BMW Ultimate Driver Competition 2018

I am the antepenultimate driver.

I qualified for BMW’s 2018 Ultimate Driver Competition by turning the fastest autocross lap at the San Francisco stop of BMW’s 2018 Ultimate Driver Tour. Me and 14 other drivers from the other cities on the 2018 tour and from BMW’s 2018 M Schools were flown to Palm Springs in February of 2019 for a competition at the BMW Performance Center West. All of the competitors were treated to a two-night stay at the JW Marriott in Palm Desert, including meals and parties during our stay.

Saturday, February 16 was the competition day. I woke up early, at 4:15 am, out of nerves and excitement. Once the hotel restaurant was open, I went down for an early breakfast and found all of the other competitors there too. I had met many of them the night before at the welcoming reception.

The drivers gathered at the hotel entrance as 7:30 am approached. Soon a chartered bus arrived to shuttle us to BMW’s Performance Center West. As we chit-chatted about our BMWs and their reliability (or lack thereof), the bus driver took us on a scenic route to the Center. Out the windows of the bus, I drank in the desert’s winter green, its wildflowers, and the spectacular Palm Springs mountains.

Excitement was high when we arrived at the Performance Center West and saw the M2s, M3s and M4s lined up and waiting for us for today’s competition. Everyone whipped out their phones and started snapping photos.

We were herded into the school’s building, where we signed in and completed waivers. Then we were gathered in a classroom for introductions and orientation.

To my surprise, the competitors were not the nationally competitive autocross buffs and track stars I’d expected to fill the ranks. Instead, there were many other guys like me—but no gals!—with plenty of driving enthusiasm but only sporadic participation in closed-course events. Many were just as amazed as I was to be their region’s winner.

A couple of the competitors, namely Tom and Rich, had competitive track or autocross backgrounds. Still, the most common theme among the drivers was repeated attendance at BMW’s M Performance School events. The youngest participant was just two years out of Villanova University; the oldest participant, Tom, was a grandfather from Utah.

Matt, the lead instructor for the BMW Performance Schools, gave the orientation talk. The talk was on point and audience-appropriate, skipping some of the chalkboard basics that usually are doled out at performance schools and instead focusing on what we’d need to know for today.

Of note to me was that BMW’s M Dynamic Mode stability control would be on during today’s competition. My driving style conflicts with MDM’s strategy, but I was at least happy that I’d had private instruction in the schools’ M3s yesterday and spent lots of time learning the system’s nuances and how I could accommodate them.

Matt explained how MDM manages the engine’s power and brakes and told us to focus on lines that unwind the steering wheel early to maximize our acceleration without interference. He also pointed out that the BMW schools don’t use helmets in their instruction. BMW has determined that it is safer for drivers in cars with airbags to go helmet-less rather than risk the extra weight on their heads and the interference with airbags that aren’t designed for helmeted passengers.

The 15 competitors were split into three color-coded groups so that the groups of 5 could do the morning’s (unscored) training exercises in parallel. My group, Blue group, contained me, a California software engineer with auto journalist aspirations, Christian, a quiet, bearded Seattleite with the appearance of a software programmer, Charles, the intense owner of a Phoenix media company with a passion for video production and M Track Day events at Circuit of the Americas, Tom, the warm Utah grandfather with racing history who laced-up his well-used red racing shoes as the instructors talked, and Rich, a down-to-earth lawyer from DC with at history in competitive autocross and track events who was attending with UDC with his high-school-senior son.

Blue group’s first activity was skid recovery and drifting on the polished skidpad. First, the instructors demonstrated how to provoke a skid and then catch it, and then how to hold a long drift around the polished circle. In my private instruction yesterday, I’d practiced skid recovery and drifting with instructor Chris for nearly two hours. Yesterday the surface had been wet; the only adjustment I needed to make today was to the increased grip of the dry pavement. (Even without the water, the polished surface was as slick as El Mirage’s dirt.) In a few minutes, I was doing full orbits of the skidpad, only having to stop to make space for the other M3 with which I was sharing the skidpad.

