ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608100003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCKINGHAM, N.C.
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
Kylie Sklennik hit the straightaway full throttle and hurtled toward turn one.
``Go! Boot it! There you go,'' her instructor barked from the passenger seat.
Kylie's little Subaru whined obediently under her young foot.
75 mph.
``Don't touch your brakes. Never, never, never! That's it, good. Stay on the gas!''
80 mph.
Her fingers gripped the steering wheel for dear life. She wore a crash helmet. She could smell hot rubber. And all she could see ahead was the asphalt of turn one rising up in front of her like ``this big black, grayish monster.''
It filled her windshield. She felt a touch of vertigo.
She loved it.
85 mph.
Her Subaru hugged tightly against the curved embankment.
``Stay in it, stay in it. Good, good.''
90 mph.
Then, in a blur, Kylie left the monster behind.
Her instructor cheered. ``Much better. That's perfect.''
Last weekend, Kylie Sklennik, 17, of Vienna, learned how to drive fast.
At least she learned a little about it.
She's not yet the next Dale Earnhardt.
But she was one of about 65 people who participated in a school on racetrack driving last Saturday and Sunday at the North Carolina Motor Speedway in Rockingham, N.C., one of the stops on the NASCAR circuit.
Call it the School of Speed.
It was sponsored by Car Guys Inc. in Roanoke, a company formed by Kenley Smith in 1989 that specializes in on-track driver education and every year hosts a series of schools at racetracks throughout the Southeast.
These are not schools for professional drivers. They are for novices like Kylie Sklennik or car enthusiasts who want to take their personal cars and their driving skills and push them to their limits.
Kylie had been waiting for months for this weekend, ever since her mother enrolled her in another Car Guys school on decisive driving aimed at teen-agers and other new drivers. She was the youngest student at Rockingham, and she had the most ordinary of cars.
Hers was a four-door, four-wheel-drive Subaru Impreza that really belonged to her grandmother, despite the personalized license plate, ``Kylie S.'' Most of the students drove faster Porsches or Corvettes or Mazdas or Mustangs.
One guy even rented a BMW.
Kylie's Subaru was a simple automatic and packed a humble 90-horsepower engine.
By comparison, a stock car on the NASCAR circuit boasts about a 650-horsepower engine.
Kylie probably doesn't fit the profile of a car nut. A rising senior at the private, all-girl Madeira School in McLean, she is still a little gawky and girlish, with braces on her teeth and the marks of puberty on her skin. She plays the flute in her school's chamber ensemble.
She brought along her mother and her sister, who spent much of their time at the racetrack reading books. Her mother was reading ``College Guide For Parents.'' Her sister was reading ``The Body Farm'' by Patricia Cornwell.
``We're the pit crew,'' joked her mother, who admitted she was a little nervous.
``See, I'll be all right,'' Kylie reassured her. ``There's the ambulance.''
Kylie has one speeding ticket to her credit, for clocking at 41 mph in a 25 mph zone that's a notorious speed trap. But she confessed that she pushed 80 mph along Interstate 95 once during their trip down to Rockingham. ``I've got to watch it, yeah. Mom's hoping that this will get it out of my system and I'll slow up a little bit on the road,'' she said.
In fact, that is one of the school's commandments.
``There's no way you can enjoy your car on the street as much as you can on track, so why bother?'' said the school's classroom instructor Dan Unkefer. He also warned that the enticing long, flat stretch of U.S. 1 leading away from the North Carolina Speedway is a favorite hiding place of state troopers.
At Rockingham, the two-day school cost $295.
That guaranteed each student three half-hour sessions on the track with an instructor each day, plus several hours of classroom discussion with Unkefer, who offered up a barrage of advice and rules and questions.
``How many of you are concerned, nervous, anxious about this weekend?''
He surveyed the room for a show of hands.
``That's not enough hands. I need to see more hands.''
Unkefer and other Car Guys instructors aptly describe these weekend schools as ``serious fun.'' They aren't competitive. The students aren't racing each other. It's just fun - but it's fun at 100 mph.
``At 100 mph, you can travel the distance of a football field in about one second,'' Unkefer said.
Other Unkeferisms:
``Look at nothing. See everything.''
