A Semester at Superdriver U

Stirling Moss once said to me that in years of traveling all over the world, he had met only one man who would admit that he was not a superb driver and a great lover.

"In those two areas," Moss said, "every male seems to be under a real compulsion to believe he's great. As for bed, who knows; but as for driving, most people haven't got the corner of a beginning of a clue."

It's an attitude well known to Bob Bondurant, former Grand Prix driver who is head of the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving at California's Ontario Motor Speedway.

"Sometimes we have to spend most of the first day of the course changing people's minds," Bondurant said. "The typical attitude is, 'Well, I'm sure you can give me a few fine points--but I'm a pretty hot driver right now.' So we have to show him that he really isn't all that good and maybe he doesn't even know how to hold a steering wheel. After that, he may be ready to start to learn."

The high-speed, high-performance driving school is an old idea in Europe and some of the European schools, such as the Slotemaker Skid School in Holland, are well-known. Probably because millions of Americans begin to drive at 16 and believe they're polished performers at 18, the expert-school concept has been slow to root in this country. Most Europeans learn later in life, so feel more need for instruction. Too, they drive on varied terrain: autobahnen, Alpine passes, Swedish gravel roads and, much of the time, under no speed limit. It's a sobering experience to be doing 100 miles an hour on a French route nationale, be passed by someone doing 140 and realize that even if your car can do 140, you cannot.

But there are other reasons for learning to drive really well and they are overriding in importance. Anything done well is enjoyable. If driving bores you, you'd think it a pleasure if you had learned to do it well; if you like driving, you'd enjoy it twice as much if you did it well. Driving an automobile is one of the 20th Century's required basic skills, as fencing was in the 16th Century and riding in the 17th. The 20th Century sophisticate ought to be a superior driver; indeed, it is almost obligatory that he be.

And skill is not only useful in a hazardous pursuit, it is almost an imperative need. Driving today is a hazardous pursuit, with the fatality rate running around 55,000 annually. For males in the 18-25 age group, it is particularly hazardous. It is the primary cause of death, with more men between the ages of 18 and 25 dying in automobiles than in Vietnam.

Three days after I had finished the Bondurant course, I was driving pretty briskly on 57th Street, a main cross-town artery in New York City, when one of the 20,000 potholes New York has as a souvenir of the past winter appeared just in front of me as the car ahead straddled it. The hole was three feet square, looked at least a foot deep and my right front wheel was headed straight for it. In the ordinary way of things, I would probably have braked hard, hoping to slow enough to get in and out of the hole without blowing a tire, breaking up the front suspension or being thrown into the double line of oncoming traffic. It wouldn't have worked, because there wasn't time. I didn't even think about braking. I didn't think about anything. I turned hard left, straightened the car--a Pontiac Grand Prix--to run parallel with the traffic, passed three cars with nothing to spare, accelerating as I did, and didn't touch the hole.

The important aspect of this little exercise was that I did it instantly, in a blink, and that I couldn't have done it two weeks earlier. Bondurant had taught me to do it, using a fascinating device he calls the Accident Simulator, something that ought to be standard equipment in every driver-education school in the country.

The Accident Simulator is Bondurant's modification of a teaching aid developed by Paul O'Shea, a champion sports-car driver of the 1950s. It's simple: At the end of a straightaway, three standard red-yellow-green traffic lights are hung over the entrances to three curving paths marked out by rubber pylons. The paths are little more than a car wide. Exactly 88 feet before the entrances, an electronic eye runs across the straightaway, connected to a control box in the instructor's hands. As the student's car starts down the straight, all lights are green; but when his front wheels hit the electronic beam, the lights snap to a pattern preset by the instructor, say, from left to right, red-red-green. It's now up to the student to get into the green lane, without touching the brake, without hitting a pylon, and accelerate through and out of it. The situation being simulated is a crash just ahead, a stationary or violently slowing car or other emergency. The runs are made at 30, 35, 40, 45 and 50 miles an hour. For most people, 50 is the outer limit. Fiftyfive is just barely possible for an extremely skillful driver who happens to be sharp that day. Over 55, it can't be done: The driver will not see the lights in time to do anything at all.

