For Cardrona’s Southern Hemisphere Proving Ground (SHPG) there’s no business unless it’s snow business, and over the past decade the car/component/tyre-testing facility has developed a nice little earner on the side.
Parts of the proving ground are now hired by New Zealand’s motor vehicle distributors so they can stage tailored driving experiences for customers that will up-skill their car control. First to stage one of these slip-sliding events in the 2018 winter was BMW NZ last week, which will soon be followed by similar driver training programmes offered by Audi, Ferrari, Lexus, Aston Martin and Mazda importers.
Attending my sixth driving-on-snow-and-ice event, I last week came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter which brand of car you drive at these skid-fests. What matters is the condition of the snow.
Lamborghini once took me to China’s border region with Siberia so I could skid stud-tyred Gallardos on what it claimed was the “best snow in the world”. The conditions at the BMW NZ event at the top of the Pisa range in Central Otago last week refuted that boast. The track preparation team had spent a seven-hour shift the previous night compacting several centimetres of freshly fallen powder into a harder surface that offered a wonderfully consistent lack of grip for the winter tyres of the BMWs.
The cars could therefore be held at attitudes and slip-angles without sudden changes in grip affecting their balance. Drifting, for me, never felt more natural and effortless, even though the BMWs would occasionally trigger their pre-crash preparation systems (windows would suddenly wind up, seat belts were pulled tighter etc) because they sensed that an accident was about to happen.
Had this been a drive on the road, that was a likely outcome; but the tracks at the SHPG offered plenty of room in which to correct driver errors, and the speeds of the cars were relatively modest (I never went beyond third gear). If you get it all wrong the result would be only a harmless spin.
My driving partner even used the event to hone his own signature snow-and-ice driving trick — spinning the cars on the approach to the exit cones so that they left the tracks backwards.
Not only are the SHPG exercises kind to drivers, they’re also easy on the cars. All that slippage places little stress on engines, brakes and drivelines, to the point that I’d feel confident about buying a car that I knew had been used for an SHPG event.
At the first BMW NZ event at the SHPG I attended nine years ago the emphasis was on the four-wheel drive abilities of the X-badged SUVs. This time, it was the turn of the M-division performance cars to shine in two of the three driving experiences.
First, for me, was a hot lap of the far reaches of the SHPG in an M3 sports-sedan (pictured left), with chief instructor Mike Eady at the wheel. With the M3 reaching speeds of 145km/h before weaving on the brakes like Marquez’s MotoGP bike, it felt like being a navigator inside a WRC car competing in the Swedish round of the championship.
Then, the absolute highlight — our hands-on drifting of M5, M4, and M2 sedans and coupes, by first getting some practice and tuition on a kidney-shaped track before progressing to a higher-speed drift circle.
BMW instructor Dominic Storey at BMW NZ’s Alpine XDrive experience at the Snow Farm, Cromwell.
Rising stars of the New Zealand motorsport scene Gene Rollinson and Dominic Storey were brilliant advisers as to how to get the M-cars holding a constant drift for continuous laps of the circle.
The all-paw M5 offered the best sounds and most power (441kW) as it spat huge rooster tails of snow while driving sideways in its rear-wheel mode, while the extra agility and reduced pendulum effect of the more compact M2 could also be appreciated. The M4, meanwhile, felt a delightful middle-ground mix of the M2’s delicacy and the M5’s muscle. It quickly became the BMW I most coveted.
By contrast, the last driving exercise was threading the eye of a complex slalom in four-wheel drive BMWs. This toned down the excitement a little, possibly because the stability control systems of the cars were still active.
Understeer took over from oversteer, requiring a big adjustment in driving style, and a more conservative approach.
It was a gap I never managed to bridge, as my heavy right foot triggered the DSC with such speed-snuffing regularity that the time I logged in the slalom was less than ordinary.
Still, I could blame my red face on snow-burn, and BMW NZ’s decision to get to the proving ground early this winter paid off with an event that showed skids-on-snow at their thrilling best.