Adults Are Going Back to School in Droves
Grim reapings: About 42,000 people die on our highways each year--an American tragedy that comes surprisingly close to matching the total of GIs killed in 10 years of fighting in Vietnam.
Gladder tidings: That annual toll has remained pretty even for a decade, despite choking freeways and a population of vehicles and citizens growing at a rate of 1% per annum. Drunk-driving deaths are down. Thirty years ago 5.5 people died for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled; today the figure has shriveled to 1.5.
And expect that statistic to hold, experts say, and even fade lower as tens of thousands of Americans take command of their lives through adult driver education courses and high-performance motoring schools. All with a single aim: to improve driving skills that probably haven’t budged--except to embrace bad habits--since we first sat in Dad’s lap. You steered and shifted, and he worked brakes and the gas pedal.
“Over the past 30 years we have made tremendous strides in vehicle and highway engineering,” says Lindsay Griffin III, a psychologist and traffic safety researcher with the Texas Transportation Institute at College Station. Broader and smoother highways, he explains, guardrails and escape roads, seat belts and air bags and side-impact protection may all be credited for the leveling of crash figures.
“Now, to quote a paper by B.J. Campbell,” he says, citing another highway safety expert, “the relative value of studying human behavior might be the important priority.”
America seems to be ahead of the suggestion:
* Twenty years ago, there were only three performance driving schools in Canada and the United States. There are now more than 60, offering everything from half-day classes in accident avoidance in family sedans to three-day courses that include track competition in open-wheel race cars. There’s an off-road school in Mission Viejo, a stock-car school at California Speedway, a go-cart school at Ventura, even a drag-racing school at La Verne.
The California-born, Arizona-based pioneer Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving has been selling adult driver’s education for 30 years ($250 for a half-day class, $3,950 for the three-day road racing school). Students train in factory-supplied Ford Mustangs; ages range from teens to Sun City septuagenarians. And this four-wheeled academy graduates 5,000 people a month.
“Classes are full through the end of December,” says marketing director Chan Martinez. “Five percent of our students want to become race drivers, 20% are Walter Mittys seeking the high-speed experience, but 75% are ordinary people who have realized they are not the drivers they thought they were and want to improve their skills.”
* Closer to home, at the Fast Lane Racing School at Willow Springs International Raceway in Rosamond--where Edwards Air Force Base is a high-speed neighbor--monthly sessions are crowded. With some unusual attendees.
“When Clint Black’s 100-city tour came to Southern California, 11 members of the band showed up for our one-day course,” says owner-operator Danny McKeever. “We’re also getting corporate groups--Longo Toyota and Morgan Stanley--and some police officers who had written off patrol cars because they had overdriven the tires.
“I get calls from parents of teenagers . . . but I don’t teach ‘em how to drive. What we are teaching is vehicle control, weight transfer, tire management, emergency braking and handling skids. We build instincts by doing something in a car, and then verbalizing it to make sense of what the car is doing, and then going out and doing it again.”
* This summer, BMW announced it has dropped all promotional activities, even golf tournaments, to detour funds to a city-to-city road show that will put 30,000 potential owners through one-day skid, maneuvering and emergency braking training on closed courses.
“We’re obviously interested in increased sales,” says Karen Vondermeulen, an events manager for BMW. “But we also view this as refresher training for adults, no matter what car they choose to buy.”
* The American Assn. of Retired Persons’ 55-Alive brush-up courses are alive and well nationally. The Automobile Club of Southern California offers classroom retraining for mature drivers through its local offices. Benefits of such programs can include reduced insurance premiums for senior citizens, usually 10% for three years.
To anyone who has ever been tailgated, cut off, flipped off or forced to back off by a Mustang GT sweeping three freeway lanes without signaling, we are a nation of 179 million drivers with death wishes.
Truth is, researchers say, 94% of fatal crashes--representing an annual financial loss of $170 billion--are caused by driver error. Police officers no longer refer to “accidents” because that implies a twist of fate or the backhand of God. The new and official preference is “crashes and collisions.”
Last year in California, almost 4,000 people were killed and 285,000 injured in crashes and collisions. A gentle reduction since 1993. But still brutally close to killing or injuring the entire population of Oakland.
Drug- or alcohol-related: 1,000 killed and 25,000 injured. Speeding: 77,000 dead or hurt. Following too closely: 10,000. Failure to yield right of way: 56,000. Running red lights and stop signs: 30,000.
All driver errors, all avoidable.
“If people would just follow the three-second rule, allowing three seconds between two cars passing the same stationary object,” says Steve Kohler, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, “there would be a sizable reduction in highway tolls.”
Anomalies riddle this bloody rite of citizens in automobiles running into perfect strangers several times each minute of every day.
Most careers, from flying airplanes to practicing law, require proficiency checks or proof of continuing training. Weekend athletes spend $200 on a tennis racket and $6,000 on lessons to be proficient at a pleasure that won’t kill them. Yet we invest nothing in higher coaching that would improve our handling of 2-ton lethal weapons.
“Male ego is a big problem,” says Bondurant, who started his school when a racing crash crippled the career of this former Formula 1 driver and Le Mans champion.
“Every American male thinks he is the best driver, the best lover, and has nothing to learn in either area. In truth, most people don’t know how to perform an emergency avoidance maneuver, make a panic stop or use anti-lock brakes properly. . . .
“In my experience, the proficiency factor of the average driver is about 40% of his or her capability. Because they were never taught to drive in an emergency situation.”
Mike Smith of Washington, D.C., is a psychologist and researcher with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. He says there are few denominators, certainly no easy explanation, for ditching common sense and denying basic courtesies once we climb behind a steering wheel. Although much bad behavior, he believes, is created by a highway system designed around volunteerism and human faith.
