Driving is what it’s ALL ABOUT...!
For me, back-country driving is one of the best parts of "my" automotive hobby. Driving on roads to “the middle of nowhere” is not about burning up those roads; it is about enjoying them at a quick pace, enjoying the scenery, and seeing new places. Sometimes these drives are held as a TSD rally (time-speed-distance navigational competition); sometimes they are formally-led drives of fellow car enthusiasts. Designing and leading a drive for a group of fellow car enthusiasts is a fun way to meet new people. And truly great cars are ones that can be driven hard and fast for long periods of time. The S2000, Evo, and Solstice/Sky all qualify there.
Living in Central Texas has a lot of really enjoyable aspects. A wide variety of back roads – thousands of miles of potential roads to drive – is one of the big attractions here. I haven’t had as much fun on back roads since my TSD rally days of many years ago. In more recent years, it was the local S2000 club which really excelled at regularly hosting drives. At its peak we were often driving twice a month over most of the year. It was a great way to form bonds amongst owners with similar interests. It’s this type of same thing that I think would be most valuable to the Solstice clubs that are springing up around the country.
You'll remember my earlier post about the first Solstice Club drive last March that we led: at the time it was (as far as we were able to ascertain) the largest Solstice club drive ever held. It even got GM's attention.
Reference: March 2006 Solstice Drive
Reference: August 2006 Solstice Drive
Since then, we've been wanting to hold a smaller but much longer drive. In June, Steve and Derek, of the local Solstice owners club, asked me to plot and lead another drive. It took several weeks to agree on the date, then 2 weeks to set it up.
Unfortunately, the end of August is still full blast-furnace-hot in Texas (which is certainly preferable to the ice cold wasteland I formerly had to endure as Yankee up north!). So besides being a more challenging and longer drive, we'd have the severe heat to deal with too. The initial concept of a drive lasting for ~8 hours of drive-time (not counting stops) had to be reset to about 5 hours of driving, plan additional and frequent stops for water and rest. We did stick with the idea of both lunch and dinner on the road - but air conditioned restaurants were required. Furthermore, to ensure everybody kept their cool, we scheduled a stop at Longhorn Caverns to give everybody a chance to really cool down (it’s in the sixties underground!). Then we'd head to Fredericksburg, Texas for a late dinner before returning to Austin.
Planning & Prep
As before, in the days before the event we established a route and then drove most (but not all - my mistake) of it to check it out.
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I have a "master map" of routes in Central Texas, showing all the "good" driving roads that I know of - as well as some roads that won’t work (gravel, dead ends, etc). I use Microsoft Streets & Trips (“S&T”) to select portions of these roads and to plan the route - as well as to look for "new" roads to try. S&T also supports GPS so that during the drive I can follow the route “live”. Very cool! Why S&T? There are some similar offerings available from other vendors, but this is by far the best of the lot. The graphics are fast, the maps are accurate (most of these programs are all based on the same data provided by a company that consolidates data from state & local governments), the entire set of maps for all of North America can be stored on the hard drive, and route maps can be printed (even with turn-by-turn instructions). It's important before the day of the event to drive the designed route and check for issues such as gravel or deep water (which was the end of one particularly infamous S2000 drive) that S&T can’t show you. |
My mistake was not test-driving one small but critical portion of the road... in an isolated part of the route that was literally in the middle of nowhere. For the March drive, we put over 500 test miles on the car as we designed and test-drove the route before the day of the event! For this drive, we did most of it just once.
In planning this drive, I wanted to show the attendees some of the best roads in Central Texas. I designed a route that would be somewhat different from the last drive - besides being longer, I wanted to use some roads south of town and go much farther to the west as we made our way to our dinner stop. It was straightforward to plan this route, but the late addition of the Longhorn Cavern stop severely complicated the route planning. Complicated because the vast expanse of land south of Llano - in the triangle formed by 16 to the west and 71 to the east - has no paved roads which cut all the way thru it. So, we'd have to backtrack down some of the same roads which we'd already driven. In an ideal pre-planning phase, this choice of stop would have been avoided if it all possible. But we needed the cool relief of the underground cave tour in order to keep us all in top form.
In our one pre-drive “test drive”, we checked out a couple of new roads. As I've said, this is an important step because you can’t count on every road on the map being appropriate or even safe. Indeed, one road we wanted to use had an enormous dip which would have severely bottomed out a Solstice. That was too much – so we had to scratch this portion of the hoped-for route at the last minute.
And then I made my goof – it was late, we were out of time, and I was sure from a previous drive that one little piece of road I’d chosen was workable. It turned out to be gravel – discovered of course in the middle of the drive- and was therefore impassable.
