When fears of a global coronavirus pandemic ground the world to a halt just over a year ago, nobody expected the massive changes to daily life that would follow. For the automotive industry, the crisis led to repurposed factories, production delays, and canceled events like the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.

On the other hand, the pandemic also directly contributed to a car craze among a growing base of enthusiasts, leading to skyrocketing values and a rash of speeding tickets. Whether the rush can be blamed on boredom or too much screen time, the auto addiction does offer respite from feeling cooped up indoors by attending group drives or Cars and Coffee-style meetups.

For those gearheads who feel the need for speed extra powerfully these days but don't want to risk their lives (and cars!) going nuts on public streets, track days offer a safer environment to test the limits of human and mechanical performance—although the financial commitment rises almost exponentially, as well. But Covid-19 also squeezed the availability of track day events, which made it all the more exciting when I was recently invited by a company called Exclusive Track Days to attend a dream day of pandemic living up at Sonoma Raceway in Northern California.

Sonoma Raceway AKA Sears Point

For historically minded readers, Sonoma Raceway is still probably better known as Sears Point and today, it serves under a new name as one of only seven road circuits on which Nascar drivers leave the oval behind. Each 2.52-mile lap at Sonoma includes 12 turns and a total elevation change of 160 feet (which doesn't sound like much, though it mostly comes in the form of two steep hills).

For the day of my visit, I was able to wander around the entire facility almost completely unrestricted, thanks to the fact that Exclusive Track Days (ETD) rented out the entirety of the track. The company has been doing just that for over six years now, throughout which founder Ace Robey has hitherto resisted the urge to listen to PR pressure and broadcast the private events to the general public. Ace sits on the cusp of sharing ETD with the world, so I served as something of a guinea pig, the first and only member of the press to appear onsite at an ETD event.

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Exclusive Track Days Lives Up To The Name

ETD Sonoma Raceway 5
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

ETD manages to attract a core group of customers by offering a different approach towards track days when compared to other options on the market today. Ace only rents out the likes of Sonoma Raceway and Laguna Seca on loud days, when decibel levels can reach 103-105 and the neighbors have no right to complain. And on those rare days, ETC limits attendance so that nobody feels cramped while driving—with three car classes to make sure that someone shaking down their brand-new McLaren Senna GTR, for example, doesn't get crowded out by a Mazda Miata.

But the price of entry itself isn't the limiting factor. The drivers at Sonoma got seven 20-minute laps in one day—for the surprisingly reasonable entry fee of $289, though later calendar events can run up to $699 per day. Anyone buying into ETD can rest assured that everyone else on the track has been vetted to a certain extent before being allowed to mash the throttle and cause problems—in the past, Ace has had to get stern with attendees for not heeding flags, racing too aggressively, or neglecting to live up to the "point-by" courtesy.

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Cars Available To Rent Through AR Motorsports

ETD Sonoma Raceway
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Ace also fields a small paddock of impressive track toys for customers to rent through ETD's sister company, AR Motorsports. Current options include a Porsche GT3 Cup car, a BMW M4 GTS, a McLaren 570S GT4, and an E36 BMW M3. A few other vendors on site sell wheels and handle tire mounting—while race gas was available from Sonoma Raceway at just under $10 a gallon.

Because ETD only rents the tracks on loud days, a few private racing teams take the opportunity to test out their cars and drivers. On hand at Sonoma were Rearden Racing with a fleet of three Lamborghini Huracans, plus an Audi R8 GT2, as well as Hard Motorsport, which was flogging a fully prepped BMW 2 Series.

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Shaking Down A McLaren Senna GTR

ETD Sonoma Raceway 7
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Without a doubt, the star of the show was the McLaren Senna GTR going through its first  day of shakedown driving. Only the day before, the onsite vendor Elite Auto Works had hand-wrapped the Senna in its Alain Prost-inspired Marlboro livery, further helping the track-only hypercar turn heads (not too hard when you're a 1-of-75 road-illegal McLaren with a price tag somewhere in the range of $1.5-2 million).

The Senna's owner wished to remain somewhat private—as do many members of the wealthy Silicon Valley tech crowd that make up a large portion of ETD's clientele—but the car itself stands out immediately, whether looking fast parked in the paddock or screaming past just about everybody on the track without breaking a sweat.

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Air Jacks And Diagnostics For The Senna GTR

ETD Sonoma Raceway 8
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Named after the Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, the screaming carbon-fiber creation sounded unlike anything else on hand at Sonoma, with an almost F1 whine to go along with the burbling twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 that produces an estimated 814 horsepower. The massive aero components help to produce 2,204 pounds of downforce at speed—for a car that only weighs 2,619 pounds from the factory.

