Big boys and their toys

It’s all the fault of my cousin Jim, finally. On a wet Thanksgiving afternoon in 1983, he took me for a revelatory after-dinner drive in his new Saab 900 Turbo. He tossed the car confidently around curves on rain-slicked roads strewn with damp, slippery leaves as though the tires were made of glue.  Omigod, I thought, you can do this with a car? It was a life-changing moment.

At the time, I was driving a 1980 Volkswagen Dasher wagon, serviceable but hardly what you’d call a high-performance automobile. That short ride in a fast machine awakened my dormant inner teenager, practically love-struck with newly discovered joys of driving. 

That same year my colleague Bill Rukeyser, the managing editor of Fortune magazine, had taken his family to Germany, collected a new BMW 733i sedan at the factory, driven it around Europe and turned it back in London to be shipped to the States. 

Hmm, I thought. My parents had done that with two Mercedes-Benz sedans, in 1958 and again in 1967, when with little fuss you could drive your new European car onto the boat at Le Havre or Cherbourg and drive it off again at the pier in New York.  With strengthened emissions regulations in the early 1980s — catalytic converters were already mandatory in the United States, but not yet in Europe, where lead-free gasoline was scarce — the process was now more complicated, but still doable.

So it was, thanks to a timely bonus from Time Inc., that my mother and I flew to Munich in October 1984 to collect a burgundy red BMW 533i sedan.  We spent three weeks touring northern Italy — I reluctantly discovered that the only way to move in traffic in Rome was to be aggressive with my new baby — before heading back through the Brenner Pass to return the car for shipment home.

Cut to spring 2007, three BMWs later. In my dotage I have treated myself to an M3, the souped-up Motorsport version of the entry-level 3-series cars. I’m planning to drive to a young cousin’s wedding in Nashville, and I remember: 1) that BMW offers drivers’ schools at its factory in Spartanburg, S.C., and 2) that Rukeyser, with whom I did my first Skip Barber drivers’ school in 1985, now lives in Knoxville, three hours’ drive from Spartanburg.   

So one fine afternoon we set off for Spartanburg in his new 650i convertible, equipped with everything from a heads-up instrument display to active cruise control, which slows you down if you get too close to the car in front of you. We have chosen the one-day M School, which will let us see what we can do with the M Coupe, kin to the Z4 roadster, and the M5, the 500 hp Motorsport version of the 5 series family sedan.

They don’t give this away, though given the wear and tear on cars, and the instructors’ salaries, $1,295 didn’t seem out of line. The other choices include one- and two-day schools in non-Motorsport BMWs ($650 and $1,095), one- and two-day schools for teenagers ($495 and $895), a two-day M School ($2,995) and, for M School graduates, a two-day Advanced M Experience at Virginia International Raceway near Danville ($3,995).

We were 15 in the class, including a lone woman. Two of our four instructors, Bill Conger and Matt Mullins, had been stunt drivers in the NASCAR-spoof movie “Talladega Nights.†After an hour in the classroom hearing what we’d be doing and reviewing some of the basics — the right line through a curve, the proper driving position, when to brake and downshift, and so on — we headed out to the waiting cars. 

In the exercises that followed, we alternated between the coupes and the M5s, each equipped with a two-way radio over which the watching instructors relayed praise, criticism and suggestions.  We practiced correcting skids, hitting the proper apex in a turn, using heel-and-toe downshifting (which I finally began to manage), making smooth transitions between curves and straightaways, initiating a power drift, and remembering to focus as far ahead as possible. The mantra:  “Look where you want to go and the car will go there.â€

After sorting out the hyper-powerful M5s on individual runs around an autocross track, we came to the closing exercise: a relay race between two teams, each with an M5, in which one student drove the equivalent of a lap and a half, then jumped out so the next person could walk, not run, about 10 feet to the car and continue the race.  Our team did terribly. We wound up 28 seconds behind the winners. No one bought my less-than-serious contention that the other team, which had both of the college-age guys, should have had an age-related handicap.

The day ended with a total blast.  Three of us piled into each of the M5s with an instructor, who promptly took off on a power-slide hot lap in which the car was never actually going in the direction it was pointed — including two power 360s on the skid pad.  Adrenalin city, it was.  Said Rukeyser:  “That was by far the most exciting five minutes I’ve had in a car since high school while parked.â€

If you go, either for a school or to take delivery of a car, which includes a two-hour driving course, I recommend the Greenville Marriott and Stax’s Peppermill restaurant in Greenville (impressive menu, interesting wine list; stax.com).

© 2007 by Keith R. Johnson. A retired editor of Fortune, Johnson lives in Sharon. Wheels appears monthly.