I have been sim racing on a pretty serious level for the last several years. Thanks to a lot of help from the amazing drivers that have been GTNDC over the years, I have achieved some modicum of success, both for the team and myself. However as Im sure any serious sim racer or even die hard race fan for that matter would, I always dreamt of getting behind the wheel of a real car, putting on a real helmet, and turning laps in anger on a real track.

With the news sometime in early 2005 that local entrepreneur and Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller would be building a band new road course less than a half an hour away, the first signs of that dream began to take shape. I began keeping tabs on the progress of the track and eventually attended the big unveiling party for Miller Motorsports Park (MMP) that was held at the Delta Center in late summer of 2005. Wow this was an amazing event, all of the top road racing organizations in the US were represented including ALMS, AMA, Grand Am and SCCA among others. One at a time each group brought their wares onto the floor of the arena in spectacular fashion. With ear piercing engine notes and burnouts and donuts galore we saw everything from Emanuele Pirro in an Audi R8 to a 5year old local Kart upstart, and everything in between. All of us mere mortals were allowed down on the floor after the main announcements and got to mingle with all of the stars present. I had the great thrill of meeting former multi time Gran Prix motorcycle champion Freddy Spencer, ALMS GT Champion and LeMans winner factory Porsche driver Patrick Long, along with Emanuele and many others. Needless to say the excitement surrounding this new facility had all of us attending this even with the bug.

At this time I had a Honda VFR800 motorcycle and was a pretty serious sport rider. I had every intention that I would do my first real track time on the bike, thinking it would be the less expensive way to get on to the track. As I prepared however I discovered that though some aspects of track time on a bike are in fact cheaper than cars, it is by no means by any definition cheap. First of all even though I had the bike I also had to own and maintain a daily driver car for numerous reasons. The equipment that goes along with getting a bike on the track is also very expensive not to mention that you will go through about $300 worth of tires for each track day that you run. As I thought about it and learned about some of the cool cars out there that will serve as a daily driver and a weekend warrior racecar, I made a big change in my fundamental plans.

I decided to sell off the trusty Viffer, (give me a moment I get a bit emotional at this point,,,,,okay) and one of our cars and find myself a nice mid 90s BMW E36. With help from some great guys including Tommy Regan I knew what I wanted and found a really nice 95, 325is down in San Diego. I flew down on Friday night and drove it back up on Saturday and instantly fell in love with my new driving machine. I talked my wife into letting me put most of my Viffer money into the Bimmer so I immediately started getting her ready for my anticipated track days. The one big thing I knew I had to have was a set of track wheels and tires so I made these my first big upgrade. Along with the normal maintenance items to make sure everything was up to snuff I also ordered and installed a Ground Controll/Koni suspension kit all the way around. Besides a custom race cold air intake the car is otherwise pretty much stock and remains a very capable and comfortable daily driver.
Since I had a good helmet from my MC past I was pretty much set as far as gear, though I did choose to order a good set of racing shoes and gloves. MMP only requires long pants, long sleeve shirt, closed shoes, and at least a Snell M2000 helmet, but I figured I wanted to get used to the proper gear in case my participation became more serious. With several months of planning and work under my belt I finally scheduled my first track day with MMP directly on the 4th of July 2006.

MMP has their own program to get 1st time open track day participants up to speed called TORD. This consisted of a quick meeting in the morning to go over basic rules, flags and track etiquette, followed by a couple of laps around the track in a minivan with one of the driving instructors so that they could show us the track and basic lines. As we were taking our laps in the van I noticed our instructor James Burke had a heavy British accent. As we finished, being the ham that I am, and always wanting to establish any relationship that may lead to personal gain, I introduced myself to James. I asked him where he was from and explained that I was and avid sim racer and had several friends that were fellow online sim racers and friends in the UK. He was instantly very interested in the fact that I race sims and asked who I knew in the UK. I said, well a few but for one I know Sean Edwards, in fact we both are on a Bata team for a sim development company. James then replied, no way Sean is like my best friend in racing, we both worked together at Silverstone…etc etc. Anyway it never ceases to amaze me how small of a world this can be.

The next step of our TORD was to go out in our own cars with an instructor to help us get the feel for the track and make sure we were safe along with receiving instruction on proper lines etc. For the most part instructors would just spend a few laps with each student and then let the students go back out alone and practice. Dan McKeever is the driving school manager at MMP and also oversees the open track days. I had met Dan during my research and preparation and he is the lucky guy that got to jump in with me for my first laps. As you can imagine this can all be a bit nerve racking but I took off and got up to speed pretty much right off. About halfway through our second lap Dan said that I had things well at hand and I could pull into the hotpit, let him out and go out by myself.

MMP has the ability to run 4 different configurations including 2 separate half tracks that can be run independently and simultaneously. My first day happened to be on the East track, which is 2.2 miles and has 14 turns and is the more technical half of the track. As opposed to the 23 turn, 4.5 mile Full track this was much easier to learn and get used to my lines and brake points. I finished the 30-minute session alone and quickly became more comfortable and just started pushing a bit harder lap-by-lap. It was a really fun experience and I had some interesting folks to share the track with, including a Pro Grand Am driver who flew in and rented, get this a Ford 500 and did laps in order to just learn the track in preparation of the first Grand Am event to be held latter that year. Nothing like getting schooled by a guy in a 5000 pound sedan with an automatic and street tires to define the term driver ability if you didnt already know it. The good news is there was also anther mere mortal there in a brand new BMW M5, yeah the 500hp V10 one, AND I was able to keep a gap to him in my humble 200hp E36, ego restored.
Now it was lunchtime and with a few half-day arrivals Dan decided to split the drivers into 2 run groups for our afternoon sessions, and to my amazement he suggested I run with the advance group. As a rule the open days at MMP consist of 2 morning and 3 afternoon sessions, usually about 30 minutes each. MMP also runs bikes on these days so this makes for at least 2 run groups and depending on attendance they sometimes run 2 groups of cars. My afternoon sessions went great and I was really pleased with the handling of the Bimmer (it still had stock suspension at this point). Its amazing to come in to the pits after a 30 minute session and see how much rubber has peeled off of your $200 ea Toyo RA-1 R compounds, puts things in a very different perspective from sim racing.

All in all I had a great time, met a bunch of great people and realized a long time dream on that hot Independence day in the Utah desert. MMP is an amazing facility and the track is just amazing. The surface is wide and smooth as a babys butt and it contains some of the most unique corners and combinations of any tack I have seen. It has several multi-apex corners of both increasing and decreasing radius, which require some really counter-intuitive lines. I have since done about 3 other days and have driven 2 of the other 3 configurations, the Full track and the 3-mile outer track that the AMA used, leaving the West half-track as the only configuration I have not yet run.

I plan to do a few more upgrades to the car for this year and hope to run 5 or 6 more days this year as well depending on my work schedule and the financial situation. Im hoping that some of these days will count towards getting into the time trail level of this type of event. This has been very rewarding and though there are clearly some significant costs involved, it may be a surprise at how easy and relatively affordable it can be to get this type of opportunity. I would encourage anyone who lives a reasonable distance from a track to look into it, NASA, SCCA, and several clubs offer great events of this type and include reasonable cost, instructors and an all around great time.