For the average Canadian driver, a winter driving school is an excellent investment: for a few hundred dollars, you can learn how to get along with Mother Nature at her moodiest and reach your destination unscathed.
Or, if you're willing to shell out around five thousand dollars instead, you can attend Porsche's Camp4 and spend two days smacking winter around in a $100,000 sports car.
Camp4 started in 1996 in Rovaniemi, Finland as a driving program taught by instructors from the Porsche Sport Driving School. The program made its way to Canada in 2011 and has been held at Mécaglisse, a four-season motorsports park located in Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci, Que. about an hour north of Montreal ever since. Other Camp4 events are also held in Italy, Switzerland and China.
As a “precision driving course” (as Porsche markets it) Camp4 does instil valuable car control skills. However, rather than teaching how to simply maintain control of a car during an emergency avoidance maneuver on a slippery road, Porsche's instructors show participants not only how to negotiate an icy corner, but how to do it at speed, with the car sideways, while throwing twin rooster tails of snow off the spinning rear wheels.
Porsche's ever-expanding model range includes a number of vehicles well-suited to winter driving, such as the Macan and Cayenne SUVs and even the Panamera sedan, which can be purchased with all-wheel drive. Camp4 leaves those models out though, putting drivers behind the wheel of two of its most popular sports car models, the Cayman and 911 (the latter in both rear- and all-wheel drive formats).
During Porsche’s 2015 Camp4 media day program began by putting the cars through a slalom course, with instructions to use the car's rear-drive layout to help steer around the pylons. Next, it was off to an icy skidpad, where the task was to negotiate the circular track in a constant state of controlled over-steer (which is what happens when the back of the car slides to the outside of a turn). After that, a technique called trail braking was taught. This involves applying the brakes after entering a turn, causing the rear of the car to slide out, and counter-steering to recover and use the car's momentum to carry you into the next turn.
The inclusion of both RWD and AWD versions of the 911 demonstrated how having four powered wheels isn't an automatic ticket to staying out of the ditch. Camp4 teaches you how to use that to your advantage.
After all the lessons, it's time to integrate everything learned onto a longer, icy road course. For a little extra entertainment value, Porsche has track marshals standing at every turn on the course, cheering you on as we approach the course's various challenges.
The focus at Camp4 is the same as in any performance driving course, no matter the amount of grip under the tires: it's all about keeping the car on the track which requires deliberate steering, throttle and brake inputs. Your hands and feet control the car, but once you've learned the physics of car control, the most important body parts here are your eyes. The key lesson being that if look where you want to go, nine times out of ten, the car will do what you tell it to. The trickiest part is remembering that, sometimes, seeing where you want to go involves looking through a side window, not the windshield – this applies in an unintentional skid on a public road just as much as it does in a controlled slide on a racetrack.
In addition to all of the valuable lessons you will learn, Camp4 is fun – it had better be at a cost of $5,195 (plus tax!) for the basic program. Once you master the precision driving skills there, you can move up to the more performance-oriented Camp4S ($6,195) and after that Camp4RS ($7,195). If somehow that's not enough adrenaline for you, you can try the Ice Force program, an all-out ice racing course held in Finland, with a price tag of 5,700 Euros (roughly $8,000 at the time writing).
Porsche's annual Camp4 media day is an abbreviated version of the class; for paying customers, the cost includes two full days of driving, three nights' accommodation, and all meals. (Porsche supplies the cars, too.) All you have to do is get yourself here, and many people do, every year: Porsche expected more than 350 participants for the 2015 program, from as far away as Australia.
As Porsche's cars are largely considered “lifestyle” purchases, Camp4 is definitely a lifestyle event: you will learn things, but factor in three nights at an upscale resort and a couple of days tossing someone else's sports cars around in the snow, and what you've got is an alternative to a Las Vegas getaway for a group of friends looking for a fun few days. (That being said, a week in Vegas would probably be less expensive if you reined in the gambling.)
While there are certainly more affordable ways to build winter-driving confidence, Porsche Camp4 does teach techniques that may not be applicable in in daily driving, but could help you out if you ever find yourself in a winter skid. Regardless of the cost, there's certainly something to be said for making learning physics this much fun.
