Home, James. There's a Bogey at Four O'clock!

Old habits die hard, but with Howard they are practically immortal. He has been a professional driver for 27 of his 50 years on this earth, compressing his vertebrae in the seats of Greyhounds, Carey limousines and now, as the chauffeur for the chairman of the board of a giant multinational company, a Cadillac Fleetwood. Yet for all that time behind the wheel, Howard cannot bring himself to spin an automobile. He is driving a vermilion Datsun 610 sedan on a vast expanse of asphalt custom-treated to make it slippery--a place designed specifically for training drivers to control automobiles during a spin--but he cannot seem to haul the car off its head-on course.

Time after time, Howard heads down the paving, which shimmers like black ice in the warm Northern California sunlight, only to yank the steering wheel to one side in an attempt to force the car off line. But his movements are tentative and instead of snapping the machine around in a crisp 180-degree loop, his vague control merely sends the Datsun slewing sideways (continued on page 221)Home, James(continued from page 153) until it shudders to a halt at the edge of the skid area.

"Damn it, that guy will never learn," mumbles Bob Bondurant, headmaster of the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, located at Sears Point, some miles north of San Francisco, and creator of a course tailored to teach corporate chauffeurs such as Howard how to keep their bosses in the executive suite and out of the homicidal grasp of terrorists, revolutionaries, anarchists, kidnapers, crazies, cranks and perhaps--if the company skipped a dividend--even disgruntled stockholders.

Bondurant is attempting to instruct Howard in the subtleties of what is called a 180-degree, or bootlegger, turn, wherein a well-choreographed application of parking brake and steering input will snap-spin a car, permitting it to reverse direction in a matter of feet. The technique was perfected by Southern bootleg haulers, some of whom could loop a truck loaded with hooch on a one-lane bridge without touching the sides, and is an invaluable tactic for evading a roadblock of any type. The 180-degree turn is a critical part of Bondurant's antiterrorist training and is relatively easy to accomplish on the skid pad, where the surface is slippery and the acreage is open. But, like so many of his associates, Howard is having trouble. "It's against their nature, alien to everything they've ever done with an automobile," says Bondurant. "He spent 27 years trying not to spill the boss's coffee and now I'm asking him to drive the hell out of a car, and he just can't handle it. Like most professional chauffeurs, he can't even get used to really cranking the wheel into a corner. And the idea of a skid is almost beyond his comprehension."

Bondurant waves the little Datsun to a halt and strides toward its driver. He is a burly man in his early 40s, with a firm jaw and deep-set dark eyes that energize an otherwise placid face. He walks with a gate-legged uncertainty, the result of a horrendous, end-over-end crash in a 1967 Can-Am sports racing car at Watkins Glen--a shattering wreck that marked his departure from the ranks of America's best racing drivers and his move toward the proprietorship of the nation's most respected school for fast, expert driving. Legions of top young road-racing drivers hold diplomas from his extended course in competition driving, while such celebrities as Paul Newman, James Garner, John Chancellor, James Coburn, Robert Wagner and Candice Bergen have benefited from Bondurant's special gifts in teaching the art of controlling an automobile on the limit. He is by nature a quiet man who smiles almost reflexively; but he takes the craft of driving seriously and his patience is fleeting in the face of inept students.

Howard climbs out of the Datsun, his shoulders sagging in defeat. His golf cap, bearing his company's logo, shields a gaunt face dominated by watery, wide-angle blue eyes and a lank mouth that seems to droop open in perpetual amazement. Bondurant gestures furiously, pantomiming the entire procedure of the 180-degree spin: one, a sharp turn of the steering wheel in concert with an application of the parking brake that will lock up the rear wheels, sending the car into a snap-spin on its axis; two, release of the brake and return of the steering to straight ahead as the automobile completes its reversal of course. The key to the maneuver is brisk, precise action of the brakes and steering and Howard, like so many of his professional associates, appears to have a mental block against such actions in a car.

Bondurant directs the chauffeur into the passenger seat, while he slides behind the wheel of the Datsun. They zoom off down the skid pad, the little engine whining furiously under Bondurant's authoritative, rather irritated throttle foot. Suddenly, the car lashes around in a perfectly executed 180, then rockets onward in the opposite direction. Again it spins. Then again. Now the Datsun is pin-wheeling along the pavement, changing direction every 50 yards. The berserk movements continue for a few moments, then the Datsun stops and Howard lurches out. He is bending over, his lean frame convulsing as he retches up the remnants of a lavish Fisherman's Wharf meal from the night before.

Unlike the casual atmosphere of his race-driving classes, a certain air of tension pervades Bondurant's antiterrorist sessions. He smiles grimly while Howard purges his digestive tract, but he is obviously impatient to get on with the teaching. The time is short--four days packed with instruction, both on the racecourse and in detailed blackboard sessions. In contrast with the mildly frivolous purpose of instructing people to drive a racing car quickly, there is a raw, life-and-death aspect to the antiterrorist curriculum. Each year, more and more business and government leaders around the world are involved in abductions and outright attempts on their lives. Over half of those incidents have centered on automobiles, giving rise to Bondurant's course, as well as several rival efforts on the East Coast and at least one in Europe.