Charles also displayed an aptitude for drifting, and he quickly set to looping the pad well-practiced ease. Rich expressed frustration with the exercise. The racetrack driving he is used to never calls for intentional skidding. I suggested Rich buy some snow tires to put on his Evo race car: An Evo in the snow is one of the greatest automotive joys.

The next exercise was one of the most fun of the day. We took competition package M4s to the Thermal Club’s South Palm Circuit. The blue group was split into two for lead-follow exercises behind two instructors. Rich and I made up the smaller group, and we two chased the instructor Connor around the track.

For the first laps, I was directly behind Connor, and I put as much pressure on him as I dared (and could!) in the braking zones and through the corners to encourage him to increase our pace. He obliged, and we were soon circling the track near the limits of my abilities. Rich kept up easily with superior corner-exit skills.

The M4s drove identically (but with poorer outward visibility) to yesterday’s M3 on Desert Palm Circuit. Like yesterday, I constantly fought with the MDM traction control as I tried to power out of the corners. MDM did not like my aggressive throttle roll-on, a bad habit I’ve kept from my AWD Evo and Focus RS days. MDM would pull engine power as I tried to blast away from the apex. My poorer entrances onto the straights caused Connor to build a significant gap and made Rich fill my mirrors until the braking zone. At the end of the straights, I seemed to better than Rich in heavy braking and trail braking into the corners, and in the braking zone, I would regain my position directly behind Connor’s car. (Yes, he was certainly slowing for me.)

After four or five laps, Rich and I switched places, and I chased the two of them around the track. It was immediately obvious that Rich had superior speed over the full lap of South Palm Circuit; it is hard to tell exactly how much faster Rich was since Connor periodically slowed to let me catch up, but I suspect Rich was at least a second quicker per lap faster around the 1.8-mile track. Regardless, our little group had enough overall speed to catch up with the other lead-follow group by the end of the session.

(Thoughts on South Palm Circuit: This is a fun, fast and flowing circuit, but one that is mostly flat. My favorite section is the broad left-right-left sweepers that link the long back straight to the front straight. For this section, I get to enjoy heavy trail braking, then long sustained cornering, then finally some gratuitous curb climbing at the entrance of the front straight. It is quite fun and gives me a good 3 or 4 seconds of feeling the M4 completely up on its tiptoes. The most difficult section for me is the zig-zag chicane that precedes the back straight. I had a hard time properly sacrificing the zig to get a perfect run out of the zag.)

Afterward, Connor praised our efforts, told us that we were the fastest drivers he had taken around South Palm all day, and sent us away with a smile. I was pleased with my ability to learn the new track and achieve a quick pace in the short span of 10 laps.

The morning’s final training exercise was autocross-style laps in a segment of the school’s practice grounds. The corners included the Bus Stop (aka Jug Handle) chicane and the extremely late-apex Patience that preceded a nearly straight-line slalom. We were shown the line by the instructors and then sent out for laps in BMW M2s.

The M2s were run initially with MDM on, but later we switched MDM off. As I found yesterday, the M2 was a much better partner with the stability control off, as it becomes extra agile, chuckable and throttle steerable. While most of my laps were clean, my Blue group peers were running over the orange cones with abandon. We were all scolded for killing cones and making the crew run to fix the course. I also nearly rear-ended a participant who was understeering at the entrance of Patience and decided to straight-line brake to halt rather than plow into the dirt. The imminent collision icon—a red outline of a car’s rear-end—flashed on my instrument panel before I turned into Patience and avoided the stopped M2.

Training exercises finished, we had a catered lunch on the second floor of the Performance Center. I started getting nervous about Charles and wondered if he’d be the competitor to beat.

After lunch, we convened in the classroom to have the afternoon’s competitive events explained. We would stay with our color-coded groups and rotate through three points-earning activities. One was the Cloverleaf, a timed course through the traction-limited skidpad. Two was the Rat Race, a race in which two drivers raced around an oval circuit. Three was the Autocross, timed across an infield segment of the training grounds. The points earned in the three qualifying activities would determine our order in the final, winner-take-all Supercross. The slowest driver would run the Supercross first, and the fastest driver would run last.