At 30, it's easy, if you're reasonably quick. At 35, it begins to be interesting. At 40, after perhaps six runs at the lower speeds, most people will brake, take out a pylon or two or miss the lane altogether. If the setup shows three red lights, meaning stop dead before the lanes, you'll almost certainly lock the wheels and go in sideways. At 45, you see the lights almost subliminally, out of a top corner of the eyes. At 50, everything is hectic. One quick look to be sure the speedometer is dead on 50 mph (the instructor will spot cheating at 47-48), aim for the center lane and wait for your hands to do the rest, because your brain will give you the impression that it is out to lunch. If you try to think about what you're going to do, you'll probably spend the next five minutes setting up pylons, one or two of which will have managed to become wedged underneath the car.

It's most illuminating: After 30 or 35 runs through the lights, a driver will be so quick he can't believe it, he will be diving into a slot between pylons--narrower and narrower as the speed goes up--with what seems absurd ease. He won't be tempted to touch the brake, nearly always a formula for disaster if the car is not on a straight line; he will find it easy to do what at first seemed altogether wrong--accelerate past the emergency--and he will feel a sense of control of destiny that he never knew before. All in all, this transformation will have taken perhaps a long morning's work. And it is a transformation. When I was running the lights, a new Lotus Europa came onto the circuit and the driver, who was perhaps 22 or 23, remarked that I seemed slow in reacting. I was coming into the lanes at 50 and making it clean about three times out of five. Bondurant suggested that the exercise might be harder than it looked and invited the Lotus driver to try it. He missed at 40, missed badly several times at 45 and declined even to try at 50.

The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving is the only one of its kind presently in this country. The Sports Car Club of America, working through its 105 regions, runs weekend sessions of group instruction open to any member who is over 21 and can pass the physical. There are about 80 of the sessions a year, attendance running between 21 and 100 students. Those who satisfactorily complete two sessions or "schools" are given S.C.C.A. novice competition licenses. The Jim Russell School in Rosamond, California, is strictly a racing school, using single-seat cars from the beginning of instruction. The essential difference between the Bondurant curriculum and the others is that it carries more classroom-and-blackboard work (about 30 percent) and is designed to produce drivers very skilled at regular highway driving, who can then, if they like, go on to racing instruction. Bondurant's basic thrust is toward competence in high-speed driving. For example, the instructors of the Los Angeles Police Department who teach pursuit driving and car handling to the Los Angeles police force are graduates of the Bondurant school.

His own racing career began in 1959, when he was the top U. S. Corvette, driver. In 1963, he joined Carroll Shelby's Cobra team and drove for the Ford Shelby team in Europe. He was responsible for eight of the ten wins that gave Shelby the 1965 World Manufacturing Championship, the first time ever for an American builder. The same year, he began driving Formula I single-seat cars, BRMs, American Eagles and Ferraris. He drove at Le Mans, too; but in June 1967, a steering arm failed at 150 mph at Watkins Glen ("I flipped from six to ten times, according to who was counting") and he came out of it with multiple compound fractures of both feet. He was hospitalized for months and, for a long time afterward, couldn't stand for more than an hour or so. Now he runs in an occasional long-distance race and is thinking about more of the same in the future.

Bondurant is a gifted teacher, patient and able to convey complicated ideas quickly and simply. He taught James Garner and Yves Montand to drive singleseat cars for the film Grand Prix, and Paul Newman and Robert Wagner for Winning. And they were really driving. Garner could have gone racing in Europe after Grand Prix; and Newman, after Bondurant passed him, was running the Indianapolis track fast enough to have won not many years before.

Competition drivers without extended experience have been his best instructors, probably because they're willing to adapt to his methods. His chief instructors now are Wilbur Shaw, Jr., 24, son of the legendary Indianapolis winner, and Max Mizejewski, a 25-year-old exhelicopter pilot out of Vietnam. Like Bondurant, they are patient, understanding, courteous and with a certain amount of iron in them.

Unknowingly, students bare themselves to the instructors. Halfway through his third day in the Bondurant competition course, a student has made a chart on (continued on page 162)Superdriver U(continued from page 84) himself: His motor reactions are somewhere between quick and slow; he is reasonably courageous or wholly cowardly or something between; he is intent on learning to drive well, in order really to drive well or in order to convince someone, honestly or not, that he drives well; and so on himself His motor reactions are some where between quick and slow; he is reasonably courageous or wholly cowardly or something between; he is intent on learning to drive well, in order really to drive well or in order to convice someone, honestly or not, that he drive well; and so on

Typically: A student on his last day is running the road course. His instruction is to run as fast as he can within the limits of consistency and safety and his own ability. Mizejewski is timing him and Bondurant comes by to watch.

