious? Is this not joy? Is this not freedom from the regulated roadways, the tyranny of speed limits that save our lives but mute our inner Richard Petty? Hasn't everybody wanted to just stomp on the gas and see what that baby will do? And you can! Right now! No cops, no radar guns, no stop signs, no tractor-trailers mucking up the Beltway.
Whhaaannhhh-nnaaannhhh!!! Eeeerrrrrttt!!! Whhaaannhhhh-nnaaannhhh!!
HA-HA-HA-HA!
"You just forget the rest of the world," says Ray Bruning, a 46-year-old dad and network engineer for Sprint, who lives a couple of miles away and brought his 2006 Mini Cooper to the track.
So the deal is you pay your $250 registration fee, take the orientation and training class about 9 a.m., then drive with an instructor riding shotgun for four 20-minute sessions. Other classroom talks fill in the day. You can also pop into one of the track's junkers to spin through the skid pad, a water-slicked oval that sends you into 25-mph skids and where instructors teach you how to pull out of them.
Master enough skills and you can drive solo. This usually takes several days of training, because, as instructor Don Ruschman tells the 40 or 50 beginning students who turned up on a recent Friday, "most of the time in driving, our instincts are wrong."