“It is based on people volunteering to comply with rules and regulations, and when they comply, there’s no problem,” he says. “But because it is a very forgiving system, you are free to violate some of these rules and regulations . . . and, generally speaking, nothing happens.”
So we go a little faster. We roll through stop signs. One piece of deviant behavior tempts others to retaliate. Bam! A bounty of human errors, crashes and collisions.
Smith believes there’s a subtle underpinning to this business of kind and civilized souls who become road ragers once transmogrified by the inanimate, yet also volatile, automobile.
“We take on a feeling that a car is our castle, an extension of our home and, therefore, private space,” he says. “When people intrude on your space, cut you off, follow too closely, you react negatively to that trespassing, that forced entry of your home.”
Traffic safety, Smith continues, is a convoluted matter, with every question, answer and possible solution locked into enforcement merging with education and legislation. While expected to allow room for personal freedoms and all citizens’ rights to the pursuit of mobility.
“Joe and Joan Public have to accept that although the death rate is pretty stable, 42,000 fatalities a year is unacceptable,” he says. “We have to address the problems of teenage drivers who are risk takers and inexperienced at a complex task. Unfortunately, adult behavior is very difficult to change.”
Griffin, of the Texas Transportation Institute, agrees with Smith on the tough task of changing human habits: “The conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus was an isolated case. It can be done, but not very easily.”
He’s a wry researcher who says the psychomotor demands and hazards of daily commuting make him “marvel that people arrive home safely every night.” Although recognizing a need to improve adult driver skills, he sees only “marginal benefit” from courses at high-performance driving schools.
“I’m just a voice of caution saying that the effects we get might not always be what they appear,” he warns. “These schools certainly produce greater confidence in one’s ability . . . which could be more dangerous.”
Arline Dillman, safety manager of the Automobile Club of Southern California, shares Griffin’s wariness.
“There have been some concerns about newly licensed teenagers taking a high-performance driving course,” she says. “Young drivers define risk differently and may even seek out situations to test their new skills.”
But she believes such courses are better than nothing.
Bondurant, of course, believes they are better than anything. In fact, he says, if every adult driver would drive by his teachings, “the reduction in major accidents would be about 70%.”
McKeever is another obvious believer.
He says the mantra of high-performance driving is the application of knowledge and the conquering of driving responses rooted in fear and panic.
“If you always know what every bit of driver input will make the car do, through steering, through braking, at speed or when cornering, then you will always give it the right information. Take a skid. The first one is pretty easy to catch. But over-correct, give the car more than it can handle, and that second one will get you every time.
“When you’ve done 10 180s [reversing direction by skidding 180 degrees], you start seeing things in slow motion . . . instincts take over, and you realize just how much say-so you, the driver, have in what your car is doing. Controlling a car is really pretty easy. Controlling yourself is more difficult but more important.”
George Ryon, 59, a South Bay commercial real estate appraiser, says amen to that. He’s one of Danny’s Disciples, a graduate of Fast Lane who took a one-day driving course at Willow Springs as a wedding anniversary gift from his wife. Ryon learned to drive on a Cushman, a three-wheeler once issued to city parking enforcers. He graduated to a 1946 Plymouth and more lessons from his father.
“I learned a lot of driving skills from him,” Ryon says. “Watch out for the other guy. Recognize tell-tale maneuvers: Wheels starting to turn out on a car at the curb. Why is that guy accelerating?”
Ryon became a good driver with a bad habit. Speeding. As a motor-sports buff, he also developed huge admiration for professional race drivers.
“I knew there was a lot of difference between the professionals and the way I was driving,” he says. “You feel like you’re a good driver, but competition drivers are driving better, smoother, faster and safer.”
The anniversary gift, all domestic platitudes aside, was exactly what he had always wanted.
As Fast Lane trains novice drivers chosen to compete in the pro-celebrity portion of the Long Beach Grand Prix, Ryon drove a Toyota Celica left over from the event.
He spun the Celica on wet pavement. On the 2.5-mile wriggle of the main track at Willow Springs, he heard the language of trail braking, decreasing-radius turns and how to read apexes of the circuit’s nine curves and corners. He drove them and understood them until “if the car starts to skid, I’m not going to panic--just steer into the skid and put on the power.”
The greatest course legacy, he says, is one of confidence. In himself and his car. Ryon believes he’s a better driver, and probably by 5%.
“I’d love to go back and take it again,” he says. “Or maybe the chauffeur course that teaches emergency avoidance and evasive driving.”
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Pedal Pushers
Gentlemen, and ladies, start your engines, using this list of selected advanced driving schools as your guide:
Bondurant School of High Performance Driving
P.O. Box 51980
Phoenix, AZ 85076
(800) 842-7223
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Buttonwillow Race Track
24551 Lerdo Highway
Buttonwillow, CA 93206
(805) 764-5333
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Drag Racing School
P.O. Box 484
La Verne, CA 91750
(888) 901-7223
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Drivetech Racing School
7300 Scout Ave., Unit B
Bell Gardens, CA 90201
(562) 806-0306
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Fast Lane Racing School
P.O. Box 2315
Rosamond, CA 93560
(805) 948-4448
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Jim Hall Kart Racing School
1555 Morse Ave., Suite G
Ventura, CA 93003
(805) 654-1329
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Russell Racing School
Sears Point International Raceway
Sonoma, CA 95476
(707) 939-7600
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Skip Barber Racing School
Laguna Seca Raceway
Monterey, CA 93942
(800) 221-1131
