The SRT Experience at Bondurant
Last week, I was invited to head out to Arizona to partake in the wonder that is the SRT Experience at Bondurant Racing School. I get to do lots of cool events on and off of the track for my job as an automotive journalist, but nothing has been as much fun as my trip to Arizona for the new Bondurant version of the SRT Experience.
I have previously had a chance to play with the Hellcat Challenger, the Hellcat Charger and the Dodge Viper on a closed course, but the Bondurant program gave me a chance to push those cars to my driving limits under the close watch of a skilled racing instructor. As a result, I spent the day going faster and faster in some of Dodge’s fastest cars ever – including the Challenger SRT 392, the Challenger SRT Hellcat, the Charger Scat Pack and the Viper TA2.0 – on a variety of surfaces at the Bondurant complex in Arizona.
First up, the SRT Experience begins with a brief classroom session, where the instructor explains what you will be learning while you are driving during the day at Bondurant. You learn all of the safety information for the Bondurant tracks and you learn specifically what skills the Bondurant program teaches you. I have been through a handful of racing school programs and all of them have a classroom session, and this aspect of the Bondurant SRT Experience isn’t all that different from the other schools.
However, everything else is fairly unique to the Bondurant Racing School compared to others I’ve been to around the country.
First off, you don’t go from the classroom to tearing around the road course in the Viper TA2.0. Each student begins the day on the skid pad with a specially prepared Dodge Charger Scat Pack. These cars have a unique hydraulic cradle system which allows the instructor seated in the passenger’s seat to adjust the way that the 485hp Charger handles the turn. The instructor can raise the front end and force understeer or raise the back end and force oversteer, and in each turn, the student has to use the steering, the brakes and the throttle to keep the car pointed in the right direction. Until you have proven that you can handle an extreme understeer or oversteer condition without crashing, you cannot get on to the road course, but once you’ve exhibited the ability to save yourself when things are doing wrong – the good stuff begins.
As we headed over to the 1.6 mile Bondurant road course, we were invited to pick one of three available vehicles – the Hellcat Challenger with the manual transmission, the Hellcat Charger with the automatic transmission and the Viper TA2.0 with the manual transmission. We had a much larger group than the average class, so we were asked to pick one of the cars and then cycle through the other two on later sessions. I was happy to accept the #17 Bondurant Viper TA2.0 as my first car and I headed out onto the track with the instructor in a lead car (Charger SRT 392) and three other new Viper TA models.
Unlike other schools, where every student has an instructor in the car, the SRT Experience has a single instructor leading the small group of like vehicles around the road course. The idea is to watch how he hits the turns and copy him, essentially keeping up the best that you can. As the group of students keeps up, the instructor continues to push harder and harder. After a handful of laps, the small group heads onto pit road where the instructor offers you all pointers on what could have been done better, then you head back out onto the track to use what you’ve learned. In our case, each trip the pits during the early track session meant a car change, so I went from the Viper to the Hellcat Challenger to the Hellcat Charger. While in the Charger, I was the first car in line behind the instructor and I was able to push the pace enough that we caught up to the Challenger group which had left the pits well ahead of us.
After a few hours of time on the road course, racing in the various Mopar performance cars and getting pointers from the Bondurant pros, we headed over to the autocross course where a field of Challenger SRT 392s were waiting for us amidst a sea of cones. We each got a Challenger, a “pace lap” where we all ran together and a single practice lap before they turned on the stopwatch. We each received pointers from the instructors at the starting line before two official timed runs and during this portion, I am proud to say that I was the second quickest in our large group – trailing the quickest time by just one tenth of a second.
Finally, we headed back to the road course for our final session and this time around, we were invited to pick the Dodge car which we preferred the most. Some people picked the Hellcat Challenger or Hellcat Charger, while I was happy to grab up more seat time in the Viper TA2.0. This allowed us to get some more quality seat time behind the lead car after we had gotten tons of input from the instructors and as a result, our afternoon sessions were by far our quickest of the day.
Everyone who buys a new SRT vehicle gets a free pass for one person to attend the SRT Experience at Bondurant and all you have to cover as the student is the travel and hotel cost. If you haven’t purchased a new SRT product and you would still like to drive the high performance Dodge products at Bondurant, you can buy a pass to this one-day event for just $699. If you have the voucher from buying a new SRT product, the SRT Experience is most certainly worth the cost of the flight and a hotel room overnight and at $700, this is the most enticing racing school experience I have attended with that price point.
The SRT Experience allows you to push the Hellcat cars and the Viper to the limits of your driving abilities, with instructors present to keep you safe while also making you a better driver during the course of the day.
