It's a Gas Gas Gas!
On This Track, Average Joes and Janes Get Their Motors Running, and Hearts Racing

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 29, 2008

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."

For example, you have to look where you want the car to go, and not look at what you're afraid of hitting or running over (in a crisis, this is harder than you think). You don't use the brakes in a skid -- unless the car rotates 90 degrees, which means you're not going to be able to recover, and then you slam on the brakes and stop trying to steer.

The facility has three tracks; today, students are running the Shenandoah Circuit, 18 turns and five straightaways in a two-mile loop. Phew! Decisions have to be made so fast that instructors set up orange cones on the entry and exit points of each turn, to train drivers' eyes where to look.

"I'm very, very nervous," Shapiro is saying. You will not be surprised to learn that she's accompanying her husband, Mitch, who's really into cars. He's on the track in a 2006 Porsche Carrera. She drives an SUV, but you can't drive that on the track, so he lent her this monster of a 2008 Beemer.

She pops in the driver's seat and announces in a bright voice that she's "not really good with a stick shift." She straps on her helmet and invites us to ride in the back. This car has a top end of around 200 mph and can go from zero to 100 in 10 seconds flat. We are overcome with an urge to check the death and dismemberment clause of our insurance coverage.

Instructor Klaus Hirtes, a slender, silver-haired 20-year veteran of driving instruction (he's retired from the airline industry), slides in the passenger seat. He has a slight, vaguely European accent, and tells her to relax, that this is going to be like a drive to the grocery store. He guides her to the edge of the track. It's loud, cars blowing by, engines roaring. Shapiro eases out onto the track as if she's pulling out of a parking space. She's also looking down at her feet.

"What are you looking for down there?!" Hirtes shouts over the din. "Give it some gas, a little gas -- make sure that's the clutch! Go go GO GO!"

Cars roar up to her bumper. The car wobbles. "I'm a little directionally challenged," Shapiro confesses.

"I'll help you with the steering." Hirtes reaches over and helps drive with his left hand. Now we have three hands on one steering wheel.

The car shimmies. We're in third gear and doing 40 mph. Cars blow by at more than 100 mph: Whump whump whump.

Hirtes: "Don't fight me when I try to turn the wheel." Pause. "I'm guiding you, but you have to let me guide you." Pause. "You have to let me help. Here's the turn. Brake brake BRAKE!"

The car pulls into a 180-degree turn called the Hook.

Hirtes: "Where's the cone? The cone? The cone! Go go go go! No, no! No braking! No braking!"

Shapiro teeters into another straightaway, 25 mph. Blurs go by: Lotus, Mustang GT, Corvette. Was that a Honda?

Shapiro, nervous, voice bright, takes her right hand off the wheel: "I'm relaxing! I'm relaxing! See? I'm wiggling my fingers!"

"Look for this turn!"

She puts the hand back on the wheel, and Hirtes helps steer into the Karussel, the banked left hairpin turn that leaves you looking out the passenger door at the track below. Shapiro hangs in there, negotiates the Corkscrew, the Big Bend and makes it onto the back straightaway. More cars blow by. Hirtes guides her around the last turn, then back around the track once, twice more.

We pull back into the paddock. We seem to still be alive.

Shapiro, delighted: "Klaus, I'm going to take you home with me."

Hirtes, unmoved, pulls out an evaluation card.

"You have to give me a gold star!"

"I don't," he says politely, "and I won't."

He points out her driving technique checks on the scoring grid, which goes from one to 10. "Michael Schumacher would be a 10. You are a 1."

"Yes. I'm a novice. I'm a beginner."

"Yes, you are."

He gives her some coaching advice and promises she'll do great things in the afternoon.

During the lunch break, you walk around, get the full range of drivers.

Peter Sienkiewicz, a 50-something mechanic, is driving a hot red 2005 Ford GT, a 525-horsepower, two-seat machine with the engine in the back. It goes for about $150,000. This is his first Friday at the Track event, and he kept it at a modest 105 mph in the straightaways. Thirty feet away is Greg Keller, a co-worker of Bruning's, who's driving a 1991 Honda CRX that is painted in a lovely shade of primer.

"I only started with the cars last year," says Sienkiewicz. "The Mustang flew by me, the Mini flew by me, and I'm just not worried. It's not just about what your car can do. It's about knowing the track."

Shapiro tries out the skid pad, spinning out, then whipping the car around, remembering to keep her eyes forward, looking where she wants the car to go, what instructors call "ocular driving." She says: "This would be a lot more fun if they handed out martinis."

Confidence bolstered (sans vodka), she's ready to hit the track again.

Wham, she's out into the first turn, Hirtes hanging tight.

"Very nice, much better than the first time around," he's saying, Shapiro taking the car through an easy turn called the Hammer so smoothly, at 40 mph, that it almost makes you long for the wonders of fourth gear.

Then into the tight turns.

Hirtes, wrestling at the wheel: "You're giving me a hard time when I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help you! Go, go! Gas, a little bit of gas!"

Down the straightaway -- and then it happens. Shapiro drops the car down into the banked turn, the Karussel. She's looking left through the turn, and in so doing, smoothly pulls the car through the banked route. She whips by the cone, then shimmies through the corkscrew. She's doing all the steering. The car pulls up to 55 in the straight.

"Look at you!" Hirtes exults.

A few more turns, another lap, and there's the checkered flag. "Oh my God, I'm done!"

She's pulling into the paddock, slowing, the car lurches, lurches, dies.

Hirtes: "Why are you doing this? You want to annoy me? The clutch, the clutch! It's your left foot! Don't forget to turn the steering wheel!"

Shapiro doesn't care. She pulls halfway into a parking spot and lets the car heave to a rest.

Friday at the Track. She's beaming, and why not? She's a track star.