His advice on reverse parking was equally acute. He would get me to line up alongside the car in front of the space I wanted, reverse back until my head was level with the rear wheel of the other car and then turn into the space. He had me look over my shoulder and use the rear wiper post like a rifle scope to aim for the centre of the empty space, then straighten the wheel, switch to the wing mirror and line up with the kerb as I drove in. A hole-in-one every time.
Fixed features inside the car such as the A and B pillars to the front and sides of the driver's eyeline are a burden in the sense that they create blind spots, but are useful when it comes to formation flying as you observe the movement of other vehicles relative to yourself, and for gauging distances to objects outside of your bubble.
In Nascar, where you have more than 40 racers fighting wheel-to-wheel for a short stretch of tarmac, the drivers regularly splatter their machines across the track whenever they misjudge their length or width. Every inch of space counts when you're gliding past a concrete wall at 180 mph [290km/h] in a machine that handles and generally feels like a high-speed tumble drier.
Brushing the wall is deemed acceptable up to the point that they classify as a "sticker rub", a streak of skin-deep scratches that would reduce you to tears if it were your personal ride, but a sign of accuracy in speed world.
Working through the pack of swarming racers is different. On an oval circuit, everybody is slithering around on tyres that are stretching physical boundaries, and a little kiss can turn into a catastrophe. You have to run exceptionally close to one another to benefit from the aerodynamic slipstream - so close, in fact, that your stomach reverberates from the throb of the engine in the car alongside you, and the windscreen is filled with the bouncing tail of the one in front, pressure-spraying your world with debris and exhaust fumes.
To prepare for this type of excitement I used to enlist my main man, Vinny, who would stand patiently at different points around the car in the pit lane, at a top speed of 0mph. It gave me the opportunity to stare directly at his proximity to the car at different points and acclimatise to that distance, then look ahead as if I were driving, and back to Vinny again.
A few of my competitors would snigger, but it was worth it. A dozen or so laps into one race at Rockingham Motor Speedway I entered turn two at 160mph [257km/h], and the whole track was blocked by crashed cars. There was a tiny gap between one yellow car and the wall, and everyone ahead of me who tried to make it through was stonking into the concrete. I aimed my front left wheel arch at the tail of the stopped car, rather than focusing on the wall, held on to that view all the way and cleared it.
Whenever I get in a new car I do the same thing. I never asked [Top Gear's Jeremy] Clarkson to help because the temptation to run him over would have been overwhelming. If there's nobody around, you can do the same thing with a big cardboard box and practise driving up to it, or line it up alongside to test your width.
Ben Collins as The Stig.
A common fault people develop is to continuously work the wheel for no reason and weave in and out of gaps between parked cars, simply because they failed to fix a course and stick to it. Aiming for a point in the distance makes it much easier to follow a smooth groove, and when you do find a challenging pinch, just kill the speed and allow yourself the time to handle it properly.
As you drive into busy urban areas, it's time to start thinking about how to avoid taking out all those cyclists and pedestrians who are going to start running out in front of you. Who are these people? The very young and very old are most likely to be hit and least likely to survive - but just as dangerous are the rising numbers of zombies patrolling the pavement wearing iTuned earmuffs to drown any chance of hearing your approach.
We'll look at some of the key triggers for accidents shortly, but I want to start by talking about speed, pure and simple. Doing 70km/h in a 50km zone increases your chance of an accident by ... 20 times! Exceeding the speed limit in these areas by just a few km/h can mean the difference between life and death. It's all physics and biology.
Experts in the latter are Hollywood stuntmen like Batman's double, Bobby Holland Hanton, who gets run over for a living. "Car knockdowns," he calls them.
Z"I'm just glad I'm a bloke," he explains while strapping a knee-pad over the top of his gel-cushioned shorts. "The stunt women are worse off because they usually end up doubling some glamorous starlet in high heels and a mini-skirt, so they can't pad up."
Bobby is built like a brick shithouse anyway, but by the time he's finished padding up he looks more like a medieval knight than your average pedestrian. His upper body is contained within another layer of neoprene, and all his pointy bits, like elbows and ankles, are encased in impact-resistant plastic. Once Bobby's final layer of clothing goes over the top he is ready for action.
"We never, ever do more than 20 miles [32km]an hour. Any more than that and you're guaranteed A&E for sure."
