Learning to master the Gen V on the road course

[VENOM V]

I took a two-day private lesson at Ron Fellows School at Spring Mountain about a week ago. I had previously completed their Levels I and II courses and completed about 20 track days since. In Levels I and II, you learn all of the fundamentals of driving well on the track- heel-toe shifting, turn-in, apex, balance braking, visual scanning, the correct line, Etc.. I felt that I had a fundamental understanding of those skills, but wanted to take my abilities up a notch. To my surprise, I found out that if you drive your own car, a private lesson is about the same cost as a group lesson. This was a chance to take a private lesson with their chief instructor that I respect and communicate with well, Rick Malone. Track all to ourselves most of the time, custom designed curriculum? Hell yes!

Over the course of two days, we did a variety of things- lead/follow, Rick in the car with me driving, Rick driving, Rick in the tower looking down on me and coaching me over the radio, and lots of discussion in the classroom between sessions. At the beginning, one thing that really impressed me was the tremendous exit speed that Rick was able to achieve coming out of corners. I was late-braking and catching him at corner entry but he would then pull away at exit and yield an overall quicker lap. This helped me break bad habits I had learned of braking hard and late. It's better to brake earlier and then lighten pressure as you approach turn-in for lots of reasons. The car is less upset as you enter the corner because it's not recoiling from the hard braking. It's difficult to not over-brake if you brake at the last minute, which Rick proved to me. Plus, when you brake too late and hard, your tires will start to overheat and lose grip before you know it, and it's unnecessarily hard on your brakes as well. Believe me, I boiled the brake fluid three different times on Corvette Grand Sports previously in the school. Too many things to list- why one should try to sense and eliminate as much understeer as possible, because it scrubs speed and overheats your front tires; benefits of changing your line to create mini-straights between adjacent corners and in esses; using throttle and brake to correct your line instead of the steering wheel, Etc. Rick continually tuned the curriculum based on his observations of how I could improve.

I told him that one of my goals was to become as comfortable with the Viper at and beyond it's limits as I am in my Camaro and in Corvettes, which I have considerable track time from the Levels I and II courses. So after a couple of sessions on-track exercises, we hit the skid pad. And boy did we, non-stop for about an hour! We knew we were going to waste my half-spent R-compound tires in this exercise, so I had a set of new MPSCs ready to mount after the skid pad. We started out on the wet skid pad. It took Rick all of 5 minutes to have the Viper figured out. We did wet figure eights and tried to do circles (donuts) around a ring of cones. The point is to get the car sideways and drift it under control without knocking over cones. Well Rick did it, so shouldn't I be able to? Haha, after killing a few cones I progressed enough to move on to the dry skid pad.

Painted on the dry skid pad was a small oval course, with a big sweeper at one and and a tight corner at the other, and a kink in one of the straights. The beauty of this skid pad exercise is that you can drive the wheels off of it, spinning and losing control on occasion without any risk of hitting anything. I could never push the car this hard on a road course for fear of wrecking my snake. I worked on a couple of skills here- the first trying to fly around that oval as fast as I could. The other was to purposely get the car sideways and try to recover elegantly without going off track or spinning. It was surprisingly easy in the Viper. I had so much fun honing my car control skills that I didn't want to stop. At the concusion of this, I felt very comfortable with the Viper at the limit.

This will go against the grain of the most common misconception of the Viper - the Gen V is NOT difficult to control at the limit, no more difficult than my Camaro or a Vette. It handles exceptionally well, very well balanced before and at the limits. Rick had driven Vipers in the past, but never felt that they were as predictable and controllable as his bread and butter, the Corvette (he now pilots a C7 Z51 Vette in the school, and on occasion a C6 ZR1). After tracking my Viper and testing it's behavior at length on the skid pad, Rick declared that they had "fixed the Viper." He was very complimentary of it's handling. He may not have been a fan of the Viper on the track previously, but he clearly is now. I am too in case you didn't notice, LOL.

I will admit that in the past I had felt that the Gen V Viper was wicked fast but a little harder to track at it's limits than it should be. Here's why:
1. It was hammered into my head by the damn press! And because of the high cost of the car, I erred on the conservative side on track. I think the press is stuck in this line of thinking, in reality the Gen V is a dream on the track.
2. You need to have Stability Control in Track Mode, which defeats traction control and leaves stability control at a reduced level. I had previously tracked in Sport Mode. If the rear end steps out, a driver is typically supposed to increase throttle in order to weight transfer to the rear so that you have traction to bring the car under control. But in Sport Mode, the traction control is too invasive, it cuts throttle so that you can't use throttle to get yourself out of trouble. Instead, it puts you into a fairly violent "tank slapper" fishtail. But once in Track Mode, the car behaves entirely different, it's very easy to control. Rick and I both agreed that the stability control in Track Mode is so non-invasive that you don't notice it, even when you do get a little sideways. Track Mode = problem solved. I will say for beginners, Sport Mode is probably more appropriate until you learn how to use throttle correctly when loose.
3. The Viper rotates at a faster rate when it becomes loose because it has a short wheel base and low polar moment of inertia (meaning that the mass of the car is biased towards the center of the car, not the front and rear). So when my Camaro becomes loose, I have more time to react because the rear end steps out slowly. The Viper steps out faster, so you need to have quick hands and feet. It's not hard to have quick hands and feet once you're used to it, and this becomes second nature with skidpad work. The best analogy is mouse sensitivity: If you've set your mouse with low sensitivity and then use someone else's computer with high sensitivity, at first it's difficult to control. Once you become used to the faster reacting mouse, it's a piece of cake to use. Make sense?

Perhaps the best take-away from this lesson is that I am now truly comfortable tracking the Viper hard. The car is so good at the limits, so well balanced, it's hard for me to see the need for an upgrade such as the MCS. About the only improvement I feel it needs is a little more aero at some tracks, and the carbon aero package solves that. Yes, it's that good.