More pictures are available courtesy of gotbluemilk.

As always, getting to Thunderhill is the hardest part (not to mention the 6 AM wake up call) but at least the weather was very nice -- relatively clear, sunny with a refreshing wind -- and the people from Hooked on Driving were really nice.

The group was pretty small, we had 4 people in the beginners groups and 6 in the advanced one. The 4 of us in my group had 3 instructors whom were giving plenty of feedback, which was much appreciated.

The program consisted of a series of exercises: running over dots to understand the car limits, simulate getting in the dirt and back on the track, and of course the mandatory find-the-apex-yourself, the cone zigzag and the braking exercises. All the kind of stuff you have to do when you want to learn your car, which is exactly why I went there in the first place.

We also had some more practical exercises to learn the track, especially a good amount of time practicing turn 9. For those unfamiliar with the track, it's a nice "blind" spot: the track goes up the hill, and right at the top there's a turn to negotiate and since you can't see the road on the other side of the hill it's really hard to know where to go when you're doing that at 50 MPH :-)

Later we did the same with turn 5, which is even more tricky, but this time we stopped and literally walked the turn. Once used to it this way, I found these turns to be almost the easiest ones. We walked turn 11 too but I still found it pretty tricky to get right after.

We also had a nice number of real track laps, basically I was following a lead car driven by an instructor. This started nice and slow and depending on how the student behind was following the instructor would give some nice feedback or pickup speed. I built up a descent speed although a couple of times I almost wanted to pass the lead car ;-) but it was really nice to have a reference point in case I had forgotten how to negotiate a turn and most important to see in advance which zones would be tricky and where to brake. Having the instructor in front made most turns look almost obvious; remove him and it's a whole different story...

In total I drove 85 miles, with most of it on the track so it was pretty good for a training program. And I used about 8 gallons of gas, so that gives me a respectable 10 mpg, not bad :-)

Most important I see now what my little car can do, it's really nice to see it in action and to have a safe place to experiment with it. It's only a Civic Si so it's clearly not as spiffy as the other cars one expects to find there -- for example the others "beginners" cars included a Subaru STI, a Corvette Z51 and an F430!

I can really see a clear difference with the old 240SX. The most important is the understeer instead of oversteer of course, but the way the power builds up is interesting too -- the VTEC really kicks in at 6k RPM and the red line is at 8, so after a couple of laps I found where to downshift to get more RPM faster thus a better momentum.

So overall a great experience which was totally worth it.