Best Place To Feed The Need For Speed

Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving

Comments (0) Thursday, Sep 26 2002

Living under the watchful eye of the Valley's radar-patrolled freeways and red-light cameras has our inner speed demons so pent up that we could get a Hyundai-manufactured golf cart with two flat tires to exceed 50 mph. Seems it's high time we took a day off from traffic school to spend a day at Bobby B.'s school adjacent to Firebird International Raceway.

This so-called "school" features a 1.6-mile road course, an eight-acre paddock and more than 200 race-prepared vehicles. Classes range from the -- yawn! -- necessary and practical (i.e., Teenage Defensive Driving) to the -- gulp! -- downright intimidating. Unless you're James Bond or David Letterman, we imagine that the four-day, $4,000 "Executive Protection/Anti-Kidnapping" course of "intense driver training for high-risk individuals" is, well, not meant for you.

Fortunately, even mild-mannered AAA members can get fast and furious. If you can't swing $4,850 for the three-day Advanced Road Racing course, cough up 350 bucks (equivalent to about 10 parking tickets) and the boys'll let you lap Phoenix International Raceway's one-mile oval in an F-1 Style Formula Ford for 150 precious minutes.