The National Capital Chapter held their last Driver’s School this past weekend at the Jefferson Circuit at Summit Point. The Jefferson is one of my favorite courses — very MINI friendly. The weather was beautiful, and unlike last November, sunny and warm. The GeorgeCo MINI ran like a top. (Watch me chase the M5 in the video above.)

No major changes to the car from the last track day. The suspension has settled a bit, so I now have more negative camber up front which helped with tire wear. I replaced my stock hood scoop with the M7 Extreme Hood Scoop which may have helped with intercooler temps, but it wasn’t that hot to begin with. The Falken RT-615s continue to wear evenly and remain predicable through multiple sessions, never exceeding about 125 degrees in the front and 98 in the rear.

Because of the suspension work and sticky tires, we’ve been having trouble making the car misbehave on the skidpad. For my second session, we tried something different. To get the car into oversteer, I lowered the fronts to street pressure and over-inflated the rears by about 10 pounds. With a little application of the emergency brake, the tail came out quite easily. But with all front-wheel drive, it is hard to sustain oversteer for any distance. You can see at the end of this clip that I managed to get the car almost completely sideways and still recovered.