McLaren techs were on hand at ETD to help the Senna through its first paces. After a lap or two, it would pull in to get boosted up on its air jacks (my favorite detail), receive new wheel and tire combos, undergo diagnostic testing, and even get an oil change. By the end of the day, its owner-driver seemed to be feeling good, willing to push the car full-bore, and nothing, not even the LMP3 car with its radical dorsal fin, could hope to keep up.

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Daily Drivers All The Way Up To Private Teams

ETD Sonoma Raceway 4
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Factory racecars like Lamborghini Huracans, Audi R8s, and McLaren Sennas sound and look amazing, but don't get the impression that ETD only serves a hyper-exclusive group of hypercar owners. In fact, most of the cars lapping the track were made up of more pedestrian products.

At the lower end of the spectrum sat a couple of Miatas and a Honda Civic hatchback, then your expected crew of Ford Mustangs, a large quantity of Porsches ranging from a stripped air-cooled 911 with what looked like homemade GT2 stickers to multiple modern-day Cayman GT4s and even a host of 911 daily drivers running on street tires. From BMW, a few M3 examples from the E36, E46, and E92 generations, plus a Z4 or two, also fit into the mix. The lone Mercedes I saw on the day was an AMG E63 S convertible—perhaps unexpected and yet, impressively, the owner was doing his own wheel changes.

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Towing A Lotus To Sonoma With A Porsche Macan

Personally, my favorite cars on hand were a pair of Lotuses (Loti?) that made every single other car on the track look enormous. One was a relatively "stock" Exige—if such a thing can be said about one of the lightest production cars ever made with its minimal creature comforts and a mid-mounted, supercharged Toyota inline-four—but the other was a fully stripped and gutted Elise sporting a Honda K24 swap. The Elise's owner told me the K24 sacrificed some top-end revs but gave him much more low-end torque to play with—and the car only weighs 1,800 pounds including fluids and driver. Best of all, he towed it to Sonoma behind his Porsche Macan S.

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Protecting Cars And Drivers

ETD Sonoma Raceway 10
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Of course, even if the entry fee is low, any day at the track quickly becomes costly thanks to the cost of race gas and consumables like tires and brakes. Throw in an engine swap or, worst of all, any damage and comparatively, an ETD ticket easily seems like an afterthought. ETD also offers a membership that includes discounts for the calendar year of events, which helps to foster the social-club feeling of so many of the owner-drivers who see each other every few weekends or so. But during the pandemic, Ace did cancel most track days, making Sonoma the first day out for just about everyone in quite some time.

And perhaps that long wait can explain why, despite the level of experience that ETD requires of attendees, something can and did go wrong. Sonoma staff waved three black flags on the day, once for spilled oil, once for a cone in the track (which led to one driver being chased down after he ignored the flag), and once for a minor collision.

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"Racing Is Life, Everything Before Or After Is Just Waiting"

ETD Sonoma Raceway 6
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

For my part, I spent about nine hours at Sonoma Raceway that day cruising around, checking out awesome cars, watching drivers hone their track skills, and chatting with fellow car nuts. As the weather turned warmer, so did the track and tires, leading to higher speeds and engines, especially the Lamborghinis from Rearden, getting noticeably louder. Perhaps suffering from a bit of heatsoak myself, I couldn't help but find myself frequently recalling Steve McQueen's famous line from Le Mans: "Racing is life, anything before or after is just waiting."

But if anyone had offered me a chance to hop behind the wheel for a few laps, I'd have had to explain that my total track experience consists of 20 oval laps in a stock car, with a one-way radio commanding slowdowns for passing. I was less concerned about the driving itself and more about my lack of etiquette leading to confusion, and yet, by the end of the day, the urge to get out there felt hard to quash.

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Track Experience Required

ETD Sonoma Raceway 2
via Michael Van Runkle / HotCars

Overall, in an expensive hobby like automobile racing, a certain amount of mental gymnastics becomes mandatory. Yes, this could go wrong very quickly—and could cost very much more than a few (thousand) bucks for a new bumper and oil lines, too. No, nobody really needs to get out on a track and push both themselves and their cars to the limit. But if I were to invest in a track car, or rent one for a day, Exclusive Track Day's formula seems like the way to go—not too expensive, not too many people, and no amateurs allowed.

But I clearly need the experience to vault myself up out of the amateur category, so between now and the next ETD outing at Laguna Seca, I'll be taking some track training courses to put an end to all this damned waiting.

Sources: exclusivetrackdays.org, cars.mclaren.com, instagram.com, youtube.com, armotorsports.org, reardenracing.com, hardmotorsport.com, and sonomaraceway.com.

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