Every new Dodge Challenger, Charger or Durango in SRT^® trim comes with a free one-day program at Radford Racing School, allowing owners to experience some of the highest performance production road vehicles in the world under the supervision of some of the best driving instructors in the world. More importantly, the Radford SRT Experience provides owners with a lesson on how to push these 700+ horsepower vehicles to their limit in a safe environment, where losing traction and spinning out won’t lead to a guardrail or tree being hit on the side of the road.

SRT Ground School

The Radford Racing School SRT Experience begins in the classroom with a Ground School session. After the instructor introduces himself and explains what the day will consist of, he runs through a lesson of basic car control. This includes information on weight transfer during braking, steering and acceleration, and how each of those three actions impact the ability to steer or accelerate.

The instructor will also go through the basics of how to position your seat, hands and feet for the best results on the track, at which point many people will realize that they have poor habits in terms of seating position. For some, just what is learned in the brief classroom session will go a long way in making them a better driver, but once the group heads out to the vehicles, the real fun begins.

SRT Seat Time

The first seat time that you will get at the Radford SRT Experience comes on the large tarmac in front of the main school building. This sprawling piece of pavement has many different patterns painted on it and during the course of the program, the instructors move cones around based on the exercise at hand.

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Driving either a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat or a Durango SRT 392, students in this class will participate in an accident avoidance exercise that teaches them to keep their eyes up while making a hard swerving maneuver at speed. This allows the students to experience vehicle physics in action while also improving their driving skills.

Next, a team slalom exercise measures how quickly a group of drivers can each weave through a series of cones and change cars between each run. During this exercise, the instructors provide pointers on how to be smoother through the slalom.

Finally, each driver gets to make some runs around the Radford Autocross course, which exercises the driver’s vision and car control skills in a very tight space. Each cone down adds a second to their time and with the course taking about 25 seconds for an average driver, one cone down takes a driver out of contention for the class win.

Time on the Big Track

The Radford SRT Experience saves the most exciting seat time for last, as students head out onto the 15-turn, 1.6-mile road course for some high-speed lead-and-follow action with an instructor. While many lead-and-follow exercises are more about keeping everyone’s speed low, that isn’t the objective with this program. The instructor will push a little harder each lap, provided that the small group of students in tail keep up. While you won’t be setting any lap records during this session, you will be pushing the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcats harder than you could ever do safely on public roads, providing most owners with a rare chance to use all 700+ supercharged horsepower.

While you are not allowed to pass during this exercise, the instructor drives hard enough that the students will be going all-out just to keep close. Groups of students who display the ability to consistently follow the proper driving line and correctly use the braking zones will make progressively quicker laps in the Challenger SRT Hellcat, making this the most exhilarating part of the program.

The last portion of the Radford Racing School SRT Experience is a session of hot laps with one of the driving instructors. Instructors generally give the students their choice of fast laps or “fun laps”, with the fun laps consisting of plenty of drifting around pretty much every turn. Meanwhile, the fast laps are run with a proper driving line and proper attention paid to the braking zones, leading to the quickest lap times possible – but no tire smoke. Since many people love all of the smoke, the fun laps are a popular request, but in either case, the instructors make sure that every SRT Experience student ends the day with their blood pumping.