A track day from the eyes of a "newbie".

Donington was my first-ever track day, and I suspect it won't be my last! The only similar experience I've had was a day at Silverstone, driving Caterhams, Formula ford single seaters and Peugeot 106's; but while it was fantastic fun and most instructive, we didn't actually go very fast, and were not allowed to push the cars anywhere near their limits - I've played a lot of racing simulation computer games, so I have a reasonable idea about racing lines and stuff, and I guess the track day was aimed at teaching these basics at lower speeds rather than getting to feel the G-forces as you corner. So a chance to try all this stuff safely and see what my car was capable of was something I couldn't turn down!

I (and my 2 passengers) set off at 6:30am on an overcast morning that brightened to beautiful sunshine and a freezing wind by the time we reached the M1 services near Donington - We stopped quickly to fill up on petrol so that I could properly calculate my fuel usage for the day, and put the top down so we wouldn't be subject to ridicule as we arrived :-) My car had started off nice & clean ready for its first MX5 club meeting, but by the time we reached Donington it had become the dirtiest MX5 in the paddocks, with massive mud splashes up the sides! (Bizarrely due to the heavy rain later it ended up as one of the cleanest looking cars by the end of the day)

The cars were divided into 3 groups, each getting a 20-minute session in each hour. The first group was booked by the MX5 club, but I booked too late to get into that, so I fetched up in the second group, which turned out to be booked out almost exclusively to MX5s anyway - I think the club took over the track day a bit! The organisers had opened up the Grand Prix track layout, which includes the Esses chicane and an extra loop of track with the 180 degree Melbourne hairpin and nearly-as-tight Goddards.

On the first couple of sessions quite a few people seemed to be pushing slightly too hard - I watched 2 cars spin off directly in front of me (fervently hoping that I was not about to follow them! I began to like having 195mm wide tyres compared to many people's 180's, as this seemed to be the main difference between my sticking to the road and their not!) [see above pictures for one of these trying to keep up with Richard Foster and overdoing it!]. Then the second session was stopped for a few minutes while another unfortunate was towed out of the gravel after outbraking themselves into McLeans (?). I considered the possibility of doing the same and wondered if I would soon be chiding myself as I sat waiting for recovery. My apprehension faded after this as I witnessed 2 more spins in my rear-view mirror and began to see that everyone seemed to survive these events intact!

On my first set of laps I managed to reach 85mph by the end of the Dunlop straight - this rose to just touching on 100mph by the last session, as I improved my speed entering the straight and left my braking at the end considerably later. Entering the Esses chicane at the end of the straight proved to be one of the most interesting corners, especially after 4 or 5 laps when my tyres started to go soft, and the back end of the car began to get quite out of shape. I was surprised at how well I controlled the car in these slides - my 2 passengers remarked at several points in every session where they thought we were heading into the "kitty litter", but I somehow held it together, and by the 3rd and 4th session they said they were actually enjoying themselves, and seemed to have some confidence in my abilities. Well, OK, so it was more due to my car deciding it didn't want to fall off the track despite my best efforts, but I like to think I contributed in some small way to our survival!

The scariest point was in the second session - I caught up with 2 cars; the first kindly let me by on the pit straight, and I followed the second for almost a lap until he spun off - and for the first time, I had open track in front of me, and I suddenly realised that I had been following other cars around and hadn't paid any attention to braking points and corner entry speeds, and oh shoot that chicane's approaching awfully fast, and the track looks so smooth that I'm bound to just glide straight on through that looming tyre wall! It's amazing how much easier it is to follow another car (even one that is going a lot faster than you would on your own) than to have to make all these important decisions for yourself! For a couple of laps, I took it quite carefully, but I quickly got an idea of safe, if not particularly fast, points to brake.

After that I started to brake later and harder, and was soon sliding and squealing the tyres quite a bit, especially into the Esses chicane. My passenger remarked that I seemed to be doing quite a bit of steering correction at times, but I hadn't noticed because I was too busy trying to avoid a spin! After a while I felt I was going reasonably well on most corners, but I just couldn't find the right line through McLeans and then Coppice - these are especially tricky as you approach them uphill (making judging braking distances hard) and blind, so you have to brake and turn in before you can see where you are going - it takes a lot of trust to take corners like that at high speeds! At one point I spotted Richard Foster's yellow beauty catching me, and for a few sweet corners I thought I managed to keep the distance between us, and then blew McLeans completely, and only just managed to stay on the track. I dived to the right to let Richard through, feeling quite embarrassed at how badly I'd taken the corner, and took it easy for a couple of corners to regroup :-) By the end of the day I was taking those corners a lot better, but I think a lot more practice and commitment are required before I'll get through there at a respectable pace! After seeing that at least one car had overshot the corner, I was understandably reluctant to follow them!

