When you purchase or lease a AMG Mercedes, you get a credit to use at the AMG driving academy.  After moving dates around for a while, I got the opportunity to attend at Laguna Seca.  10/17/13

The event dealt with a lot of basic racing fundamentals and did everything from spending time on a skid pan to lead and follow laps on the track.  We also got to drive everything from C63s, E63s, CLS63s and SLS GT cars.

The above video is me in the SLS during lead and follow  Unfortunately this is done as a group and our overall speed is really limited by our slowest driver.

I start behind the 43 car (Bob), our slowest in the group.   After he moves to the side, I lap behind the instructor in the red 41 car.

After my lap behind him, I move to the side to let the next person ride directly behind the instructor. You can get a sense of how much slower we had to go by seeing how long it takes for the last car (43) to catch up before I fall back inline.

Certainly not getting anywhere near pushing the limits of what is possible with this car on this track, but it was a lot of fun!

We spent a lot of time working on our racing line though the “Corkscrew” –

One of my favorite parts of the event was the Autocross event. There were around 60 people total at the event. We were all split into 5 groups of 10. I was the Blue team. Though we were competing individually for the best overall time, the teams were also competing for the best group time. My team (blue), won first place.  The team prize was a nice pair of Bang & Olufsen headphones – Not bad!