Bobby is a trained gymnast, is warmed up and knows the car is coming at him. As the vehicle rolls in Bobby starts crossing the street on cue, turns and just as the car reaches his legs slams himself into the bonnet by imperceptibly tucking his legs up at the last moment. He cartwheels over the roof and lands hard on the tarmac. And doesn't move.
A real paramedic rushes in like an Olympic sprinter. "Get off the set you idiot, he's just playing dead!" Bobby is fine.
The good news is that pedestrian fatalities like this, which make up nearly a quarter of all road deaths, are the easiest to prevent. As we already know from the section on braking, a car travelling at 50km/h can stop almost twice as fast as one doing 65. It adds seconds to a short leg across town, but it might save a life.
So, pedestrians aside, what are the things that we should be looking out for on the open road? Before we do that, let's dispel a myth: they say that most accident claims occur within five minutes of home, which is hardly surprising when most journeys start and finish there. Anecdotally, there's an element of truth that concentration might reduce as you near home. Oops, I drove into my house again.
A remarkable downward trend in casualties over the past decades is largely due to vehicle safety design, although insurers point out that the number of accidents is actually rising.
A driver's risk profile is shaped like a horseshoe depending on your age. Young drivers account for a quarter of fatal accidents, as well as those leading to life-changing injury. Your likelihood of injury plunges as you get older, owing to the better decision-making skills that come with experience, until your risk spikes again in your 60s as your vision and reflexes dim, and perhaps a few bad habits come home to roost. Passengers make up a hefty proportion of casualties, and 30 per cent of those killed weren't wearing seat belts.
Although young drivers pose the biggest risk on the roads, they also adapt quickly, and their crash rate plunges during their first two years of driving. The vital knowledge that these youngsters acquire is a clue as to what it really means to be a good driver. Their experience of near misses and general observations develop into a broader, fuller view of the task.
That skill is grandly titled "hazard perception". It means the ability to analyse the scene and prioritise the aspects or risks that might affect you and sort them by their importance. It means taking a busy road or a jammed street loaded with shoppers and being able to see the wood for the trees. A honed visual strategy and a simple system of car control makes the job a lot easier.
Many drivers are oblivious to what takes place behind them and miss out on a rich palette of disaster trailing in their wake.
On one occasion in Pittsburgh I stopped for a junction at the bottom of a hill with a truck coming up behind. It wasn't slowing, so I checked the light was still red, looked behind and saw the big trailer was jack-knifed and inbound. I drove up on to the kerb to give it space and avoided being flattened.
Clairvoyance came in handy when I worked in Johannesburg on the Top Gear Live show, where we had a convoy of red Audis taking us to the venue. They drove too fast and too close for my liking, a military convoy but without the war or the training. After my driver conceded that his hometown was actually Cape Town, I rented a car for the remainder of my stay. Two days later I drove past the Audi packet, with the fearless leader firmly embedded into the sharp end of a flat-bed trailer and the two sidekicks rammed up each other's exhausts like some sort of insect incest.
There are drivers who cause accidents, those who share other people's and those who avoid them. Good drivers learn to adapt to an imperfect world by accommodating and anticipating other people's mistakes until it becomes a habit. As Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
Channel your inner Jedi master
1: Observe. Use your vision to create a 360-degree rolling map of the environment: the dog on the lead, the car speeding towards a side road, tiny feet visible behind a parked car, a sharp curve ahead ... Listen to the sound of the engine, the chirp of a tyre, the protest of a gear change, and the sound of children breaking up from school and spilling on to the pavement. With your hands, feel the weight of the steering, how much it's turning and responding, looking for any tell-tale vibration from a loose wheel or under-inflated tyre. Hear what your backside is telling you: this precision instrument has guided me through more situations that I can remember. The more elegantly you balance the car and feel it hug the road, the more eloquently your rump will squeak, I mean speak, to you. Trust and develop your gut feeling.
2: Interpret. Filter the information coming in by ignoring the irrelevant and prioritising the key hazards and road features along your path. Use your imagination to predict the paths and intentions of everyone and everything in sight. By projecting potential scenarios on to the scene, and creatively considering what might be around the corner, you won't be surprised by the guy picking his nose on the wrong side of the road.
3: Act. Does the scenario you encounter actually require you to do something? If so, formulate an appropriate plan of action. Nothing too fancy. Calmly deploy a reasonable response while maintaining oversight of the bigger picture as it evolves with you. And continue to cycle the information stages every step of the way.
Used with permission from How to Drive by Ben Collins (Macmillan RRP $34.99)
