By Chris Doane
Thursday, Aug 27th, 2009 @ 11:59 am

There are many memorable firsts in life. Your first kiss, first real job, the first time you drive a $150,000 supercar 100 mph down a very short back stretch and apply full brake 200 feet before a 90-degree right-hander. Wait… what?

Starting Grid

The track is Waterford Hills Raceway: A 1.4 mile road course nestled in the middle of a gun club in Clarkston, Michigan. Waterford is much more about handling than speed. With the back straight barely 0.2 miles long, it’s the only place on the track I’ll flirt with triple digits. Going by the official track map, eight corners await me, though, as it turns out, a few of those corner features have multiple bends.

The car is the 2009 Audi R8 ; Ingolstadt’s 420 horsepower supercar. Motivation begins at the 4.2-liter V8 and flows through Audi ’s quattro all-wheel-drive system. An AWD setup, yes, but, the quattro system in the R8 will never send more than 35 percent of the power to the front wheels. Should I need to change gears, I’ve got Audi’s R-tronic transmission. The R-tronic is not a dual clutch setup, rather, it is a close cousin to the sequential E-gear transmission found in the Lamborghini Gallardo, but with optimized tuning for the R8.

That leaves me, a 30-year-old automotive journalist whose racetrack credentials are a little… sparse, to navigate the bends. Sure, I’ve done plenty of sport driving on racetrack-like roads, but as for setting tire on an actual track, I’ve never done it. In the interest of preserving my life, and the finely sculpted sheet metal of the R8, NASA Performance Touring and Koni Challenge driver Jack Baruth (seen in the above video) is riding shotgun to pass along his cornering Zen.

First stint

For my first lesson, Jack and I regressed to a Kindergarten game of follow the leader — the only difference being that five-year-olds can’t drive $200,000 worth of Audis. Jack is driving a bright red Audi TT S and my job is to follow his line and speed to learn the way around this course. Easy enough, right? If only.

My first problem is vision. Among the other firsts of the day, this is my first time wearing a racing helmet. My peripheral vision has gone from plenty to “where’s the door handle?†It’s so disorienting that I’m going way wide at the corner exit. So wide that I’m getting dangerously close to having two of my four Pirellis in the dirt.

My second problem is, well, everything else. Did I mention I’d never done this before? Strangely enough, the hours of Grand Turismo 4 on the Playstation have not prepared me for the responsibility of piloting a six-figure car around a racetrack and not crashing it. It takes almost no time at all to appreciate how much information you have to process on the fly and how much concentration you need to keep the car pointed in the right direction. On my second lap, I came off the final corner, turn 8, onto the front stretch and noticed some motion in the start/finish tower. It was our video crew moving to a new position, and in the tenth of second I’d taken my eye off the course, my line on the track was blown and a large correction was needed.

While I quickly learn from that mistake, things are still going downhill. I see brake lights ahead of me on parts of the track I shouldn’t see them. My speed is dropping and Jack is slowing down so I can catch up. We rip down the backstretch and go briskly into turn 6, a 90-degree right. I let the car run too wide again and nearly have an off. Through the turn 7 esses, I start flashing my brights to let Jack know I want to pit. He waves out the window during the long, sweeping left-hander of turn 8 and we make for pit lane. Hilariously, when I pull up next to him in the pits, he asks, “do you wanna go faster?â€

“Uh, actually do you want hop in here? I feel like I need some instruction…I feel like I’m doing a lot wrong,†I answer.

“Oh, sure!â€

Second Stint
As it turns out, I’m even sitting wrong. Jack jumps in, takes one look at me and moves me forward to a less-than-comfortable driving position. With good reason though, as I need to be up on the wheel to have good range of motion in my arms while keeping my hands at the “10″ and “2†positions. Sure, you may have thought your high school driver’s ed instructor was a crusty old-timer for making you drive with a balanced hand position, but at the track, anything less, or any shuffling of the wheel within your hands, and you’ve failed.