Sometimes called offensive driving, antiterrorist tactics advocate the employment of anything up to and including the use of the automobile as a blunt instrument to bash one's way past barricades and human bodies. Bondurant puts it to his students this way: "As long as you're moving, your life is valuable. Once you're stopped, it's worth nothing." By way of emphasis, it is a matter of record that most terrorists consider chauffeurs pawnlike nuisances and kill them before leaving the scene. Obviously, the problem lies in maintaining the movement that Bondurant says is crucial to survival. Evasive moves in a three-ton limousine are not a simple matter, especially for someone like Howard, who drives 40,000 miles a year with the sole intent of concealing from his boss the fact that the automobile is actually moving.

In addition to the hours spent on the skid pad, students are taught how to take corners in racing fashion. This involves choosing the proper "line" or arc and apex that gives the corner the longest possible circumference. Operating on the simple logic that an automobile can run faster in a straight line than when cornering, the object of a racing driver is to "straighten" a turn as much as possible, so that he can maintain the highest possible speed during its negotiation. This demands the use of all the road. Chauffeurs are taught to throw traffic legalisms to the wind in crisis situations and drive like racers.

Bondurant stresses seating position and placement of hands on the steering wheel. These two factors are extremely important in maintaining control, and much effort is expended to assure that the student is sitting properly (far enough away from the wheel so that the arms are nearly extended for maximum movement). The hands should be placed in a nine-to-three (as on a clockface) position-- again, to provide the greatest possible alacrity in making right- and left-hand turns.

These simple control techniques become vital factors in the negotiation of a fiendishly tight precision-maneuvers course Bondurant has created with rubber pylons. Its navigation, done against the relentless ticking of Bondurant's stop watch, requires constant turning, parallel parking, backing up into tight spaces and cranking the car through the labyrinthine bends. Penalties are accrued for each rubber cone that is knocked over, which encourages precision and smoothness as well as speed. Again, Bondurant stresses the fact that fast driving is possible only when the driver is under complete control. He teaches the easy application of brakes (as opposed to hard, brutal stabs that can lock the wheels and produce skidding), which causes the car to settle easily on its suspension with a minimum of pitching or swaying under deceleration.

To further reinforce smoothness in crisis situations, Bondurant has created a clever accident simulator, using a set of blinking lights and more rubber cones on the track's main straightaway. The bank of three traffic lights is hung above three lanes on the track surface and as the driver approaches at about 35 mph, one of the lights changes to green while the two others flash red. It is up to the driver to guide his car into the safe--or green--lane without knocking aside any of the pylons that line the course. The maneuver teaches novices to make quick decisions while maintaining smooth but decisive control of the automobile.

As the students become increasingly acquainted with speed and the sensations of sliding and drifting through corners at velocities they never imagined possible, they are permitted to run the full Sears Point circuit, a tricky, twisting two-and-a-half-mile road course. Slowly it dawns on them. Big, soft-handling American cars can be driven at astounding rates of speed without extreme danger. Their bodies lean, brakes smoke, suspensions buck and leap, tires moan, hubcaps fly into the weeds, but they stay on the road. They are hardly as tidy or as easy to control as, say, a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL (according to Bondurant, the perfect superlimo for escape-minded executives, thanks to handling that would put many pure sports cars to shame), but they can be driven quickly enough to evade most pursuers. "After all," says Bondurant, "it's unlikely the guy at the wheel of the terrorists' car has had any professional training, so a little edge in skill can make a lot of difference."

Howard has recovered and is back behind the wheel, pressing around a tight slalom course in his rented Chrysler Cordoba. (While some companies supply the company limousines for the training sessions, many chauffeurs appear with other cars. Bondurant has found the Cordoba to be the most durable and nimble of the readily available full-size rental cars and recommends it to students who are unable to bring along the company limousine.) Howard's normal machine is a 6300-pound Cadillac Fleetwood that he operates in the ruck of metropolitan New York traffic, picking up his boss at his New Jersey home each morning, driving him to his Manhattan office, then home again at night. Until he took the course, Howard's schedule was like clockwork, his route rigidly fixed. That will now change. Bondurant recommends fluid driving patterns to prevent the creation of ambushes or roadblocks. Even before arriving at the school, Howard instituted simple preventive procedures. The windows are up, the doors locked and the fuel tank full whenever he has the boss on board. He has associates who carry .38-special revolvers stashed in the glove box, though he travels unarmed.

