Eager drivers, not quite ready to test themselves and their cars in an autocross, and definitely not in a driving school on the Road America circuit, nevertheless had a learning opportunity at O’Fast 2025: the car-control clinic. Held as part of previous BMW CCA Oktoberfest celebrations, car-control clinics were the forerunners of today’s Tire Rack Street Survival schools, which show teen drivers—in their own cars—how to handle emergency situations they will encounter in everyday driving.
The car-control clinic teaches the limits of your car, of yourself, and of physics, Street Survival for the grown-up crowd.
Eighteen drivers registered for the O’Fast 2025 event. Chaired by Bill Wade and Jaynee and Tim Beechuk—plus volunteer instructors—the event featured three different sections: an actual classroom, with video and an instructor; a skid pad; and a handling-and-braking course, set up similar to an autocross course with cones and asphalt.
First came the classroom, with videos and instruction on vehicle dynamics and what affects them: tires, suspension, road surface, weather—and driver attitude. Then came the fun part. With the class divided into two halves for efficiency, one group experienced the skid pad while the other took to the handling-and-braking course.
The skid pad is a circle described by cones, with a concentric outer circle perhaps twenty feet farther from the center than the inner one. The object is to drive the circle at increasing speeds, staying within that twenty-foot lane. Oh, and did I mention a spray truck that keeps the circle nice and wet? And if your car has traction control, it must be turned off.
Students quickly learned about traction limits—and how to recover from the resulting skid before it turned into a spin when those limits were reached. Speeds increased as did confidence—and grins.
While one group was going in circles, the other was experiencing what amounts to a short low-speed autocross. With some tight turns and a multi-gate slalom, it was much like downhill skiing, but for cars. The object is to learn how your car reacts to sudden and repetitive sharp maneuvers; the lesson is designed to improve your ability to perform. For example, a quick right-to-left-back-to-right maneuver in order to avoid a car that’s suddenly backed out a driveway in front of you.
Hard braking is also a part of this session. In this exercise a student would accelerate to a typical street speed—35 to 40 mph—and on the instructor’s command drivers were to come to a quick stop as close as possible to—but before hitting—a stationary cone. Some students experienced the potentially unnerving rat-a-tat-tat of their cars’ ABS systems for the first time; they also unlearned what Driver’s Ed taught before the invention of ABS.
I had a chance to talk with two car-control-clinic participants, both from the Windy City Chapter. Wes Diggs normally drives a 7 Series, on the larger end of the BMW vehicle scale, and wanted a little more expertise in keeping it pointing straight ahead, especially during Chicago winters. He was driving a friend’s smaller BMW (a 3 Series, if I recall). “The clinic really helps me to define the handling boundaries of my car,” he told me, “in a nice, safe environment—not on Chicago streets.”
Not only was this Theresa Buck’s first car control clinic but her first O’Fest-style event—and her first BMW. She comes by Bimmerhood honestly; her grandparents had BMWs, and when, in her words, she “got her first Big Girl car,” it had to be a BMW. She’d been driving her new-to-her BMW since February, but she said that she hadn’t really driven it. “The Clinic was a chance to dip my toes into performance driving, since I’m driving a performance car,” she said. “I learned correct hand positioning on the steering wheel for maximum control, and how to make all changes—turns, braking, accelerating—smoothly. On the skid pad, I quickly learned the difference between oversteer and understeer, and what to do when visited by either. My day was well spent, and I’m a better driver for it.”
Buck added that she was looking forward to trying an autocross, and then perhaps a driving school. I think she’s hooked!