During our classroom session, our spectating guests arrived by shuttle bus and rental cars. My wife Kay and my 3-year-old daughter came in our rental Toyota Yaris. Upon seeing the stickered M cars, my daughter said, “It smells like race cars!” “What do race cars smell like?” my wife asked, to which my kit replied, “Cars.” Spectators watched from the big windows of the second-floor lunchroom or from the shaded parking paddock. A few guests rode in the instructors’ cars to watch the qualifying activities up close.

The blue group started with the Cloverleaf challenge in M4s. A barrel-racing style course had been set up on the slippery skidpad. Three circles of cones designated the “barrels” that were the pivot points around which we would do 270-degree turns.

Imagine the circular skidpad as a clock, and the starting line was on the grippy pavement near the 5 o’clock mark. We first dash to the barrel near the 9 o’clock mark and rotate around it in the counterclockwise direction. We’d cross the pad’s center for the cones at 3 o’clock and do a clockwise rotation. Next, we’d orbit the cones at 12 o’clock (in the CW direction again), then make a final sprint for, and hard brake into, a stop box at 7 o’clock. Stability control was fully off for the challenge; my skills earned in New England ice racing and SoCal dry lake shenanigans were called into action.

Since we started on the grippy pavement outside the skidpad, my strategy was to be very aggressive with my launch and then as tight, clean and conservative around the “barrels” as possible to minimize distance traveled and time lost to oversteer. I also set the M4 to its dullest throttle setting, Comfort, to make my throttle management easier.

I got two practice runs and then four timed runs. My aggressive, throttle-mashing launches activated the M4’s “poor man’s launch control” with its smokey burnout antics. (Floor the throttle from a stop, and the M4 clutches in to build revs, and then drops the clutch to spin the rear tires.) My orbits of the barrels were mostly as tight and clean as planned, but there was little I could do to find extra pace. Tom was the fastest of all and notched a blazing 37s run right out of the box. No one got close, and even Tom failed to improve his times on his final runs. After a number of 39s runs, I turned 38.3s on my final lap, a time that put me in second or third place in the Cloverleaf.

Next was a short autocross in the M2s, on the tight infield course we’d lapped in the morning. We started from a standstill before Jug Handle and ended in a stop box. The cars were run in Sport Plus with stability control on. Tom and Charles battled for first, with Charles putting down the fastest Blue group time of 25.70s. My laps were reasonably quick, clean and consistent, but 0.3s off the pace. Tom turned at 25.77s, Rich a 25.95s, and my 26.00s only won me 4th place.

After two defeats, I felt like my chance of becoming the Ultimate Driver was dim. A glum expression donned my face as I exited the M2. One of the instructors spotted my frown and tried to cheer me up by reminding me that only the Supercross mattered.

The final qualifying activity was the Rat Race, which we ran in M3s. A big oval course filled the Performance Center’s largest parking lot, with blue and red cones marking the mid-points of the two short straightaways. These two midpoints were the opposing start/finish lines for two competitors. Pairs of drivers lined up for battles. When our instructors, turned judges, gave us the “go!” we lapped the oval as fast as possible, trying to catch the opposing car. The first driver to complete three laps won and progressed up the bracket to the next challenger.

I’d noticed in the Cloverleaf that if you floor the throttle from a dead-start, the BMWs pause to build revs and then drop the clutch to go. This pause delays your departure from the line by a half-second. Thus, for the Rat Race, I opted to roll into the throttle for an immediate departure with less wheel spin. Even with this technique, the M3 has enough low-end torque to extract maximum acceleration from the available tire grip.

Once my Rat Race heats were underway, circling the oval track became a delightful cycle of well-managed exit oversteer and heavy, corner-entry trail braking. The straights were too short to ever allow me to fully straighten the steering wheel, and all of my acceleration and braking was done with the car still turning right. Early M3s were known as spiky beasts, as their torquey turbo engines would quickly spin the rear tires and send unprepared drivers pirouetting off the road. Today’s 2018 M3 Competition-pack cars showed none of this testiness. I was easily able to feel the limits of grip at the front and rear of the car, and the precise throttle let me carefully mete out power to extract maximum propulsion out of the corners, with just a hint of oversteer.