Event
Saturday morning - the big day. Everything was laid out the night before, but even then time was very short. The laptop and GPS had to be plugged into the car and tested, and fueling the driver and navigator are as important as fueling the car. So far, the GPS was working - but the receiver would die 15 minutes into the drive.
We started early with a 10 AM “drivers meeting” in Austin, followed by a 10:30 departure.
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When leading a drive, there are two tough challenges you are faced with right off the bat:
1. getting everybody "trained" to keep up as a group
2. getting the group quickly out of town.
On the second point, Austin is still not so big that we can't quickly get out of it. We met on 2222, drove it up the hill (providing a twisty preview of the day to come) to Mopac, and then out the southwest side of town. More challenging, however, is the "training" portion. It's tough because most people haven't been on a drive like this - they have a tough time establishing their own pace and then following the pace of the entire group. There are all kinds of different drivers, too - some fast and some not so fast - so you have to account for that and get everybody whipped into shape as a team. Each car has to keep the car behind it in sight - if you start too lose sight of the car behind you then inevitably everyone will fall out of line and get lost. Traffic is a complicating factor. And when we finally get out of town, a single lane road can be blocked by a truck or a minivan very easily. |
And that is exactly what happened (thanks to a dip driving a minivan while blabbing on a cell phone). And which is exactly what caused our schedule for the day to begin to go awry. The minivan alone cost us over ½ hour of time.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The drive suddenly got much more difficult when my GPS receiver decided to die... it had finally had enough of a lifetime of being stuck on a hot windshield and baking in the sun. Fortunately, I had the backup plan of just manually following our route on S&T. And if the laptop had died – and fortunately it didn’t - I had a second backup scheme of using a hard copy printout of the map, including turn-by-turn maps.
The rest of the morning went well, other than a mistake of stopping for water at a gas station which led to an extended rest and cost us another 1/2 hour or more. We had to bypass a few roads (“escape” options established up front for just this purpose) to make up more time. Our route followed one particularly long road (with a one-lane water crossing) from the last drive, but otherwise it was all new roads. I believe they were well-received by the group.
And of course when leading a drive in Central Texas there is only one place to stop for lunch: Opie’s BBQ in Spicewood, TX.
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Choosing a BBQ joint is a controversy, because real Texans love their BBQ (and those of us who wish we were real Texans eat as much of it as is humanly possible in a hopeless quest to become a real Texan). Everybody has their own idea what the best BBQ joint is in Texas - and there are a couple of BBQ joints (around the cities where they don’t know any better) that are absolutely not real Texas style. In fact, in the morning portion of the drive we went right past one of the better known “tourist” BBQ joints without even acknowledging it!
If you haven’t met “The Man” at Opie’s, you haven’t had real Texas BBQ. ”The Man” is Herbie, who brought his own recipe from a certain other famous Texas BBQ joint and started Opies along with a couple of friends. Herbie likes sports cars: he knows the S2000 well from having at least 50 S2000 drives stop there for lunch over the past 6 years. And the S2000 club knows Opies well. When the Austin chapter of the national S2000 group hosted a national convention a few years back, we had >100 S2000s stop at Opies in the course of only 2 hours.
BTW, don’t confuse this “The Man” with the other nationally known “The Man” in Seattle, Washington. He may be the more famous holder of that title, but he serves N’Orleans-style BBQ to Microsofties who don’t know the real differences between BBQ styles (and having once been a Microsoftie from Texas I knew the difference when I went to check out his restaurant). It was ok – but Texas has best BBQ in the world, and Opies is real Texas-style BBQ. |
Lunch went very well, with our group chowing down to the tune of well over a hundred bucks of brisket, ribs, and chicken. BBQ at Opies is indescribably good. And all of our cars were probably more than a bit closer to the ground when we left…
Rather than put everybody right into the twisty stuff again (which would have been an especially bad choice after a heavy BBQ lunch!), we drove a more-or-less direct route to the Longhorn Caverns (taking, but not testing, the infamous “roller coaster” road). Once there we found the underground cavern had been changed to 1.5 hours, instead of only 1. That change all but killed off several miles of road we had yet to travel this afternoon. So, the drive was shortened even further.
After the tour finally ended, we rounded up the group and left. 20 miles down the road we found that an important road that I hadn’t checked in advance (note that I already admitted my mistake above) suddenly changed to gravel. I had sworn that I knew this road from an earlier drive. No choice, time to find a new road. About 30 minutes were lost here altogether, but by now the extreme temperature (>100 degrees) had taken it’s toll on us all and we voted unanimously to take a route straight to dinner.
