Motor Trend: Sprint Car School

You can keep your wimpy gasoline-burning race cars with fenders and those skinny little tires. I'm not impressed by your fancy heel-toe downshifts or million-dollar manicured-grass-lined racetracks with both left and right turns. Give me a muddy fifth-mile hole in the ground, a 650-hp alcohol-burning 360 Sprint Car, a helmet, and some coveralls. Now that sounds like a dirt-flingin' good ol' time to me.

Some people say the only real racing these days happens in fifth- to half-mile dirt tracks from where tomorrow's CART, IRL, and NASCAR drivers will come. In fact, many of yesterday's and today's best-known drivers began racing in Sprint Cars like the 360 I learned to drive at Cory Kruseman's Sprint Car Driving School in Ventura, California. Drivers such as A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones, Billy Boat, Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, and many others were throwing mud off their tires into spectators' beer cups long before they earned fame and fortune in their careers. Why? Because Sprint Car racing teaches a driver car-control lessons he'll take with him forever. Learn to drive-and win-in a Sprinter, and anything else is tame in comparison.

The school's founder and instructor, Cory Kruseman, is the reigning 2001 Sprint Car Racing Association Champion who calls the fifth-mile Ventura Raceway home. So who better to teach a novice like me in the famous Bullring? The $350 Basic course (the least expensive in this story) was designed to give SCRA race fans the opportunity to get some safe "seat time" at their own pace in one of the 1300-lb tubular steel race cars just like the one Kruseman races. Class size is limited to assure students enough of Cory's invaluable instruction. However, to get the most out of the half-day class, at least some knowledge of how to comfortably steer a car when it's sailing sideways is recommended.

From the outside, a Sprint Car looks crude (and it is) and old fashioned (it is not). These modern race cars evolved from what were Indy cars in the '40s and '50s; they've become specialized in the same way today's Indy cars have, but in the other direction. The 5.9L V-8 alcohol motor produces enough thrust to push around two pounds of car for each horsepower. To put that in perspective, this issue's Porsche GT2 would need to make over 1500 hp (not 460) to achieve the same power-to-weight ratio as a 360 Sprint Car.

The engine bolts directly to the large rear differential through an exposed driveshaft that runs through the cockpit directly between the driver's legs. Because there's no transmission or clutch, the driveline is either engaged or it's not-direct drive. No starter motor means the car must be push-started on the track by a truck, while in gear with the magneto and fuel switched on. The two disc brakes are applied with a left-foot-only pedal (remember where that driveshaft runs?) and operate the left-front and single-rear disc that's bolted to the solid axle. As one might expect, when the driver stands on the brakes, the car turns left and the rear end skids to the right. It's supposed to do that.