I tried to hug the inside of the track as best as I could to minimize my distance traveled.  I followed the inside cones all the way to the apex marker and then fed in the throttle. Cleanly but furiously orbiting the oval was immensely satisfying. I was as happy as a kid discovering how centripetal force keeps the water inside his bucket. I won my initial match-up against Tom and my second heat against Rich. Charles and I faced off in the final race, and I pipped him by a car length over three laps. I had vanquished the Cloverleaf and Autocross champions, and I was back on top of the world.

The instructors called for some celebratory drifting, and I happily obliged. I then had the idea of doing a subsequent NASCAR-inspired donut. The instructors acknowledged my donut, too, but did not condone it.

There was a 45-minute break as the instructors tallied our qualifying scores and prepared the Supercross course. From the top floor of the Performance Center, Kay and I tried to make out the route. This year’s Supercross started identically to last year’s course (which I had studied from the YouTube promotional video), with straight-line blasts along the west and north edges of the practice grounds, a tiptoe 90-degree crossing of the (dry) skidpad, and then a ¾ loop of the rat race oval. All of these fast segments covered ground I’d driven yesterday and today, favoring me for familiarity and for my threshold braking skills. But the remainder of the course was an expansion over last year’s, with a reverse-run of today’s timed autocross course and then use of segments of the infield training grounds I’d never driven before. This tight infield work would be new to me and a challenge to my memory and my line-finding skills.

Kay and I watched as the instructors took out the five M3s in which we would compete. The instructors were leveling the playing field by warming up the engines and brakes.  They also chewed up the tires with huge sustained drifts. No competitor would start with a completely fresh car! The Supercross lap timer indicated that, with gratuitous drifting included, a time of 88 seconds was possible.

Cars and track ready, the competitors were called together to hear the rules. All drivers would get to see, and ostensibly learn, the track twice as a passenger in an instructor’s car. Each participant would get two timed runs, taken back-to-back: Only the best run would count. Each trampled cone would add 2 seconds of penalty. The made-for-TV order put the poorest-qualifying driver on the Supercross first and the best-qualifying driver last.

The worst news for me was that the course would be run with MDM on; my nemesis!

I took a back seat in instructor Connor’s car during the teaching laps. Connor’s first pass through the course was done at slow speed, while he gave us advice and strategy on each section of the Supercross. He pointed out the braking references at the ends of the long straights, told us to enter the skidpad wide and allow the car to run wide on the exit so as to minimize the diameter of our turn, indicated where to trail brake on the way through the rat race hairpin and into the fishhook turn into the infield, and gave us advice on where to find short straights for full-throttle use through the tightly twisting infield. He then did a second pass through the course at what he described as a 60% pace. I was most nervous about hitting a cone in the incredibly tight chicane at the mouth of the skidpad, but remembering the proper path through the unfamiliar sections of infield track was going to be difficult for me too.

After the teaching laps, the participants were assigned group numbers 1, 2 or 3 so that the slowest, middle and fastest qualifiers could rotate into the competition cars in an orderly fashion. To my surprise, I was assigned to the fastest group of 5, which meant that I had qualified in the top 33%. My late start gave me time to return to the large windows on the Performance Center’s second floor and watch the Supercross progress from on high. I tried my best to learn the details of the track from this high vantage point, but the track was too far away to pick out nuances in the line and braking zones.

Also in the lunchroom were Rich’s son and Tom. Rich’s son was writing down incoming times, which we could see on the timing board at the end of the track. The best times were in the 92 seconds range. The two men surmised that a fast time would be anything under 90 seconds.

During the first run group, the timing system failed and had to be reset. Several of the drivers from the first group got a third run due to the technical issue. The timing was clean for the drivers of the middle qualifying group, and then my group was up. The qualifying order, from 5th to 1st, was Tim, Michael (me), Tom, Charles and Adam. I was 4th in qualifying! I followed Tim to the grid.