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Fredericksburg, TX is the most successful “tourist” town in Central Texas. By “tourist town”, I mean a town that has completely dedicated itself to providing shops and restaurants – as well as motels and B&Bs – to tourists. Most of the shops sell “stuff for the wives” (and that may sound like a sexist statement, but in contrast a “NASCAR-theme” shop that some poor fool thought up only lasted a very short time before it failed), but there are also several worthwhile book stores, furniture stores, and a gourmet kitchen store for those of you who like to cook.
The town has almost no reason to exist otherwise. What it does, it does very well.
A couple of places for the rest of us to note: first is the Museum of the Pacific War. This is a very well done and worthwhile attraction. You’ll also find the interesting WW2-themed Hangar Hotel and restaurant at the local airport. There are two other historical tours in town: one is a church built by the original German settlers in the mid-1800s and the other is a collection of original cabins and barns from the same timeframe, located next to what was the general store of that age. Both are very worthwhile tours. So, a couple of “good” places to visit before you get back on the roads for some more twisties. |
Dinner was at the Fredericksburg Brewing Company – aka “The Brewery”. By this time, it was 6:30 PM and we were all starved and dried out. Needless to say, this was a good choice for two reasons: it was very nicely air conditioned inside, and the food was great. Dinner took about two hours – with a good chunk of that time spend recovering from the day and swapping stories. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to speak to most of the people in the group because I was pretty much worn-out from navigating and leading the drive all day.
We broke up at last before 9 PM and headed back to Austin. After driving well over 200 miles, what’s another 75 back to town?
Lessons Reinforced
I’ve been involved in a bunch of drives, and have led several over the years. I got involved with this one as a favor, and also because I’d been interested in making a first-hand impression of the Solstice by seeing it in “action” and talking to the owners.
· Set a goal for the drive: whether it’s to do as many miles as possible, or just to have a relaxing drive followed by dinner as a group.
· Know your audience: as I’ve said, skills vary widely. Experienced drivers can do a different type of drive than can inexperienced drivers. And everybody has different ideas about what kind of a drive they are looking for. Some pre-conceptions form if you don’t clearly explain the concept up front as early as possible. For most groups, you’ll need to find a happy compromise. We had an initially aggressive concept for this drive, which had to be reset as the potential attendees commented (via an online forum) about what they wanted.
· Don’t rely entirely on GPS. GPS is the best possible thing for leading a drive: the ability to keep an accurate fix on your position in real time – even to plot a route change “on the fly” – is invaluable. But, as I’ve found in the past, equipment errors do happen and you need to be prepared. Laptops run out of batteries, GPS signal is occasionally lost (although extremely rare, it has happened on some occasions – for example in the middle of Open Road races where ascertaining the exact position is critical). In this case the backup for GPS is either the mapping software or at worst case a stack of hardcopy printouts.
o BTW, IMHO, an in-car navigation system won’t work for this type of GPS usage. You can’t program those with complex routes and you can’t change the route to use your own choice of roads. And, you need a navigator to run the laptop – don’t try this yourself from the driver’s seat.
· Be prepared to deal with folks who are new to this kind of drive. They need to be shown why they have to keep up with the group – although “keeping up” is a team function. Establish the cohesiveness of the group as a team, and then you can fly.
· Don’t plan a drive that purposely has an average speed well above the speed limit. I’m not here to drone on about always playing by all the rules, but as professional drivers we do know that people’s skillsets vary widely (both the people on the drive as well as other drivers you will encounter on the roads) and you have to plan for that in a group drive. Plan on the speed limit, allow time for getting used to the pace.
· Test-drive every single road of the drive – don’t rely on memory. As I found out, memory failed me. Many of these roads look alike after years have passed.
· Plan on a gas break, and hold to the plan. We had an unplanned water stop, which everybody used to also gas up. That took valuable time. The Solstices and our S2000 didn’t require an extra gas fill up with only a 200-mile trip before dinner (although the Evo did).
· Don’t plan an overly-ambitious route… plans change, people need to stop more often than you might think (not everybody in the group can use the “Dan Gurney” method on fast cross-country drives), and if you encounter anybody else on the most remote of the back roads, chances are they’ll hold you up and ruin your schedule if you don’t allow some leeway in your planning.
So, one more drive completed. The group is already talking about another one, although late in the fall when it’s much cooler. Hopefully the basic ideas of group drives have now been well-established. To keep this going, it’s time to get a variety of drive leaders established. Therefore, for the next drive, I’d suggest that one of the other members of the group take over. I’ll be happy to act as consultant for setting up the route, and maybe as sweep car.
Shown at SEMA in November 2006: a "GXP-R" Solstice with a 6-speed. This may preview a future option for the Solstice and Sky turbos.