``Open that vision up. Don't focus on one thing. Let your peripheral vision take over.''
``Don't look at what you don't want to hit. Look where you want to go. Look for an escape.''
And this about tires: ``Your tires are going to tell you things. Can you tell the difference between a happy tire and a not-so happy tire? One's a scream and one's a moan. You want to slip the tire. You don't want to slide the tire.''
Car Guys owner Kenley Smith also offered up his pearls of wisdom. Smith, 37, has conducted about 90 of these schools now, and although his long ZZ Top beard has not turned gray, he could still pass as a sort of speedway mystic.
His best pearl was about the concrete wall that encloses the track at Rockingham.
He talked about it with a certain reverence.
``It has been here since they built the track in 1960 and the wall has always won.''
Even so, nobody has been killed or permanently injured during a Car Guys school, although more than a few people have torn up their cars through the years. On this weekend, a guy slammed into a bank of tires with his Porsche and caused about $6,000 in body damage.
He got right back on the track, though.
Kylie's instructor for the weekend was Kurt Spitzner.
Spitzner, 38, related to Kylie and her Subaru because his first track car was an AMC Gremlin, and his current track car isn't much better, a Ford Escort. He used to live in Roanoke and worked full time for Car Guys. Now he's in Georgia, coordinating special events at Road Atlanta, a track 45 miles outside the city.
Spitzner was happy to be paired with Kylie.
``I hate to be sexist like this,'' he said. ``Generally speaking, I have a much better time instructing women than I do men, especially young ones, simply because they come into this with no preconceived notions that are detrimental to your safety. When you're teaching a bunch of guys, none of them like to admit that they're not Mario Andretti yet.''
Like many of the instructors, Spitzner wore a motion sickness patch around his wrist.
For good reason. There he was willingly getting into a car with someone he had never met before, in a car he had never driven himself, in the August heat, traveling at tremendous speeds down a twisting track, not only around most of the NASCAR oval, but also through the hairpinned curves on the speedway's infield course.
In Kylie's car, Spitzner's instructions were economical, to the point.
``Brakes, brakes. Off the brakes. Tap, turn, off, go.''
They had their ups.
``Yes, take him. Go! Go! Pass the Porsche! Yes!''
They had their downs.
The Porsche was kind of a fluke. Mostly, she was the one getting passed.
She missed a turn and rolled to a stop in the grassy infield.
After every half-hour session, Spitzner gave her his critique - mostly praise. ``Did you notice on the last three laps, I kind of shut up because you knew what you were doing? If you don't hear Mother Hen, it's because Mother Hen had nothing to say,'' he told her after one session.
She had trouble finding the best route around the big, banked turn.
``The car was happy no matter where we put it. None of them felt bad, right? We were up high. We were down low. Then we were high, then low. High, low. We did it all and none of them felt bad. But if we were doing them at 100 mph or 110 mph, it would be a very very different story.''
In the end, the checkered flag waved them in.
Kylie recently got a new, speedier Subaru with a 120-horsepower motor. As soon as she feels more confident with its five-speed stick shift, she vowed to return to another Car Guys school. She said she loves to drive - the faster, the better.
``This has been so much more of an experience than I dreamed of.''
For more information, call 772-1517 or (800) 800-GUYS.
LENGTH: Long : 177 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. 1. Student Kylie Sklennik pushedby CNBher Subaru Impreza to 95 mph. By contrast, a stock car on the NASCAR
circuit will top 150 mph. 2. Kylie was responsible for checking her
oil and brake-fluid levels and tires before heading to an inspection
in the pit. 3. Kylie's instructor, Kurt Spitzner (right), critiqued
her driving skills after each 30-minute session, during which he
road in the passenger seat. 4. Roanoke's Car Guys give ordinary
drivers a taste of NASCAR. 5. Car Guys owner Kenley Smith mapped out
the Rockingham course before the students hit the track. 6. ``We're
the pit crew,'' said Kylie Sklennik's mother, Jan (above, left), who
watched the session with Kylie's sister, Erika, from the infield.
Flagman Phil Strayer (right) brought them in at the end of each
half-hour session at Rockingham. color.