Collins - How to drive: real-world instruction and advice from Hollywoods top driver

First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Chronicle Books LLC.
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. Copyright 2016 by Ben Collins.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

All line illustrations James Provost; : Michal Podemski.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.
ISBN: 978-1-4521-4529-7 (pb)
ISBN: 978-1-4521-5410-7 (epub, mobi)

Design by Sam Potts and Neil Egan
Typesetting by Howie Severson
Cover design by Neil Egan and Ben Kither
Cover photo Alex D. James

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1998. A twisting country lane in the middle of nowhere, traveling at 80 mph.

The sound of fourteen tons of metal colliding is almost deafening when youre right next to it. Imagine one hundred heavy doors slamming in unison and youre not even close. Its loud enough to summon people from farmhouses half a mile away to search for plane wreckage; but, inside the crash... you hardly hear a thing.

Thats because your brain is movingand as it thumps the inside of your skull it disrupts the electrical activity powering things like sight and hearing.

My Toyota Supra handled like it was on rails. It sat on enormous wide tires and had a whale-tail spoiler with enough downforce to leave a dent in the floor. At the time I was a Formula One hopeful and one of the fastest men in Formula Threeeven F1 World Champion Sir Jackie Stewart said so, and boy did I know it.

I was so clever and knew my local roads so well that I had a braking plan for every conceivable scenario. One flowing section in particular had a bottleneck into a one-lane road with no passing space. I calculated my velocity precisely to be able to make it all the way through it and out the other side before an approaching car filled the gap, or if there was a car coming through I would throw the anchors and screech to a halt to buy enough time for it to emerge.

Inside the crash... you hardly hear a thing.

According to a recent insurance survey there are certain types of music that make you put your foot down and generally drive like a complete moron. The Black Eyed Peas topped this deadly driving chart with Hey Mama, a banging tune no doubt, but at the time I had the Beastie Boys busting decibels.

I pumped the stereo up a notch and tipped into the familiar dusty right-hander toward the mouth of the funnel at full speed. Over the course of the next second, the vanishing point ran into a scene that I hadnt budgeted for.

Thick mud was spread lavishly across the road. Alarm bells were ringing, but the mud was quickly replaced by a more pressing issue. A very large, slow-moving truck was lumbering through the bottleneck, too slowly to clear it at my rate of closure.

Time slowed down, but the car didnt.

I braked. Wide tires and downforce were powerless on the greasy mud, and my front tires locked instantly. The trajectory involved a double whammy of hedge and a lethal side impact with the truck. Think fast.

Just 0.25 seconds later I released the useless brakes, hoping to recover enough steering to swing across the front of the truck and punch through the gateway into a field.

Time slowed down, but the car didnt.

Nope.

The mouth-like radiator grill and the word VOLVO filled the windshield.

Then it was that big moment. There were no more choices, only consequences. I could have been an accountant. I could have been a yoga teacher. But there I was with no more tricks up my sleeve. It was time to take the hit, and I had no airbag.

I closed my eyes as the hood of the Supra exploded into the trucks bumper and deformed until it met with the Volvos front axle, which didnt bend much. The Supras engine and gearbox traveled two feet my way as the physics of displacement and momentum did their thing. Stopping a twelve-ton truck, fully laden with turf, dead in its tracks put a force of deceleration through my body in excess of sixty times the force of gravity. I did not feel well.

The head-on impact and abrupt stop rearranged all sorts of things inside the Supra, including my kidneys, which ruptured and bled for several days. Pens, loose change, and a half-eaten sandwich all relocated themselves to the dashboard.

Temperament has always been a problem for me, and although Ive learned to control it I know that there are demons lurking. The track offers me a positive outlet for unleashing that side of my personality in very controlled bursts. But there are certain things I cant combine with driving, and loud music is one of them.

Driving is one of the most pleasurable things that most people do on a daily basis.

It is also the most dangerous. And it doesnt matter whether you drive on the right or the left, using an automatic gearbox or a stickthe fundamental principles and physics of driving are the same everywhere.

The world population of motor vehicles exceeded one billion a couple of years ago. Car crashes kill 50 percent more people than malaria, and the World Health Organization predicts that road deaths will rise 52 percent by 2030, overtaking HIV/AIDS as a global killer within the decade. In America the death toll is around 33,000 lives lost every year, which is twice as high as the bloodiest years of combat operations during the Vietnam War.

Whichever country youre from, you want to go from being a learner to a driver as fast as possible. Having tackled a tough multiple-choice questionnaire, reversed around a curve, and successfully navigated a supermarket parking lot, you throw away your learners permit, and take a ton of speeding metal out onto the open road. Millions of drivers will receive their licenses this year with less than eighteen hours driving experience under their belts.

Millions of drivers will receive their licenses this year with less than eighteen hours driving experience under their belt.

A Starbucks barista receives twenty-four hours of training before being handed the keys to an espresso machine.

The robotic syllabus of the driving test itself remains painfully inadequatenot so much in what it contains as how much is left out: controlling a skid, driving on a freeway, tackling a curve, driving at night, and passing, to name but a few. And of those who pass, less than 1 percent receive further training.

Governments, road safety groups, even the Green lobby want to wrap us in cotton wool and then pull it over our eyes. They would have us believe that speeding, among other things, is the biggest danger facing modern drivers, but 700,000 police road accident reports gathered over the last five years tell a different story. The real killer is simply poor driving.

In America the death toll is around 33,000 lives lost every year, which is twice as high as the bloodiest years of combat operations during the Vietnam War