With my hands and arms in the right place, it’s time to get my foot down. I accelerate down the pit lane and out onto turn 1, a sharp, sweeping right-hander that goes slightly uphill as you transition to the next corner. Turn 2 consists of a gentle “s†pattern. Right, then left, then back right and onto a quick straight — all slightly downhill. So far the R8 is handling all of this with ease. Grip seems endless. But, then again, I’m not exactly keeping an Andretti pace.

Somewhere around this point, my memory gets a little hazy. My eyes are several yards down the track, my ears are on Jack (and the tires) and my memory is out to lunch. I’m concentrating so hard on driving the car at that moment, that once it’s over, it’s all a bit of a blur. Professional athletes always talk about “leaving it all on the field†and apparently I’ve left it all out on the track hanging somewhere over turn 4.

I’m not at a total loss since there are two memorable lessons from the day: singing tires and unwinding the wheel.

The first is not your favorite emo-indie band, but if you don’t listen to it, you may end up cut. The idea is, when you corner, you want to do it at a speed where the noise coming from the tires is a subtle, hum. This tells you you’re right at the limit of the tires ability to grip the road. If the tires are screeching and screaming at you, you’re probably a tread block or two away from losing it. Not surprisingly, my first listen for musical tires resulted in something quite shouty.

The front stretch at Waterford Hills has a very slight rise at the end of it. It’s just enough to block your entry view of turn 1 until you’re almost on top of it. So here I was bombing down the front stretch and I’m a little late on the brake and turn in. The tires are not pleased and make a sound somewhere between Metallica and Pantera. I screech and slide through the corner, though the R8 hangs in there surprisingly well. Jack turns to me very calmly and says, “that’s about as fast as we want to do that one.â€

Oops.

At the end of that lap, my ears finally tune in to what Jack is trying to teach me. In the “Swamp turn†(a.k.a. turn eight) the tires go subtlety Soprano as I maintain speed though the long left-hander and aim for the apex that leads to the front stretch. Jack is pleased. “All right, you got it, you got. You know where to go…now floor it!â€

Relax and Unwind

The second lesson, unwinding the wheel, doesn’t come as easy. The textbook explanation sounds easy; once you’ve hit the apex of the corner, get the steering wheel back to center ASAP so that you can get back on the gas. The car wants to accelerate when the wheels are straight, not when the wheels are turned.

Fast-forward to real life in the turn 2 esses at Waterford and I must’ve left that textbook in my locker. The problem is that, for a racetrack beginner, unwinding the wheel this quickly feels like certain death, as if you’re going to run right off the track.

I clip the apex for the first right-hander in turn 2 and Jack reaches over to straighten out the steering wheel to setup for the following left. He does this way before I would’ve. I prepare myself to go headlong into the guardrail and for the embarrassing change of pants that will ensue. I’m also accelerating my brain to work out the excuse I’ll give Audi for wrecking their R8. Only, none of that happens. “Oh look! The track is still there,†Jack says with a laugh. Not only is it there, but we are right at the apex for the following left-hander. Without Jack’s correction, I would’ve eased out of the right-hander, and the front wheels would not have been straight in time. I also would not have been using the entire track. It’s a pair of errors that could cost me a few tenths in a game of hundredths.

On the following trip through turn 2, I fight off the urge ease out of the corner. If thrill seekers can stand on bridge with a glorified rubber band around their ankles and get themselves to jump, surely I can move a steering wheel a few degrees in one direction? Nope, too much to ask! On the next pass, however, I pull it off. The “oh now I get it†feeling washed over me right on cue. It doesfeel faster.

“Hey see there…I didn’t even have to steer for ya that time!†Jack bellows.

Cool down lap
The impression the R8 left on me will be floating around in my cortex for years to come. It’s very easy to drive the R8 very fast. With immense grip and such a planted, neutral chassis, it would take an exceptionally idiotic driver to get the R8 bent out of shape. But Lindsay Lohan could probably do it.

All I know is: I’ve never turned in so hard, cornered so flat, or braked so late in my life.

Words and photos by Chris Doane.

(Editor’s note: We’ll cover day-to-day life with the R8 next in a standard, non-racetrack review.)

41 Comments
  

LeftLane

Login

  • LeftLane

    Copyright © 2005 - 2012 Left lane News.
    All rights reserved.