Avenue Magazine

This corner is killing me. It’s the most important turn of the Spring Mountain road course, because it exits into the longest straightaway, and I’m mangling it every time. To be clear, I’m mangling other corners, too. But not every lap. This mild-looking 110-degree right-hander seems committed to making me look bad.

You could call this a race track, but it’s really more than that. It’s a whole new way of visiting Las Vegas. You could come here to gamble or go to a show, of course, but everyone’s done that. For really distinctive bragging rights next time you’re in these parts, instead of making a beeline for the Strip, trying heading westbound into the setting Nevada sun. About 45 minutes through the jagged hills, you’ll be at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, a resort boasting a 3.1-mile private racing track.

I’m here with my brother and some Albertans from the Porsche Club of America Wild Rose Region who have come down to take part in a Porsche Club of America track day. My brother is letting me take turns lapping his new Porsche GT3. And, at this very moment, I’m doing some laps with a Porsche Club instructor, whose job it is to assess my driving ability. The very first thing I’m learning — which is really one of the great reasons to go to such a track — is I’m only doing a fraction of what’s possible with this car.

“Use all the track!” bellows my instructor over the magnificent, 7,000-rpm snarl of the 3.6-litre flat-six engine just over our shoulders. We’re coming out of a turn and he wants me all the way to the outside edge of the pavement. “You’re paying for it. You might as well use it all!” he says.

Of course, I don’t do that properly. I end up taking the next turn all wrong. Again. Only this time there’s a car right behind me.

“Should I let him by?” I ask my instructor, who is now pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s getting a migraine.

“Yeah, but… ” he says, his voice trailing away as I point up over the roof of the GT3 indicating the trailing driver should pass me on the inside. “But it’s an Audi,” he says, embarrassed, as the car roars by.

Spring Mountain is more than a gearhead’s wet dream. It’s a country club for speed freaks, with ritzy amenities that include finishing off a day of racing with a session in the sauna and a scotch. It has 300 members and 42 employees, from a masseuse and mechanics to track, timing and safety officials. Non-members can use the track by attending one of Spring Mountain’s performance driving schools, where you can drive the new 650 horsepower Corvette ZR1, the Lotus Elise or a Radical. The driving schools run from US$3,000 up to US$4,400, depending on the course, which usually run for two days.

If you want to be a member, there is a range of packages. Full charter members pay a US$40,000 initiation fee and US$5,000 in annual dues. Seasonal charter membership, active only from April through October, costs US$17,500 up front and US$2,500 in annual dues. In both scenarios, you get about 16 monthly racing days, plus access to on-site accommodations, and even long-term lease options on loft-style apartments with garages on the main floor — a great deal if you’re the kind of driving enthusiast who wants to head downstairs after breakfast and drive directly out onto the track.

Chris Chamberlain, a retired entrepreneur and former president of the Calgary-based information technology firm Geo X Systems, isn’t one of those driving enthusiasts, but he’s close. He’s a full-time Spring Mountain member, along with two dozen other self-made entrepreneurial types from Wild Rose Country. Chamberlain also drives at Race City in Calgary, at a track in Mission, British Columbia, and at a club similar to Spring Mountain in Angleton, Texas. You can tell he logs a lot of track hours. At the Porsche Club event I’m attending, Chamberlain is racing a red GT3 and he is smoking fast. I watch him come howling out of a hairy turn onto the front stretch a handful of times, the car always perfectly on line, balanced and accelerating hard.

Chamberlian has only been racing for a few years. He recently bought himself another high-performance car, a Corvette, and has done some modifications to the car to make it all “bling bling and shiny shiny.” But eventually it occurred to him that he needed to learn how to use the vehicle properly. “I figured out pretty quickly that with a big, supercharged car like that on the street, you can hurt yourself badly,” he says.

Chamberlain started doing some laps and driving schools at Race City and got hooked. When murmurs began that the Calgary track might be closing, he began to look around for options and came across Spring Mountain. “The people there are just great,” he says. “Those guys are doing nothing but helping me get faster.”

