Summer school at 100+ mph? It's a dream come true for high school sophomore, Gray Leadbetter

CHANDLER, Ariz., July 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Summer school. Two words that most students dread. But, for 15-year-old Gray Leadbetter, it's a cause for celebration.

Gray won't be spending summer days locked inside a stuffy classroom. Her assigned seat is behind the wheel of a supercharged Dodge Challenger Hellcat with a whopping 717 horsepower.

Her classroom is the 60-acre Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in Arizona. This state-of-the-art facility includes a 1.6-mile, multi-configuration road course that can provide just about every combination of turns that a racer will face.  

Advanced degrees from prestigious universities don't carry any weight at this school. Academic achievement takes a back seat to years of hard-earned experience and proven results in a race car. You can't teach anyone how to handle a car at 150 mph unless you've been successful at it yourself.

Gray's teacher, Buddy Rice, knows what it takes to win at the highest level. He was the Indy 500 Champion in 2004 after starting from the pole with a blistering speed of 224 mph. Indy is one of the crown jewels of racing. In academic terms, one could consider winning Indy to be the equivalent of earning a PhD in Physics from an Ivy League university, only much more difficult.

In 2009, Rice added another impressive accomplishment to his resume by winning the grueling 24-Hours of Daytona. Now, at the age of 44, Rice is using his considerable experience to groom a new generation of young racers, like Gray.

Driving around a racetrack in a Dodge Challenger Hellcat may sound like fun, but it is seriously hard work. Gray is not there to play. As a professional driver, she is under great pressure to go faster and faster, still.

Improving lap times can be a tedious task. It requires driving with great precision, corner after corner. There is no letting up. The degree of concentration required is immense. "When I'm travelling at 100 mph, an improvement of just one second is worth about 150 feet on the track," says Gray. "One second faster, or one second slower, is sometimes all it takes to win, or lose a race."

So, while her friends back home head off to the lake this summer, Gray will be quite happy refining her skills at the summer school of her dreams.

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SOURCE Gray Leadbetter Racing