BMW performance center’s drivers call it an “adult Disneyland on wheels.” The 2.3-mile magic spindom, whose courses range from a curvy loop for time laps to an off-road challenge to a 300-foot-diamter polished skid pad, ain’t no Mickey Mouse drive in the Greer countryside.
Each year, roughly 15,000 people get behind the wheels of $1 million worth of brand-new inventory, and every day the center’s half-dozen professional instructors let corporate groups, school outings, and other adventure-seekers go full throttle.
“You guys are going to be bonded at the hip at the end of the day,” Doug McGrath, the center’s corporate sales/ marketing man, tells one group. With two people always in each car, he says, pointing to one of the men in the briefing room, “The way Sean’s driving, you think you’re going to die, but then it’s your turn, and payback is hell.”
When your office furniture zips from zero to 60 in less than five seconds, you’re among those lucky few firmly in the driver’s seat of your passion. Meet three of them:
{ Donnie Isley }
Just outside the Performance Center’s light-flooded briefing room, wheels squeal on the summer-seared track. Inside, 14 guys who would otherwise be at their windows-and-doors company are itching to get behind the wheel. Donnie Isley, their instructor today, knows how to start their ignitions.
“I trained with both Homeland and Secret Service, so if you need to know the proper way to ram another car, talk to me after you leave here with your car, and I’ll show you how to do that, but not with one of ours.”
Outmaneuvering terrorists, protecting “the package” in a motorcade, and racing through a pitch-black course while wearing night-vision goggles are skills he never dreamed he’d learn before joining BMW full time in 2006. Before that, the 59-year-old Arden, North Carolina, native worked in the heating-oil business, though he started racing in 1981.
Several years ago, Isley was part of a cross-training program with the Feds and BMW. “They’re training people in things that will actually save their lives in combat, and, of course, we train people to keep them alive, as well, but this is more defensive driving. Theirs is more offensive and defensive driving.”
With his charges, Isley stays on the offensive about defensive driving. “You have to be progressive with the throttle, not aggressive,” he tells the jittery bunch. “If you come out of the corner and just mash that throttle, like most of the males want to do, you’ll quickly find the back of the car trying to pass the front of the car.”
The secret, he says, comes in listening to the machines. “Until I started working here and was able to do this day after day, that’s when I really started understanding what the car was actually communicating.”
Isley races in the competitive Formula Vee, a restrictive class named after the classic VW Chassis.
These days, he takes that language to Europe, South America, and coast to coast, winning races and occasional driver-of-the-year awards, while, unlike the others, getting additional adrenaline rushes with skydiving and hang-gliding. In life, it seems, as with cars, he says, “It’s living on the edge, being able to control that car right to its limit.”
{ Laura Hayes }
Within a week of her first trip to a racetrack, Laura Hayes saw her dad buy the family a “quarter-midget.” The mini-racer looks like a cross between a toaster and a souped-up go-kart, whose single-cylinder engine tops out at 30 mph in the rookie class—ideal for Hayes to start her racing career. She was only 8 years old.
“We haven’t looked back since then,” she says from her home in Fletcher, North Carolina. In her rearview now, the 26-year-old veteran sees 100 career wins.
At 18, she surprised everyone when she left home just outside of Sacramento, California, to chase her stock-car dreams on the East Coast. The professional racing circuit proved impregnable because enormous bankrolls are required to field top-tier teams.
The money kind of dried up,” she says, “so I had to go find a real job and I happened to have my resumé with me when I came to Greenville. I happened to walk into the lobby one day and asked if they needed any help. They called the next day and asked me to come in.”
At the Performance Center, she’s neither the youngest driver nor the only woman. But she’s used to being both. “It was a little bit of an issue when I was younger: ‘The little girl’s beating up on all the boys!’ We got protested a lot. My dad worked for NASA, so they used to call him a rocket scientist, and everybody thought we were running rocket fuel, and we were cheating, but everyone else was super-supportive.
The FV class has been one of the most competitive SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) classes since its inception more than 50 years ago
“It’s even better now today. I don’t have any other drivers who mind having a girl driver out there.” As for her fellow instructors, she says, “They’re fantastic guys, and we’re all friends now. They always say, ‘You’re just one of the guys, and I say, ‘Thanks, guys, it’s cool, but I am a girl, you guys.’”
For fun, she races Formula Vee: “Vee” for “Volkswagen.” The cars’ open-wheel chassis — that’s without fenders, fellas — house VW Beetle engines with 60 horsepower; Hayes drives 600-hp Beemers in her day job.
The 120-mph, 45-minute spins are all about strategy, not speed, she says. “There are no pit stops; you’re pretty much driving at 100 percent from the drop of the green to the checkered.”
Still, she keeps that daredevil spirit. “I just bought a motorcycle a few weeks ago,” she says of the BMW R9T she bought before her third trip to the Nürburgring. “Probably the stupidest thing I’ll ever buy in my life because of all the silly drivers on the road.”
Funny, Hayes can say anything she wants to about “women drivers.”
{ Mike Renner }
His German last name translates loosely to “runner,” but he stretches that a bit to “racer.” Several years ago, he joked that his middle name was Schnell, or “fast.” It stuck. Now he’s “Speed Racer.”
“It was just the speed and the noise and the competition,” the Greenvillian says of his passion for cars since growing up in NASCAR country and watching races on Wide World of Sports. In the mid- 1970s, he and a friend heard a commercial about a Formula 5000 race at Road Atlanta, the 2.54-mile course two hours south of here. Back then, you could stand above Turn 6 and actually see into the cockpits. One of the drivers that day was the legendary Mario Andretti.
That threw Renner into overdrive.
Now 59, he still races, 32 years after his earliest and hairiest crash: “It was on the first lap. I went over a blind crest, and this car had spun, and when I went over the hill, I was headed right for his door.” Wham! After a 180-degree spin, he flipped a couple of times and landed on four wheels in the middle of the track. “It was a pretty big impact and a pretty wild ride.”
In 1999, when the Performance Center opened, Renner couldn’t believe his good fortune. “For them to open up the track 15 minutes away from where I live, it’s just amazing how the pieces fit together.” At the beginning of July, he returned from the famed Nürburgring, a Grand Prix track that winds 12.9 miles through three medieval German towns and changes elevation 1,000 feet. “If you’re a car guy, it’s the place. It’s a badass racetrack.”
Before that, he and a teammate won two classes in the One Lap of America race, a spinoff of Cannonball Run, the 1981 classic about a daredevil cross-country race. In today’s legal, weeklong version, drivers race 3,000 miles across America, stopping at seven tracks along the way for time trials.
“It’s not as safe as sitting on the couch,” he admits, “but I’ve always enjoyed sharing with people something I’m so passionate about. The reality is I’ve met so many great people and driven tracks at so many different places, and they pay me to do it.”
{ School Is in Session }
Take your seat, literally. Get behind the wheel of the Ultimate Driving Machine® at the BMW Performance Driving School. Located next to the BMW Manufacturing Plant in Spartanburg, the $12.5 million driving school features a two-mile track with decreasing and increasing radius turns, elevation changes and straightaways. It also includes a polished concrete skid pad and five water walls to avoid. Several types of classes are offered, including Teen School, Car Control, Drives, Tours, and even Motorcycle Training. There is also a 64,000-square-foot facility with conference rooms, a café, gift shop, and more for those looking for an adventurous corporate meeting or outing.
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