This topic comes up a lot: the pleasure that comes from learning about your car and getting it to rip like a roadster from Days of Thunder. At this point in automotive history, it’s common for people to own vehicles that have speed and cornering abilities well beyond what city streets (and traffic laws) will allow them to explore. In fact, it’s downright embarrassing when you think about the number of high-end sports cars that roll off the lots in Calgary that are never used for anything but puttering to and from work, and sitting in gridlock.

Felix Kuefler, treasurer of the Northern Alberta BMW Club, echoes that sentiment. He bought a BMW M3 last year and he’s down at Spring Mountain “to see what the car can actually do.”

Like many Albertans who make the trip, Kuefler has had his car shipped to Nevada by a company called Arrive and Drive. Owner Paul Conquest drives the auto-transporter — it carries up to five vehicles, with extra tires and a scaled-down mechanics shop — from Edmonton, through to Calgary to pick up drivers and take them to about 10 track events every year. This has included events at such famous tracks as Laguna Seca and Sears Point, both of which are in California. Fees run from $1,200 to $3,000 for a round trip, depending on where the event is being held.

Conquest is a Porsche 911 owner himself, although he didn’t bring it on this trip. But on the topic of how necessary a track is to really get the experience of what’s possible in your vehicle, he says: “Absolutely. If you have a GT3, there are most definitely things about that car that you cannot find out about legally on the street. And that’s what I really enjoy: finding the limits of the car and finding my own limits.”

By the end of the first day, I have just a hint of what that pleasure is all about. Only after several lapping sessions and my instructor signing me off for open racing am I finally getting to the comfort level where I can sense what’s possible from behind this particular steering wheel. That is: both what the car can do, and what I can do as a driver.

I wake for day two of the weekend, having discovered one other truth of racing: it’s more tiring than you think. It’s taken a solid 10 hours of sleep before I finally feel refreshed and can bounce out of bed like a kid. I can’t wait to get back out there.

On the track, my education resumes. A lot of that centres on trying to get the “racing line” right. The racing line is both simple and difficult. It’s simple in that it’s just the most efficient path around the course within the confines of the track surface; it’s a geometry puzzle in that sense. You’re trying to straighten the corners, which is why you “turn in” at the outside edge of the track, carve inside to the “apex” — or the inner most point or the corner — then exit the turn to the outside, which is known as the “track out.”

Hitting that line right is what’s difficult. That’s because even though the three critical points on each corner are marked with orange traffic cones — turn in, apex and track out — they’re harder to nail than you think. For starters, the apex of a corner is much later than the beginner’s brain will let them believe. You’re screaming down a straight stretch. A corner is looming. Thinking about life and limb, you want to hit the brakes and turn in. Trouble is, if you do this too early you’ll come out the far side of the corner without enough track to complete your turn. At that point, you either hit the brakes again or go sailing off the track into the weeds.

The better plan involves staying on the gas a little longer, braking harder and later; then turning in to hit the inside of the turn later around the bend. Doing this is pure exhilaration. The speed, the feeling of being right on the threshold, the very limit of the car’s traction. At that point there’s a kind of dance required between the feet and the hands, balancing the car, holding it on the racing line with very small steering and throttle adjustments.

“I’m still learning,” Chamberlain says about this delicate knife-edge balancing act. “But that’s the toughest part, to hit those marks cleanly and have your hands and feet so busy in the car. Braking and turning, then accelerating and unwinding.”

But it’s so worth it. And as you do it, lap after lap, you might also experience another pleasure, beyond learning about your car and yourself. Beyond even the adrenal thrill. And that’s why, if you have a car you haven’t quite pushed to the limit, you should get yourself to a track. It’s the moment when — quietly and without warning — all those individual turning points, apexes and track outs blur together into a single thing. The racing line stops being a series of puzzles that throw you off every time and becomes a single, magical thread that you can almost see on the pavement.

And of course, it’s also a pleasure to finally nail that pesky turn that’s bothered me all weekend and pass the Audi that blew by me on the first day.