Our Man in the Cockpit

I can pinpoint the exact moment that the sheer coolness of what I was doing fully sunk in.

It was at Turn 11. It's a tight-ish uphill left-hander that I'd spent most of the day taking in second gear. But after consultation with Mike The Instructor, the plan this time around was to hold it in third, keep the right foot planted, and see what happened. If it worked, the car would lean into the corner's steep camber, launch up the hill, I'd grab fourth on the way into the swooping Turn 12, and feel like a hero. If it didn't work, I'd run wide and head off towards the desert.

There's not a lot to hit at that particular part of the Bahrain International Circuit, but keeping the thing on the track was still my number one priority. It's a bit hard to pretend that you're Nick Heidfeld when you are bouncing towards a sand dune.

It worked. The Formula BMW FB02 hooked around the corner as if on rails, a full 20km/h faster than I had managed previously, and for the first time all weekend I got a real sense of just how much grip these things have got. A Formula BMW has wings, but the vast majority of the grip actually comes from the Michelins that are bolted onto each corner. The car never even gave a hint of breaking traction.

In the end, it was me that spoiled the moment - I was so caught up in how much quicker I was going that I messed up my line going into Turn 12, causing me to drift out wide at the exit. It wasn't a big mistake - the left hand wheels might have wandered a foot or so into the runoff area - but it was enough to screw up my run into Turn 13, a fun late-apex right-hander that was one of my favourite parts of the entire track. But what the hell, it was worth it.

One of the great pleasures of working in motor racing is that every now and then you find yourself in some of the most unbelievable situations. As someone who was paying their way into racetracks only six years ago, I still occasionally pinch myself.

Yes, that was Bobby Rahal who just bought you a beer at the end of an interview. Yes, you were just playing with gearbox components at the Jaguar F1 factory with Mark Webber. Yes, you did just tell a multiple Bathurst winner that he'd be welcome to drop into the office, but only if he brought doughnuts. (That's a standing rule at Australia's Motoring News - drivers can drop in for a chat, but they must come bearing gifts. Amazingly, it almost always works.)

I had 15 hours to ponder all of this while flying from Melbourne to the Persian Gulf with an invitation to spend two days at the BMW Performance Centre in Bahrain stowed safely in the overhead compartment. Even motorsport journalists don't get asked to do stuff like this very often - or at least, this motorsport journalist doesn't. I spent the entire flight feeling like an eight-year-old on Christmas Eve.

Paul Spooner and Mark Glendenning in a 3 series BMW © BMW AG

The BMW Performance Centre is the only driving school with a permanent based at the Bahrain circuit, and it is actually two schools rolled into one. There is the BMW Driving Centre, which offers training in an armada of BMW road cars, and the BMW Racing Centre, which instructs pupils in the fine art of handling an open-wheeler with the help of about a dozen Formula BMWs. It is one of two such facilities in the world, with a sister school based in Valencia, Spain. And for two days, this was going to be my playground.

The man with the daunting task of trying to convey some sense of how to drive a racing car to myself and around 10 others (mostly German motoring journalists) was Paul Spooner, an expat Brit and former race driver with about 20 years experience in this sort of thing. Not only were we largely a bunch of bumbling novices (although one German guy managed to psyche the rest of us out before we even saw a car by turning up with his own helmet), but Spooner had to somehow condense lessons that he normally teaches over the course of about a week down into a single weekend.

Spooner was well and truly up to the task, but for the first day I wasn't so sure that the same applied to myself. Day one was all about road cars and learning how to explore the limits of the brakes, how to steer defensively, and so on. That's fine, but I was so jet-lagged that for half of the first day I could barely see straight.

Complicating matters slightly was that all the cars were left-hand-drive, which was a whole new world for me. I was so disoriented during the first few drills that I was left-foot-braking the whole time without even realizing it. In a road car, this is not necessarily a good thing.

Happily, no-one noticed and by the afternoon I was using my equipment a little more conventionally. And we had some fun stuff at our disposal - lots of BMW 3 Series, lots of BMW 5 Series and - sharp intake of breath - a bunch of BMW M3s, complete with F1-style paddle shifting and lots of power on tap.

In the afternoon we ventured out onto the track for the first time to do cornering drills and so on, and within a couple of hours we were lapping the full Grand Prix circuit. It was almost obscene, I kept telling myself, that someone was paying me to do this.

Driving any car around a Formula One track is fun. It is a happy accident that my route from home to work takes me along half of the Albert Park circuit and I never tire of steering around it, even within the confines of the speed limit. Naturally, we were beyond such frivolous concerns at Bahrain, but there was still a sense that this was just a dress rehearsal. Sure, we were driving around a GP circuit, but tomorrow, we'd be doing it in race cars.

By the time we actually fired up our Formula BMW for the first time, we were already vaguely acquainted with it. The cars had been loosely set up according to driver height, and we'd spent the previous evening finding a car that fit, and being suited up in a proper racing kit.

Standing around in fireproof overalls, balaclavas and racing boots, we actually looked kind of like racing drivers (although, hard as I tried, I never managed to master that trick where drivers tie the arms of their race suits around their waist when they're not driving their cars. Mine kept coming undone. I've never seen Schuey's do that.) Unlike race drivers though, most of us looked scared. As far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that I had driven an open-wheeler before. Twice, in fact. But it was not much comfort - on both occasions, I'd spun the car.

"Mark Glendenning enters Turn 1 at Bahrain in the Mygale Formula BMW FB02 © BMW AG

As it turned out, there was not much to worry about. As was the case in the road cars, we spent a good half a day going through various drills designed to make us comfortable with the car, so when we were finally let loose, we were relatively at home in the cockpit.

Championship-spec Formula BMWs - those that race in the FBMW series in the UK, USA and Asia - rev to around 9,000 rpm. The cars based in Bahrain are rev-limited at 8,400, however when they were entrusted to us, they had been turned down to 7,000 rpm for most of the day, with an extra 1,000 revs being made available to us for the last couple of runs when we theoretically knew what we were doing.

To be honest, the extra 1,000 revs didn't feel massively different, probably because a Formula BMW is not the world's most powerful open-wheeler in the first place. The series was designed as a stepping stone for young drivers making the transition from karts to cars, so they are relatively forgiving things to drive.

But while the FBMW does not have a massive amount of outright power it still has a bit of go in it, especially lower in the rev range. The little cars take off quite quickly, and even with the rev limit being activated we were still seeing a shade over 200 km/h down the main straight.

The thing that felt really spooky was the size of the track itself. The Bahrain circuit is really, really wide, and when you are in a little car like a FBMW, you feel like you are flying a light aircraft through a canyon. There is so much room.

All too soon, the chequered flag was being waved, and it was all over. I had one last taste of the F1 lifestyle in that I had to jump out of the car, get changed, shake hands with everyone ("The team did a great job") and then jump into a BMW 7-Series that was waiting to chauffeur me to the airport.

But it was a reluctant parting. I could happily have spent the next week steering those things around that circuit. The year is not even half-finished, and I have a bad feeling that there is nothing down the road that can top this particular weekend.

The coolest thing about all of this is that you can do it too. Both the BMW Driving Centre and the BMW Racing Centre in Bahrain offer tuition to the public, so if you want to drive around one of the world's most advanced race circuits then pay a visit to their website for more details.

In the meantime, a message to Dr. Mario Theissen: should Heidfeld, Villeneuve or Kubica be unable to fulfil their duties at any point this year, you know where to find me.