Then there were a couple of wet sessions. They started off sunny, and mid-session the skies opened up and water poured in for a brief but memorable time. In past experience at speeds over 45mph, very little rain has managed to get into the car, but this was heavy rain on a windy day and even at 80-100mph it was like having the fire brigade spraying the windscreen and the open cockpit with a massive jet of water. With the first spots of rain I was quite concerned about grip levels in the wet, but I quickly forgot that a few moments later when the car 30 feet in front of me vanished in the deluge! Visibility was only bad for a few seconds at a time, but it's quite disconcerting to be accelerating through 90mph down a straight, heading towards a slow 90 degree corner, and find yourself wondering if you have passed the 200m marker or if maybe the fuzzy white blob to the right is actually the 100m marker!

But the real fun increased throughout the sessions, especially when it dried again, where I pushed the car close to (and increasingly - for thrilling moments - slightly beyond) its limits. I have driven my MX5 fairly hard from time to time in the 18 months that I've owned it, but the occasional roundabout or a series of twisty bends just can't compare to the circuit - it's wider, smoother, and there's no risk of a child, cow, gutter or tree leaping out at you unexpectedly. And after several hot laps, you can feel the tyres going softer and the car sliding more, which you can't usually do on the open road in any safe or responsible manner.

One of the highest points was when I had been following a nippy car for several laps, and I managed to nail Redgate - braking very late into it, I just kissed the apex with my wheel, and accelerated out of the corner about 15mph faster than the other car, and swept past him down into Craner Curves. He saw me and kept to the right to allow me through, but I still knew I had aced the corner and there was no way he could hold me off down the straight with my extra momentum! Sweet!

Between sessions, we watched the other group of MX5s and the open session (including a couple of seriously hefty porsches, some TVRs, Caterhams, Impreza Turbos, a Mitsubish Evo and Honda NSX, a few hatchbacks, some MGFs and a BMW Z3, and finally a Sierra Cosworth with serious grip problems (he drove the course like a rally rather than taking a conventional racing line, which made him most entertaining to watch). One lone bronze MX5 stood up for the club in this group, and while the monster cars ripped up the tarmac in the straights, I thought he gave them a good run for their money in the bendy bits. I must say that watching him and the other "smaller cars" in that group, I was very glad to be in a group of only MX5s, as once I was up to speed I didn't have to worry much about holding up much faster cars - and some of those non-MX5's were utter monsters, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "traffic snarl-up" as they roared past.

It was interesting looking at my tyres between sessions too. They seemed fine after the first few sessions, but when I started to really push them, you could see that they were taking some punishment - the surface was "scrubbed" with marbles of rubber peeling away from the edges of the tread blocks, and the outside edges of the fronts were being worn quite noticeably in areas that normally wouldn't even touch the tarmac. They looked a lot cleaner and healthier after the 2 wet sessions, due to my tiptoeing around quite carefully while the track was wet. It's hard to judge but I think I knocked a good millimetre off the tyres during the day.

After each session my brake discs were very hot, so I was careful to park in gear, leaving the handbrake off, to minimise the risk of the disks warping in the areas clamped by the brake pads. I was impressed at how dirty my wheels became - they were quickly covered in a black powder from the brake pads, and you suddenly realise how much you've been using the brakes! Looking back over my video footage from the day I noticed just how much smoke and dust was coming from some cars as they braked hard.

I drove 14 miles in the first session, rising to 19 miles by the last session, for a grand total of 91.3 miles on track. For this we used a mere 3/4 of a tank of petrol - a total of 13.32 miles per gallon. Mysteriously, quite a bit lower than my normal average of 32 mpg!

Overall, I was really pleased with myself because (1) I and my passengers were unhurt, (2) my car was unscathed (apart from a small amount of rubber and brakepad evaporated!), and (3) I felt I really improved during the day. In the first session I really didn't know much about how my car handles "on the edge", how to drive Donington, and was quite nervous about having any kind of accident (especially in the wet). I was passed by a lot of cars as I took things very gently on the first run, but by the end of the day, I was throwing the car into corners with wild abandon and passing about 5 or 6 cars in each session without anyone else passing me (I guess the fast cars tended to get out first and disappear over the horizon, but at least they weren't lapping me after only a couple of laps!). I've still got a lot to learn, but I think I learned an awful lot during the day, both about my own abilities and about what my car will do under stressful cornering and braking. It was also awesome fun and not at all nerve wracking or scary as I had feared it might be. It's also pretty cool to go and drive on a world-renowned circuit instead of sitting on the sofa watching some famous guy do it on the TV.

My only regret is that I think I'm about to spend an awful lot of money on better seats (in those hairpins, my arms, legs and back got quite tired trying to stop myself slopping about), an exhaust that makes my engine sound like it has a tiny bit of street cred, and a new set of extra grippy tyres!

Finally, I would like to apologise to anybody I held up or cut up (I did my best not to!) and to thank Richard Foster for organising the Track Day, and the excellent and friendly staff at Donington. Thanks for an absolutely fabulous day!

Finally, here are some more pictures from Donington. Click the thumbnails for a full-size image - Note that some of these get up to about 250kB in size so may take a while to download.

Jason Williams, April 15, 2001