Mizejewski says, "This is very interesting. He's chicken, you see. He'll improve his lap time by a couple of seconds for four or five laps, then, when he has cut one about as fast as he can, he'll scare himself and back off. Watch."

And so it turns out. The clock drops two seconds a lap and then rises. As the student comes by, he's pointing to the engine. Something is wrong, he's saying. But nobody believes him. The record of people who have gone through the school shows that the lap times of 100 students will vary by three to four seconds--no more. It's no use trying to fool the clock and drama doesn't count.

Enjoyment in driving is based, above all, on smoothness, the easy flow of the vehicle along the road, gently swinging through the curves, accelerating and braking almost imperceptibly. This sense of secure passage, similar to a steel ball rolling in a glass chute, is the hallmark of the expert. The driver may be going quickly or slowly, but a perceptive passenger will feel that he could hold a bowl of goldfish on his lap.

Graduates of the old Rolls-Royce chauffeurs' school drove like that, drifting from lane to lane, shifting gears absolutely imperceptibly, anticipating conditions so far ahead that the car never seemed to be braked, it seemed to slow by itself--and a split second before it stopped, the brake was released completely, to eliminate the possibility of even the slightest jerk.

Smoothness is the obsession of the Bondurant school. I'm not sure it's possible to do an entire lap of a twisting road circuit, fast, with Bondurant and be told that the whole lap, all nine turns of it, was perfectly smooth, but it's exhilarating and rewarding to try.

For smoothness, control is essential; and for control, the driver must be sitting upright, buttocks hard against the back of the seat, hands at nine and three o'clock, with each thumb over a spoke, the knees not held upright but allowed to fall naturally to each side, this for relaxation and to clear the bottom of the steering wheel in a tight turn. (The hand position is particularly important: All other grips are faulty, up to, or down to, the American standard freeway stance, the right wrist draped over the top of the wheel, the left idle.) No other grip will enable the driver to hold the wheel in the case of a front-tire blowout or to make an instantaneous change in direction.

The beginning student's first exercise is to drive around an oval course perhaps 150 yards in length, around and around, in second gear, the car a Datsun 1600 sedan or a Porsche 914, trying to follow the correct line through the wide hairpin bends at each end, in close down the straight, out in a gentle arc that will just touch the apex of the curve, which is nearly always two thirds of the way through, and gently in again. That there is a correct line through every corner, and a different one for almost every corner, comes as a revelation to most students, long used to going in, cranking the wheel around, feeding gas and getting out somehow. On the mathematically pure line, the car will go around almost by itself; when a car is correctly taken through a constant-radius bend, the wheel can be set at the entrance and not moved again, even fractionally, until the exit. You can spend all morning learning to take a little sedan smoothly around Bondurant's oval--and you're still not concerned with anything but steering; there is no distraction. It's at this point that the fascination of the exercise begins to flicker in the mind: Nothing could be easier than driving through a simple curve; yet it begins to appear that one can't do it perfectly three times in succession. The line may be wrong by only six inches, but it's wrong, nevertheless. At 35 mph, it mars the effort only aesthetically; but at 70, it could kill you.

Now try it going to third gear on the straight, shifting to second just before the corner. Brake with the ball of the foot, lightly; roll the side of the foot onto the accelerator with just enough pressure to raise the engine speed to accommodate second gear; in clutch, out clutch, roll the foot off the accelerator, the brake pedal has been down all the time, put a very little more weight on it, off it, lightly on the accelerator, harder, all the way down coming out of the turn, pick up third gear, gently, just wishing the gear lever through, and start over again. Meanwhile, watch the line, don't go into the corner early or late, just clip the apex, let the car run out to the edge of the straight; if you move the wheel, you've done something wrong--and Bondurant will tell you so.