I reviewed my strategy. Yesterday my instructor Chris suggested I prioritize the good corner-exits to capitalize on the course’s long straights and not be overly concerned with gaining time at corner entry. My plan was to brake a half-marker earlier than what Connor had suggested so that I could drive lines through the corners that would allow me to unwind the steering wheel sooner, appeasing MDM, and give me more power onto the straights. I would be super careful through the pre-skidpad chicane to avoid penalties for fouled cones. I’d tiptoe through the slippery skidpad, then attack the Rat Race hairpin as I’d done in my winning qualifying event. For the infield, I was unprepared: In the 20 minutes of waiting since my instructor ride, the infield’s nuances had left my mind. I’d keep my eyes up and hope I’d remember Connor’s words as the corners appeared!

As I waited second on the grid, I watched a competitor—Rich, I later learned—mark an 89.9s lap. The 90-seconds barrier had been broken!  The heat was on!

I was given the green light for my first run. I did a smooth and quick start like I’d used in the Rat Race but then flubbed the upshift to 2nd gear by hitting the rev limiter for a fraction of a second! Note to self: Don’t try for the last 500 rpm.

I attacked the esses at the end of the straight, but my final apex before the north straight was early, compromising my entry to the straight. I made it cleanly through the tight chicane before the skidpad, had a reasonable transit across the polished pavement, attacked the Rat Race hairpin (fighting MDM on its exit), and then made a clean entry into the infield. Connor had advised us to accelerate into the Jug Handle and brake on its exit, and since the exit apex was free of cones, and snipped a little dirt to straighten the line. I did fine on my return to Patience, but then I carried too much speed into the final esses and missed my turn-in marks and apexes. When I pounded the brakes and came to a halt in the stop box, my time was 90.798s. I was nearly 1s off the best time, and the fastest drivers were still to come.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Kay read, “GREAT first lap! 2nd place so far.” Thinking of the 1-second gap between the fastest driver and me, I typed out a pessimistic “By a lot” and tucked the phone back in my pocket.

I mentally reviewed my lap and made promises to focus on the entries onto the straights, clean up the infield esses, and avoid the rev limiter. Just before I was cleared for my run, a driver delivered a sub-90-seconds lap. (I did not realize it at the time, but the driver was probably Rich on his second run.)

My second Supercross lap did not feel decidedly better than the first. I avoided bumping the rev limiter on the first straight, but I felt over-slow through the chicane that links the first straight to the north straight. I was clean through the tight gate before the skidpad, but I provoked copious understeer as I crossed the skidpad. Thankfully the exit of the skidpad was wide, and my error did not force me to use the brakes or hit any cones. The Rat Race hairpin went fine, but I significantly overcooked the fishhook entry into the infield, missing the clipping point by a mile. After Jug Handle, I erroneously shifted into 1st gear for a 2nd-gear hairpin and fumbled with the console shifter to get back into 2nd. The rest of my infield run was a complete mess, with missed marks, extremely late esses, and even more understeer on the final corner. I was late pegging the brakes into the stop box, and when the tires finally stopped dead, I had overshot the box: The 90.252s time showing on the clock would be thrown out.

I hadn’t broken into the 89 seconds range, and I’d be stuck with my original lap’s 90.7s time. My dreams of being BMW’s Ultimate Driver of 2018 were crushed.

I joined the other drivers in a loose semi-circle around the huddled judges. The lead instructor Matt was discussing, in hushed tones, the contents of his clipboard with the other instructors. To my surprise, I heard him say, “Let’s be sure which Michael is which.” as he looked up and scanned the anxiously waiting drivers. The other Michael, also of San Francisco, hadn’t qualified with the top 5 drivers: Was he really that competitive or had I placed on the podium?

Matt called our attention. “We are ready to announce the top three finishers. Third is Michael from the blue group [me!], second is Rich, and the Ultimate Driver of 2018 is Andy! Congratulations, Andy!”

Elated—and greatly surprised—by my third-place finish, I joined Rich and Andy in front of the crowd. The camera crews swooped around us as Matt thanked us all for coming, participating in such a fun event, and not crashing his cars.

While I’m not the Ultimate Driver, I can at least proudly proclaim to be BMW’s Antepenultimate Driver of 2018.