Armed chauffeurs? Bootleg turns in Caddy limousines to avoid mobs of AK-47-toting terrorists? What sort of melodramatic hooey is this? Who created this bizarre ego trip whereby every stiff whose company provides him with a car and driver now considers himself kidnap bait or assassination fodder? Is Howard really serious as he laboriously tries to accustom himself to the niceties of evasive driving? "I never thought being a chauffeur would come to this," he says grimly. "But this is no joke. My boss has had some pretty alarming things happen to him. His wife received a tape recording from some outfit called the Bicentennial Revolutionary Group, or something, and it outlined what a capitalist rat her husband was. Then there was an explosion in the offices of the big petrochemical company in our building. Yeah, and my boss was one of the 75 executives to receive death-threat letters from Squeaky Fromme. That kind of stuff has got to put you on edge."

A lot of people are on edge. More than 60 major companies have sent drivers and chauffeurs to Bondurant's school and more are signing up each day. Most of the petroleum giants have sent men, as have other major, multinational corporations. U. S. Steel, Alcoa and St. Regis Paper Company have enrolled drivers in the course. Chemical companies, banks and even fast-food chains have been represented, but, like the oil biggies, they desire confidentiality. Even the Government is involved in such training for its drivers, though nothing is known about the program. "I approached the FBI and the CIA about setting up an antiterrorist program for Government drivers," says Bondurant. "They would only say that they had a program of their own. They refused to give any details."

Night has fallen over Sears Point and Howard has eased off into the darkness with his Cordoba to begin his final exam. Bondurant sits behind the wheel of his idling 450SE Mercedes and ponders the situation. "Up to now, the guy just hasn't caught on. As a group, chauffeurs are hard to teach, but generally they make more progress than Howard. The bad thing is, I've got to write a report on him. But who knows, maybe he'll put it all together tonight."

This is Howard's big chance. The night chase is the bonanza finale of the school and is a solid measurement of how much a student has assimilated during the four days. The object is to escape from Bondurant and his Mercedes, using every driving tactic except outright collision. Howard has been given a five-minute head start, with the opportunity to range over each square foot of the 700-acre property. The chase is over when Bondurant is able to force his quarry off the road long enough for him to leap out of his Mercedes and tag any part of the stopped machine. Once he begins his pursuit, very few drivers last more than five minutes before being run down. Bondurant and his automobile are that effective as hunter-killers in this particular game and, based on his performance up to now, Howard seems doomed to being overwhelmed almost before he begins.

Bondurant checks his watch, then eases the 450SE into gear. He begins to circuit the road course slowly, his eyes probing for the lights of Howard's Cordoba. "There he is," he says quietly, spotting the vague image of a car's headlights tracking along the pavement about a mile distant. The Mercedes accelerates as if propelled by turbines and suddenly Bondurant is lashing through the corners at incredible speeds, making easy corrections with the steering wheel and throttle and giving occasional gentle applications of the brakes. He is gobbling up the distance between himself and Howard like a cheetah at full stride, and soon the Cordoba's taillights are blossoming a few yards ahead. "Old Howard is making a run for it," says a pleased Bondurant. Seeking a tight line through a sweeping right-hander, Howard opens a space on his left flank, which Bondurant fiercely seizes. He throws the Mercedes through the corner in a hard slide and exits nose to nose with his victim. A burst of speed and he is in front, nosing the Cordoba toward the shoulder of the track. Howard has little choice but to brake and bring his machine to a halt.

But no sooner has he stopped a few yards from the Mercedes that blocks his path than he has poked the gear selector into reverse and punched the throttle. His car leaps backward, then lashes around in a perfectly executed reverse 180-degree turn. Within seconds, he is rushing away into the night. "How 'bout that Howard?" yells Bondurant with delight as he accelerates after him, pressing the Mercedes to its limit. The two machines squirm through a series of ess bends and, owing to Bondurant's expertise and his car's sweet handling, the distance is quickly narrowed again. But Howard is not giving up. As Bondurant draws even, Howard spikes the brakes and flings his car into a ragged but effective 180-degree forward spin. Yes, in the face of real competition, Howard, the E-Z-ride specialist--the man who wouldn't think of jostling his passengers--is bashing around like a refugee from Joie Chitwood's auto thrill show. And he's hanging in there against the best car-and-driver combination he will ever face. If he can do this well against Bondurant, he might have a chance against some jittery, quasi-competent terrorist wheelman.

Finally, it is over. Bondurant has run Howard into a small ditch bordering the track, but Howard has acquitted himself admirably. "Super job, Howard," says Bondurant. "Frankly, I didn't think you had it in you."

His student is pleased but subdued. "I know I didn't do as well as you wanted, but I know I'm leaving here a hell of a lot better driver than I came in," he says quietly.

For himself and his fat-cat boss from New Jersey, the improvement just might mean the difference between life and death.

"Bondurant is attempting to instruct Howard in the subtleties of what is called a 180-degree, or bootlegger, turn."