"That's pretty good, except at the last minute, you jerked the wheel, you caught yourself off the line.... You're coming in too early, you're in, you should be outside, brings you too wide here.... You're off the brake too early and on the throttle too soon, which pushes it down out the bottom of the turn.... You're braking too hard ... light, light braking, what you're doing with the brakes, you want to balance the chassis on the wheels, set it up, get a nice patch of rubber on each wheel. Brake too hard, you'll pitch the chassis forward, unload the rear wheels, you'll have over-steer, the rear end will try to come around on you. Accelerate too hard coming out, you'll unload the front wheels, you'll get understeer.... Now you're braking too soon.... Pick up the throttle earlier, because the throttle has to steer you around the corner.... That was nice, that was very good, didn't that feel good to you? Light braking, light, just drag the calipers across the disks, don't stab it.... Man, you blew that one, you were two feet off the apex, what happened to you? ... You weren't thinking.... All right, now, here, go; anyway, your upshifts are very nice, practically perfect, and I like the way you get right on the throttle coming out, that's right, good, stand on it, lot of people won't do that on this short straight, they're afraid the car will go off.... Beautiful, beautiful, keep it going, that was very nice.... See how good that felt, everything balanced.... Nice, good clean line through that one, too, you came in a hair too early, but you cleaned it up; you had to crank in a little more wheel, but you came out OK.... You've got one thing going for you, you're quick, you have quick reactions and good control; like back there, a lot of people, correcting that turn, they'd have cranked on just that little bit too much wheel.... Now you're braking too hard again, maybe you're going a little too fast, you let the clutch out before you'd fully picked up the throttle, you're blipping it instead of just picking it up lightly; Jesus, you still had the brake on coming out there, did you know that? Back off a little; here we go again, stay on the throttle just to the tree, off, brake, light, second, brake, let it run out...."

Years of manhandling cars and their controls and years of driving without really thinking about it are the two heaviest handicaps students carry into the Bondurant school. And these are not new boys: Nearly every student is better than average on a national standard and many have done some competitive driving. Still, it may be a day before they can shift gears properly, never grabbing the stick but pushing it lightly with the ball of the hand, pulling it gently with the finger tips, braking lightly and progressively and all the rest of it.

As for concentration--Bondurant has a short road course, under a mile, with nine turns, all different, and two short straights. To run on it fast, the driver must memorize aiming points for each curve and shutoff points; otherwise, running fast, they'll come up too quickly. The aiming point for one bend at the end of a straight is a tree. Just coming into this straight, Bondurant, sitting beside me, said something. Apparently, I hadn't been concentrating, because the remark distracted me and, suddenly, for what seemed a long time and was probably a second, I couldn't find the tree, I couldn't pick it out from the others. I went into the corner off the line, braked late and blew the next turn as well. Another time, I was alone, in one of the competition Datsuns, going about as fast as I could make it go, with Bondurant following me. When he signaled me in, he said, "You started to get tired two laps back and your concentration fell off. Right?"

Right. As I had known, objectively, for a long time, that one must concentrate in driving, I had also known that the inept selection of the wrong line going into one corner would, absolutely, inevitably, put car and driver hopelessly into the wrong line not only on the next corner but on the one after that. But I did not truly understand this simple maxim until I ran a few times through the four-bend chicane on Bondurant's course. If you're six inches off the mathematically correct line on the first bend, you're off a foot on the second, three on the third and, as for the fourth--forget it.

The Bondurant curriculum is elastic, to say the least. There's a one-day course designed to show a pretty well unclued driver how to manage on the streets and the freeways. A two-day defensive-driving course takes this farther, into hard stops, spins and skids. The high-performance course is meant to teach competence in high-speed road driving in 125-plus-mph automobiles; and the five-day competition course turns out drivers who can begin racing on the amateur-club level. Cost is $100 a day basic and $800 for the competition course, using school cars. The garage count varies. On a recent day, there were three Datsuns, three Formula Fords, two Formula Vees, two Porsche 914s, two Audi sedans, a Lola T 70 Group 7 sports car and a Ford GT 40.

Considering that he teaches such advanced techniques as correcting a skid by spinning the car 180 degrees in its own width and then steering it straight backward (a maneuver requiring such fast wheel handling that the school cars have red-and-green taped identifiers on the left and right spokes), Bondurant's curriculum sounds a bit hairy; but in the two years the school has been running, no one has been hurt. The cars are rigorously maintained, heavily rollbarred; students wear shoulder belts and Bell helmets. Most of them graduate. The occasional washouts are casualties of the competition course. Shaw or Mizejewski will decide that a man will never make a competent race driver; Bondurant will check him out; if he agrees, the student gets a prorata fee refund and is bade to go and sin no more.

The others go home happy, for the most part, impressed with their new skills or even overimpressed. Returning to his East Coast home at midnight, a recent graduate amused the lady who opened the door for him: He was wearing the school's Day-Glo orange helmet, complete with visor. "I'm going to wear it all the time," he said. He got the laugh he was trying for, but he was really only half joking.