We all do the same things: brake, turn, and accelerate. It seems simple. But, we don’t all do them the same. How someone puts them together is the only real difference that separates the best drivers from the rest.
After choosing a path toward a racing license, acquiring the necessary safety gear, and prepping for race school, we’ve finally arrived at day one of Cal Club Super School at Buttonwillow Raceway. Super School is an intensive two-day training program which, upon completion, would qualify us to race in the SM class the day after we completed the program. Pen in one hand and a large cup of strong coffee in the other, we stepped into class as a fairly normal person and left as an amateur race car driver. Here in Part IV we’ll fill in some of the blanks as far as what you’ll come across in between those two phases.
We would imagine that by now, to tell our readers that the staff of Winding Road are huge fans of the Gran Turismo series of driving simulators would be roughly akin to telling them that water is wet—pretty obvious. That doesn’t make us at all unique, as millions of gamers with a jones for fast metal have known since the initial GT launched on the PlayStation One back in 1997. The Real Driving Simulator hit a resonant chord in that first year, and has continued to set the bar very high in each of its subsequent instantiations.