Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? GRM Publisher Tim Suddard recently spent some time working with driving coach E. Paul Dickinson. By the end of the two-day session, Tim had picked up more than six seconds per lap. Photography Credit: Mark Langello
I’ve never been a private lessons kinda guy. I picked up skiing on my own, I figured out how to swim because it beat drowning, and I learned how to race in group sessions at club drivers’ schools. So when I volunteered as the guinea pig for a journalistic experiment in driver coaching (yeah, tough job), I signed on for an adventure that turned out to be unlike anything else I have ever experienced.
Driver coaching is all about you. Unlike a regular driving school, there is no sharing, no waiting and no compromising. My job was to try out a driver coach for myself and find out just how much they could really help a guy like me—or, in this case, me.
The coach I picked was E. Paul Dickinson, a guy we have known for years through our early autocrossing endeavors. E. Paul has been coaching beginners and experts alike for more than 30 years and has had a storied motorsports career in endurance racing, Solo and other venues.
We did our coaching at Roebling Road Raceway, which we got to sample just after they had completed their fabulous repaving job. Roebling Road is a great place to train or test. Not only is it a relatively inexpensive facility to rent at about $1800 per weekday, it also appears to be a short and simple track, yet is deceptively complex.
The car we used was our MX-5 Cup project. The new Mazda MX-5 spec racer has proven to be a worthy successor to the Spec Miata and is an absolutely stellar tool for this type of exercise. Our project car has combined nearly zero maintenance costs with close to perfect handling and balance, so we can’t say enough about how nicely it has turned out. Now if only the SCCA, in their infinite wisdom, would develop a place for these cars to race competitively at the regional level, then all would be perfect.
Homework
Even before we arrived at the track, it was apparent that E. Paul would be taking this assignment way more seriously than I was. A package arrived weeks ahead of time that included a survey with questions about my learning style, driver competence and goals for the session.
While my main goal in accepting this assignment was, honestly, to get out of the office and spend some time at the track with my son, I dutifully filled out the forms. E. Paul explained some of the questions to me by pointing out that to help a student, he needs to understand how they learn. Some people prefer verbal instructions, while others do better by watching other people do stuff.
I felt pretty good about my prospects once I had the forms in the mail. After all, while I have never won any type of real championship, I have been racing and autocrossing for the last 25 years. I consider myself a competent and experienced, if not great, driver. I should be the perfect guinea pig for a story like this, right?
As I would learn from E. Paul, however, these 25 years of experience have given me a lot of time to learn bad habits. Sure, I knew roughly where the line was and had good car control skills, but simple stuff—like looking toward the next corner and not down at the track, or picking landmarks around the track—had somehow eluded me. But that came later….
In a final bit of preparation to make this whole exercise even more educational, we asked Glenn Stephens to hang out with us for the weekend and do some data acquisition. Glenn owns Track Systems Technologies, the company that makes the nifty little GPS-based $995 data acquisition tool known as the Traqmate. By the way, if you are wondering if a tool like this is too complicated for you, Glenn had my 12 year-old son fully trained in just two days. The needed software can be easily downloaded on the cheapest of laptop computers.
First Period
E. Paul insists on two days for coaching, and the first one has to be pretty much you alone on track. To accommodate this request, we rented Roebling Road the day before a Targa Sixty Six track event. Brian Redman runs the Targa Sixty Six group, which hosts low-key track days for 30 to 40 people at a time. This made the perfect venue for our second day.
After we made a couple of baseline laps, we borrowed a pickup truck and E. Paul got to work. Since he uses a street vehicle and makes frequent stops on track to point out landmarks and lines, E. Paul insists that the first day of coaching be done on an empty race track.
Physical Education
As we worked through the two-day session, I was amazed at how much I was learning on a track that I thought I already knew. My excuse to get out of the office was turning into a very real learning experience, with very measurable results on track. Even more important than going faster, I felt more comfortable in the seat of that race car.
Roebling’s Turn 7 is usually notoriously scary—but it’s not when you hit the apex correctly. Likewise, Turn 1 is way faster than you think if you use the correct gears and brake early, then power through the corner.
As the Traqmate data showed, hitting one corner correctly helped me in the next one. For example, by correctly getting through Turns 1, 2 and 3, I was coming into Turn 4 at nearly 100 mph, the fastest I have ever gone on this part of the track. That’s real progress.
Graduation
As our main story suggests, driving coaches are definitely worth the money. Sure, I spent some precious time relearning both the car and the track, but even with 25 years of experience and on a track I thought I knew, I still picked up more than 61/2 seconds per lap.
Even though I am never going to win a national championship, what’s more important to me are the good, basic skills I learned that I can take to every track I now visit. These skills should make me safer and faster.
Hiring a driver coach requires some financial commitment—figure about $1000 per day plus track rental and expenses—so you’ll need to ask yourself if this increased safety and speed are worth it. (You’d probably pay that much to make your car safer and faster, right? So why not spend it on you?)
As for E. Paul’s coaching ability, the proof is obviously in the pudding—and in the data acquisition. What the raw numbers don’t show is how much I liked his style, professionalism and easygoing manner. He was a very easy guy to hang out with for a couple of days. So easy, in fact, that we have asked him and Glenn Stephens to join the GRM staff at our big party at the Rolex Daytona 24 this January, where E. Paul will host a seminar using the data collected from our weekend at Roebling Road. —Tim Suddard
