Trackday Diaries: I'm Already Scared

The speedometer on the little two-seater was already past 90 and climbing as I watched the grey-haired fellow to my left put both his hands on the left side of the steering wheel and start to tug at it. There was a curve ahead, a long blind left-hander with a line of Jersey barriers on the shoulder. What was on the road after that was a complete mystery, both to him and me. Neither one of us had ever been here before.

He tugged on the wheel at the same time as he stomped on the brakes. Various lights flashed on the instrument panel ahead of him. The car slewed then caught itself. There was a hot metallic smell as the stability control and ABS clamped all four corners of the car in rapid-fire pulses. The right front tire groaned in protest as we gradually sacrificed momentum down to about 30 mph.

“Let’s pull over here,” I said in what I hoped was a flat and judgment-free voice, “and stop for a minute.” We came to a halt in a small parking lot. A minivan pulled in behind us. I got out of the car and walked over to the minivan, where my photography team was waiting. We were all here to do a story on this relatively rare and exotic car and its owner, whose bacon had just been saved along with mine by the very best efforts of an Italian stability-control engineer.

“Move something,” I told the photographers, “I’m riding in the van now.”

“I GUESS HE DON’T WANT TO RIDE WITH ME!” the owner yelled. “I DRIVE AT THE EDGE!”

“He drives over the edge,” I spat, stepping into the van and finding a recently-cleared seat in the third row. “Over the edge of idiocy.”

This past Saturday, a Boomer-aged HPDE student was killed in a one-car crash at Roebling Road Raceway. His instructor, provided to him by the Porsche Club of America as a part of his participation in the two-day weekend event, was seriously injured. There are no further details available and, if past PCA practice is any guideline, there probably won’t be any further details available. It could have been a mechanical failure and it could have been the best-effort response to an existing on-track incident. There’s no way to know.

After 13 years as a driver coach, however, I am having a hard time not just reaching into my bag of stereotypes and scattering a few all over the event. The driver was 70 years old and he was behind the wheel of a Porsche. I’ve sat right seat with a lot of men who fit that description — and I’ve decided that I just don’t want to do that anymore. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary to earn a buck or fill in to help an organization for which I feel some affinity.

I’m tired of Boomer-aged doctors and lawyers and finance professionals who have been flawlessly trained by the circumstances of their fortunate and comfortable lives to feel an absurd sense of confidence and entitlement behind the wheel of some terrifyingly capable machinery. You can’t tell these dudes anything. They don’t listen. Sometimes you will spend a whole day getting them to shed bad, dangerous habits only to see them revert in a flash to their old ways the minute their amygdala is triggered by a narcissistic injury or a sudden memory or just the phase of the moon.

I’m tired of sitting right seat with dudes who think you can huck a 600-horsepower Ferrari on Hoosiers around the way you hucked a ’75 Mustang II with 110 horsepower and bias-ply tires. I have contempt for the people who don’t realize they are being saved again and again by ESC but I prefer them to the people who think that you should turn off all the “nannies” on your Hellcat before you take your first-ever lap around a road course. I’m 100 percent over hearing stories of high-speed canyon drives in California and I am 200 percent over sitting right seat for those canyon drives in the pursuit of some story or feature article.

Thanks to over 170 days in the instructor seat, I’ve learned to almost immediately identify all of the habits that people are going to display. There’s the Freeway Pumper who is incapable of holding the accelerator pedal at any steady position. There’s the Stab and Grab guy who always uses the steering and brakes at exactly the same time. There’s Mister Weeble Wobble who can’t stop jerking the wheel every time he moves his head to look at something. They all think they’re great drivers. The only way to show them that they aren’t is to put them in the right seat and take them around a track at 95 percent of race pace. That shuts them up, but it’s so much ego, it’s so much narcissism on your part, even if you don’t want it to be.

The old men are the worst. I’m tired of them and that applies equally to the HPDE students, the rich guys with exotics, the people who make cars available for tests. I respect their efforts and I like them as human beings, but I don’t want to sit next to them any more.

Some time ago, I had a fellow instructor tell me that he gives each one of his new students a sort of throwaway line when he gets in to the car with them.

“Don’t try to impress me,” he says, “because you can’t impress me. And don’t try to scare me, because I’m already scared.”

At the time I thought that it was an unprofessional thing to say. But I’m coming around to it. It’s maybe not quite in line with the McQueen/Hemingway/whatever demeanor that a driving instructor is supposed to display. Still. It applies. I’m already scared. Let’s not make it any worse. Let’s not upgrade it from “already scared” to “almost dead”.