There’s no shortage of driving schools available to those who want to learn how to properly exercise their high-performance machinery beyond what’s possible within the confines of public roads and/or public decency.
They range from locally organized track schools to nationally recognized and, in some cases, franchised programs, each of which promises their students varying degrees of behind-the-wheel proficiency at the end of their respective curriculums.
Not all can deliver. There are a great many challenges associated with helping students become better drivers, not the least of which being the surprisingly diverse range of opinions regarding what techniques and conceptual approaches lead to the quickest lap times. Developing a truly consistent program, and then putting together a team that wholeheartedly buys into its core tenets is typically beyond the scope of weekend high-performance driving events, or, in some cases, even bigger budget operations.
I’ve spent the past 10 years bouncing from one school to another, working my way through autocross, street survival, road course, and time trial classrooms and pit lanes in a bid to evolve as a driver. During that time, I’ve yet to encounter a program as philosophically cohesive and well-executed as the Cadillac V Performance Academy, which operates out of Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada.
Only a year old, under the attentive eye of program lead Rick Malone, the V Performance Academy has been welcoming 60 Cadillac owners a month (a dozen at a time) for two days of classroom and on-track instruction in both the CTS-V and ATS-V, the brand’s flagship sports cars. Offered free of charge to American V owners (and available to Canadian owners as well as anyone willing to open up their wallets), a full 25 percent of eligible Cadillac customers have so far taken advantage of this unique opportunity to explore the limits of their vehicles.
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Spring Mountain is no stranger to partnerships with General Motors, as the facility also hosts the Ron Fellows Corvette driving school and is the frequent site of media launches and other special events for Chevrolet and Cadillac. Sitting on thousands of acres of land roughly an hour outside of Las Vegas, the Ranch already offers the longest continuous race track in North America and is on course to expand to more than 15 miles of paved circuit over the next few years.
There’s nothing unique about an automaker associating itself with a driving school, particularly for in-house performance brands like Cadillac’s V, with Ford doing the same thing for buyers of the Raptor and Focus ST, and FCA’s SRT partnering with the Bob Bondurant school in Arizona. Mercedes-Benz and Audi even have traveling schools that move across the continent from track-to-track in order to convenience owners.
Setting Cadillac apart, however, are a number of details that dramatically improve the entire school experience. The first is the facility itself. After being picked up at the airport by a private shuttle, each participant is given on-track accommodations — as in, a luxury condo built within a few feet of the racing surface — for the duration of the program. For two full days, students wake up and then eat, drive, and sleep at the track, fully immersing themselves in the Academy environment. There is no other program in the U.S. that delivers this type of end-to-end package for participants.
Even more importantly, as I mentioned earlier the V Performance Academy has managed to develop an approach to sharing the collective knowledge of its instructors that surpasses any previous experience I’ve had as a student of the apex. By alternating classroom sessions and video demonstrations with track time and focused driving exercises, the Academy is able to clearly and logically build the skill levels of its students within the gradual framework of the school’s guiding principles.
I truly believe you can learn something about driving — regardless of your experience level — each and every time you open your mind to someone else’s perspective on what makes a fast lap. Over the course of two days at Spring Mountain, I had several of my own habits and preconceptions about what works and what doesn’t on a race track consistently challenged by the Academy’s group of instructors, each of whom was fully committed to the potential presented by trail-braking (or light brake-balancing into a corner).
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There’s no patent on trail-braking, of course, but the V Performance Academy’s willingness to stand behind this driving style in the face of the many other schools and driving gurus who advocate late-braking in a straight line is unusual and commendable. More importantly, each discussion I had with an instructor, whether in the classroom or less formally one-on-one or in a small group immediately after a track session, was done in an absolutely professional, positive, and enthusiastic manner. Again, a marked contrast to what one will discover when making a wide survey of performance driving education programs.
In a world where branding has largely replaced substance, especially when considering luxury automobiles, it would have been easy for Cadillac to throw together a single-day, fly-in-and-out driving school where the basics of how not to swap ends in your 650 horsepower super-sedan would be presented by a gaggle of disinterested former racers eager to get that rubber-stamped certificate of participation in your hand by the end of the afternoon. This is especially true for a perk that comes free of charge with every V series purchase. Instead, the V Performance Academy distinguishes itself among its peers as being one of the most professional and focused, organizations dedicated to making you better, faster, and stronger on both the street and the track.
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